Alex Rudnick

givenname.surname@gmail.com • http://alexr.cc • The Bay Area, California

Interests: Natural language processing, human languages, and machine translation. Building welcoming communities and well-maintained, well-tested software. Open Source. AI fairness and improving human language technology for under-served language communities by broadening participation in building those technologies.

Professional Experience

2022-11 — 2023-10: Staff Applied Scientist: Etsy, Inc. Remote. With the Recs Retrieval team, worked on embedding representations for listings for sale, so they could be better retrieved by the recommendation system. Used TensorFlow, Spark, AirFlow and Apache Beam.
2021-07 — 2022-07: Lecturer: Baskin School of Engineering, UC Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, CA. Taught computer science for the Computer Science & Engineering department, ranging from small upper-division elective courses to introductory courses for hundreds of students. Taught “CSE143: Introduction to Natural Language Processing”, “CSE20: Introduction to Programming in Python”, “CSE 30: Programming Abstractions: Python”, and “CSE13S: Computer Systems and C Programming”. Crafted many new lecture materials and homework assignments.
2014-09 — 2020-08: Software Engineer: Google Translate. Mountain View, CA. Worked on several different pieces of Google Translate, including reducing gender bias in translations by providing multiple translation options, translation quality evaluation, transliteration, training data quality estimation, and the translation of numbers, measurements and other known entities, among other miscellaneous projects. Hosted interns and formally mentored other interns. Helped teach machine learning for visiting undergraduates.
2007-07 — 2009-07: Software Engineer: Google Web Toolkit. Atlanta, GA. With the Google Web Toolkit team, built UI components as well as internationalization and accessibility features for GWT. Implemented a new online documentation browser for Google Code project hosting, which was used for the GWT 1.5 documentation. Helped build and launch the Google Plugin for Eclipse, which make it easier for Java developers to use GWT and Google App Engine. Answered questions from the developer community and built helpful samples in Java and Scala.

Education

Fall 2009 — Fall 2018

PhD, Computer Science; Indiana University (Bloomington, IN)

Thesis title: Cross-Lingual Word Sense Disambiguation for Low-Resource Hybrid Machine Translation
Research committee: Michael Gasser (co-chair), Sandra Kübler (co-chair), Markus Dickinson, David Crandall, John DeNero.
Minor: Computational Linguistics

Fall 2005 — Spring 2007

MS, Computer Science; Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA).

Fall 2001 — Spring 2005

BS, Computer Science; Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA). High honors.

Internships

Summer 2012: Software Engineering Intern: Google Translate. Mountain View, CA. Worked on the language identification system in the pipeline for training large language models from the web, so that the text in any given web page can be used to train the appropriate language model.
Summer 2011: Software Engineering Intern: Google Translate. Mountain View, CA. Developed Google Translate's phrase-sense disambiguation system, which was used to help the translation system pick contextually appropriate words and phrases. Also, with John DeNero, helped develop curriculum for a new introductory CS class at Berkeley.
Summer 2010: Software Engineering Intern: Google Research. New York, NY. Speech team at Google Research. Parallelized code to build finite-state transducers, using MapReduce in C++. Made small patches to OpenFST. Investigated integrating models of phoneme durations with the current weighted-FST based software. Applied speech recognition software to the problem of music identification.

Teaching

Spring 2022: CSE 30: Programming Abstractions: Python, UC Santa Cruz. 300 students.; CSE 13s: Computer Systems and C Programming, UC Santa Cruz. 240 students.
Winter 2022: CSE 30: Programming Abstractions: Python, UC Santa Cruz. 600 students, online class. Co-taught with Peter Alvaro.; CSE 13s: Computer Systems and C Programming, UC Santa Cruz. 240 students, online class.
Fall 2021: CSE 20: Introduction to Programming in Python, UC Santa Cruz. 300 students, online class.; CSE 143: Introduction to Natural Language Processing, UC Santa Cruz. 25 students, taught in person.
Spring 2019: Google Tech Exchange: Machine Learning. Co-taught an introductory class about machine learning for undergraduates from HBCUs and HSIs on the Google campus. With Olumide Malomo and Sally Goldman.
Fall 2012: B490: Natural Language Processing, Indiana University. Taught a special topics course on Natural Language Processing for about thirty undergraduates at Indiana University. Covered basic ideas from linguistics and machine learning, sequence models and tagging, context-free grammars and parsing. Gave overviews of speech recognition and machine translation.

as a teaching assistant

Google Tech Exchange: Machine Learning (Fall 2018)
Indiana University: B553: Probabilistic Graphical Models (Spring 2013, for Prof. David Crandall). B651: Natural Language Processing (Fall 2010, for Prof. Michael Gasser). C211: Introduction to Computer Science (Fall 2009, Spring 2010, Spring 2011, for Suzanne Menzel).
Georgia Institute of Technology: CS2130: Languages and Translation (Spring 2003, Fall 2003, Spring 2004, for Bill Leahy)

other teaching

Recurse Center: Hacker in Residence (December 2013).
Institute for Computing Education, Georgia Tech. Media Computation summer camp at Georgia Tech (Summers 2005, 2006, 2007). Taught gradeschool students as well as gradeschool teachers media concepts and basic programming with Python, Alice, and Scratch.

Publications, tech reports, and workshop presentations

Clayton A. Davis, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Luca Maria Aiello, Keychul Chung, Michael D. Conover, Emilio Ferrara, Alessandro Flammini, Geoffrey C. Fox, Xiaoming Gao, Bruno Gonçalves, Przemyslaw A. Grabowicz, Kibeom Hong, Pik-Mai Hui, Scott McCaulay, Karissa McKelvey, Mark R. Meiss, Snehal Patil, Chathuri Peli Kankanamalage, Valentin Pentchev, Judy Qiu, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Alex Rudnick, Benjamin Serrette, Prashant Shiralkar, Onur Varol, Lilian Weng, Tak-Lon Wu, Andrew J. Younge, Filippo Menczer. OSoMe: the IUNI observatory on social media. PeerJ Computer Science, October 2016. web pdf bibtex
Yonghui Wu, Mike Schuster, Zhifeng Chen, Quoc V. Le, Mohammad Norouzi, Wolfgang Macherey, Maxim Krikun, Yuan Cao, Qin Gao, Klaus Macherey, Jeff Klingner, Apurva Shah, Melvin Johnson, Xiaobing Liu, Łukasz Kaiser, Stephan Gouws, Yoshikiyo Kato, Taku Kudo, Hideto Kazawa, Keith Stevens, George Kurian, Nishant Patil, Wei Wang, Cliff Young, Jason Smith, Jason Riesa, Alex Rudnick, Oriol Vinyals, Greg Corrado, Macduff Hughes, Jeffrey Dean. Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation. Google tech report released on arXiv, September 2016. web pdf
Alex Rudnick, Levi King, Can Liu, Markus Dickinson and Sandra Kübler. IUCL: Combining Information Sources for SemEval Task 5. Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2014). pdf bibtex
Alex Rudnick, Taylor Skidmore, Alberto Samaniego and Michael Gasser. Guampa: a Toolkit for Collaborative Translation. Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014). pdf summary with bibtex
Alex Rudnick, Annette Rios and Michael Gasser. Enhancing a Rule-Based MT System with Cross-Lingual WSD. The 9th International Workshop of the Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology for Minority Languages (SaLTMiL 2014). workshop proceedings
Alex Rudnick and Michael Gasser. Lexical Selection for Hybrid MT with Sequence Labeling. Second Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation (HyTra 2013). pdf bibtex
Alex Rudnick, Can Liu and Michael Gasser. HLTDI: CL-WSD Using Markov Random Fields for SemEval-2013 Task 10. Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2013). pdf bibtex
Pavel Golik, Boulos Harb, Ananya Misra, Michael Riley, Alex Rudnick and Eugene Weinstein. Mobile Music Modeling, Analysis and Recognition. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2012. abstract pdf bibtex
Karissa McKelvey, Alex Rudnick, Michael Conover and Filippo Menczer. Visualizations of Communication on Social Media: Making Big Data Accessible. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2012 - Collective Intelligence as Community Discourse and Action. pdf
Alex Rudnick. Towards Cross-Language Word Sense Disambiguation for Quechua. RANLP 2011 Student Research Workshop. pdf bibtex
Alex Rudnick. A resource-light approach to learning verb valencies. Machine Translation and Morphologically-rich Languages
1. pdf slides
James Clawson, Kent Lyons, Alex Rudnick, Robert A. Iannucci Jr. and Thad Starner. Automatic whiteout++: correcting mini-QWERTY typing errors using keypress timing. In CHI'08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 573-582. pdf bibtex
James Clawson, Alex Rudnick, Kent Lyons and Thad Starner. Automatic Whiteout: Discovery and Correction of Typographical Errors in Mobile Text Input. In MobileHCI'07: Proceedings of the 9th conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services. pdf bibtex

Professional service and Open Source contributions

Project member and committer for NLTK, the Natural Language Toolkit
Contributor to CLDR, the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository.
Reviewer: LREC 2024, LREC 2022, AfricaNLP 2021, LREC 2020, LREC 2018, COLING 2016, LREC 2014, SemEval 2013, ACL 2012, CICLing 2011, COLING 2010, CIKM 2009

Patents

Wei Wang, Bowen Liang, Macduff Hughes, Taro Watanabe, Tetsuji Nakagawa, Alexander Rudnick. Contrastive Sequence-to-Sequence Data Selector. US Patent US20190347570A1, active.
Eugene Weinstein, Boulos Harb, Anaya Misra, Michael Dennis Riley, Pavel Golik, Alex Rudnick. Systems and methods for identifying music in a noisy environment. US Patent US8965766B1, active.

Other research experience

Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS). Fall 2011 to Spring 2012. With the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS), helped develop Truthy, a web-based system for analyzing and visualizing the diffusion of information on Twitter, particularly political content.
Contextual Computing Group. Fall 2006 to Summer 2007. For Thad Starner's Contextual Computing Group, developed classifiers for finding typographical errors made on mobile QWERTY keyboards, particularly accidentally repeated keystrokes and near-misses.
Contextualized Support for Learning lab. Fall 2006 to Spring 2007. With Mark Guzdial, helped develop JES, the Jython Environment for Students. Occasionally filled in giving lectures for Dr. Guzdial's CS 1 and 2 classes.
Adaptive Personal Information Environments group. Spring 2006 to Spring 2007. With Graham Coleman and Charles Isbell, worked on SWIMM, a software music-player that uses machine learning to model the listener's preferences and play songs in an appropriate order.
Learning By Design group. Summer 2005 to Spring 2006. Built web applications for Janet Kolodner's Kitchen Science Investigators project, a study on teaching children science concepts through cooking. This included software to help children easily upload images from digital cameras and manage their online lab notebooks.
Electronic Learning Communities group. Fall 2001 to Fall 2002. Worked on Amy Bruckman's MOOSE Crossing, a text-based online world for teaching children programming concepts. Helped develop the world and the server code and interacted with the community. Made weekly visits to local after-school Computer Clubhouses in Atlanta.

givenname.surname@gmail.com • http://alexr.cc • The Bay Area, California