Professional Projects
This category covers progress, reflections and news regarding my professional endeavors.
Extension FM
25 May. 2010
I am really happy to report that I have accepted a position with extension.fm. Today was my first day.
J2 Labs, as a consulting company, is on hiatus. J2 Labs, as a creative force, is just getting started.
Also stay tuned for my musical outlet: j2.fm
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This is what ten iPod touches looks like
17 Feb. 2010
I bought ten iPod touches today.
They will be used in the deployment of a custom app by J2 Labs, in conjunction with MKG Productions, for The Whitney Museum's Biennial event.
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I was in Dublin recently.
11 Feb. 2010
As the title says, I was in Dublin recently. I loved it. Especially the pickled onion snacks.
Fourth Annual Machine Translation Conference
I was at the conference with Johns Hopkins to meet other machine translation researchers and share ideas / code. There was heavy focus on the open sourced work available to other researchers. WikiTrans is open source. WikiTrans.org will be up soon too, so everyone can try the work. It has support for multiple translation engines now too! I will be blogging the progress at the WikiTrans blog soon.
Dublin itself was a treat. My Grandpa went to Trinity College, which is right in the city. I was staying in Lower Dublin and taking buses to University City of Dublin (UCD). There is also a Dublin City University (DCU), and to keep things confusing they refer to Trinity as TCD.
Anyway.
WikiTrans
As I said, I'll be covering what changed with WikiTrans while I was there, but I'd like to sum it up here anyway. We now have support for three translation engines: Moses, Apertium and Google Translate. There is also full support for Mechanical Turk translation tasks. Also, the ability to approve / reject sentence translations. We also have an improved interface to Wikipedia that also improves our sentence segmentation. A team member also improved the sentence segmentation found in NLTK's Punkt by training it on Korean, Icelandic, Russian and Hungarian.
Totally stoked on all of the work that's been done and on my new friends. Check the blog for more details.
Ireland
Driving around Ireland was great. Made some new friends in Waterford, kissed the Blarney and got confused driving around Dublin. Their streets are a mess of one-ways. They make up for it with everyone being so friendly and eager to chat.
And, interestingly, the local band we saw in Waterford was awesome. I asked around to see if the quality of the band, being made of locals, was typical and people said no. But we had a really great night anyway.
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Fourth MT Marathon in Dublin
30 Dec. 2009
J2 Labs will be attending the Fourth Machine Translation Marathon in Dublin, Ireland.
Needless to say, I'm really excited about being there. I will be meeting up with other folks from the world of MT and traveling with some of the fine folks from the Center for Speech and Language Processing at Johns Hopkins.
I'm also hoping to get a few people together to learn / work-on wikitrans related stuff. I think the best project for getting other people involved will be our tools for detecting bad information. My thoughts on how to do this are currently dubbed Babel Wall and will probably show up on GitHub before my flight.
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J2 Labs added to NAACL 2010 committee for exploring Mechanical Turk
30 Dec. 2009
J2 Labs is now a program committee member for the NAACL 2010 exploration of using Amazon Mechanical Turk for gathering research data.
More information available here
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The Ford Models promote Robin Hood and IFed
18 Dec. 2009
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IFed in the press
17 Nov. 2009
Robin Hood Taps Long Tail to Feed Hungry Families
iFed: Using Social Media (Er, And Money) To Feed Hungry New Yorkers This Thanksgiving
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wikitrans.github.com
20 Oct. 2009
Chris and I setup a blog to host the progress of wikitrans. We had originally thought we'd do it using Django and would host it off his computer a JHU, but using github proved to be so easy it was simply a no brainer!
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Kamber & Edelson
27 Sep. 2009
I worked with FRESHTHRILLS to bring the new Kamber & Edelson law firm's website to life.
This website has a custom CMS built using Django and makes heavy use of Ajax / JSON for the dynamic functionality. jQuery also proved itself as a vital tool in our toolbox once again.
As I'm beginning to accept as the norm, working with FRESHTHRILLS was a fantastic experience and I am quite proud of the finished product.
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