About

I am currently the VP of Research and Technology at Zuva where I oversee the Engineering, Product, Design, Research, and Legal Knowledge Engineering departments and as an executive help other departments where I can. My day-to-day work generally involves helping my teams to set directions and measure progress on their goals. I still occassionally do development and research as part of my role but it is not a primary objective at the moment. Though I still continue to keep up to date with developments in the field and still attempt to regularly publish as part of Zuva and as an independent researcher.

Prior to its acquistion in August 2021, I was the Director of Research at Kira Systems where I guide the direction of the team and aid in the deployment of the team’s insight into production. Prior to this I was alternatingly a Product Manager and Research Scientist at Kira. Prior to Kira, I completed my PhD at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Gordon V. Cormack (and occasionally Charlie Clarke, when Gordon was on sabbatical).

My primary interests are in the design and evaluation of human-in-the-loop (i.e., explicit feedback) Information Retrieval systems. This has generally been expressed through research in electronic discovery in civil litigation and mergers and acquisitions due diligence. However, when the opportunity arises I do not shy away from real-time, web-based information retrieval research.

While at the University of Waterloo, my research tended towards high-recall retrieval system design and evaluation. As part of this research, I co-ordinated the TREC Total Recall track for both years it ran. As a side project during my PhD, I also conducted research into Twitter-based retrieval, primarily evaluation, and was part of the TREC Real-Time Summarization track for its 2017 iteration. With Charles Clarke, Gordon Cormack, and Jimmy Lin, I explored the idea of “Searching from Mars” and the practical implications that such search systems would face.

At Kira Systems, I currently lead the Research team where I guide the team to find new and innovative solutions that allow our customers to more efficiently and effectively perform their work through the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In addition to this, I also act as the Product Manager for the productization of the Research team’s solutions. Prior to this, I was a Research Scientist where I primarily worked on developing the core machine learning technology that powered Kira’s software. My time at Kira has also allowed me to further explore my interests in Human-Computer Interaction through close collaboration with our Design and Legal Knowledge Engineering teams. Furthermore, I have helped to drive Kira’s contributions back to the scientific community by releasing some of our training data used in our core technology.

Throughout my tenure at the University of Waterloo, I taught and helped design course materials for CS 135 (Fall 2015) and CS 246 (Spring 2013, Fall 2014). I found that teaching was instrumental in helping form my ability to speak to large crowds and is an activity that I encourage PhD students to seek out. In Winter 2019, I taught CS 431,451 in place of the usual instructor, Jimmy Lin.