About Sam Anzaroot

I am an Applied AI researcher at Verneek, working on natural language processing, with the mission to enable “anyone to make data-informed decisions”. (github)(resume)

Before that, I was a Principal Data Scientist at Dataminr, working on natural language processing. At Dataminr I built models to extract public safety events from social media posts. Before Dataminr, I worked as an intern at Oracle Labs East, where I made contributions toward large scale machine learning inference using GPU programming.

I completed a masters degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst specifically in the IESL lab working with Andrew McCallum.

I completed my undergrad education at the Computer Science department at Queens College – City University of New York. There I worked at a number of labs, mostly in the Blender Lab (now at UICU) with Heng Ji.

My interests lie in machine learning methods with applications in natural language processing.

My work at UMass involved automatic field extraction from citation strings in research papers. Machine learning methods on this task often only includes local information about the labeling of the citation strings. In contrast, humans can use the fact that a field such as volume number is unlikely to appear twice in a citation while performing inference on such tasks. I investigated the use of constrained inference of this manner in order to bring the performance of models on such tasks up to human levels.

As an undergrad, I’ve worked with improving relation extraction by jointly doing inference over a large amount of automatically collected relations. We built a system that can detect unlikely collections of relations in a network. For example, this system can detect constraints such as that a company is unlikely to have been founded by somebody who does not live in the same country that the company is located in. The system proceeds to find the best configuration of relations that satisfies these learned constraints (joint work with Qi Li).

I’ve also done undergrad research at the SimStudent Lab at CMU HCII (NSF REU), at the MetroBotics project at Agents Lab at Brooklyn College(NSF REU), and the Brain Networks Lab at Texas A&M(NSF REU).

I also enjoy creating useful and functional user-facing systems that interact with complex machinery.

Publications