Sam Anzaroot pdf version

Verneek

Feb. 2021 - Present Applied AI Researcher

Accomplishments

• Founding engineer, first employee of the company. Built and launched the company's first product.
• Built core machine learning/AI/NLP technologies using state-of-the-art transformer language models, such as ROBERTA, Flan-T5, ColBERT, and GTR, Llama 2 and other open source LLMs.
• Created automatic training, evaluation, and deployment pipelines using Kubeflow and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server.
• Trained internal semantic parsing and code generation models with novel data augmentation methods to achive over 98% accuracy on internal datasets.
• Researched and trained retrieval embedding models using unsupervised methods to significantly increase retrieval bi-encoder model performance.
• Sped up large language models using model distillation and NVIDIA FasterTransformer for an around 10x-20x speed up.
• Implemented a RAG inspired chat system for ecommerce that can answer product, informational, and customer service questions.
• Helped managed AI team employees and mentored interns.

Dataminr

July 2019 - Sept. 2020 Principal Data Scientist

Jan. 2017 Senior Data Scientist

Feb. 2015 Data Scientist

Sept. 2014 Software Engineer in Data

Accomplishments

• Helped grow the AI team over six years by leading multiple high-profile projects, advocating internally for state-of-the-art techniques, leading an AI reading group and mentoring interns. Communicated with stakeholders including product managers, HCI researchers, designers, domain experts, and engineers.
• Led and contributed to team focused on automatically generating summaries of public safety events detected from social media posts. The team utilized seq2seq LSTM and Transformer deep-learning models, and ran a user study and deployed a human-in-the-loop system for summary writing to production which sped up summary writing by 2x.
• Led and contributed to geo-prediction team, focused on detecting mentions of locations in unstructured text and geocoding mentions to points on earth. Trained and deployed a neural network conditional random field model and neural network LambdaRank model, drastically increasing location precision on Dataminr content.
• Led and contributed to automation team, combining multiple different models in a pipeline for full content automation. This project resulted in the full automation of the majority of content sent by Dataminr.
• Worked as IC on various projects, including a novel language-identification model for social media, a text-based topic prediction model, a novel neural-network library built in Scala, a named entity recognition model for social media, and a label annotation platform.

Oracle Labs - East

Feb. 2014 - June 2014 Research Intern

Accomplishments

• Researched methods for highly parallel probabilistic inference on conditional random fields (CRFs) using GPUs.
• Created a GPU version of the belief propagation algorithm written in CUDA. Optimized this implementation to allow for 200x speedup in inference and 100x speedup in training of CRFs over sequential implementation.

IESL, University of Massachusetts — Amherst

Sept. 2011 - Feb. 2014 Research Assistant

Advisor: Andrew McCallum

Accomplishments

• Performed NLP and ML research focusing on undirected graphical models and information extraction.
• Oversaw creation of a novel citation extraction dataset, the largest and most fine-grained openly available dataset for this task.
• Developed method for more robust inference in conditional random fields using extensions to Lagrange relaxation methods called soft dual-decomposition with applications in citation extraction, retrieving new state-of-the-art results on the citation extraction task.

Datakind

March 2016 - Sept. 2016 Data Science Volunteer

Accomplishments

• Implemented methods for automatically extracting metadata from research documents to assist researchers in performing systematic literature reviews.
• Helped build and deploy a machine learning enabled systematic review web application currently in use by researchers available at colandrapp.com

University of Massachusetts — Amherst

Feb. 2014 MS in Computer Science

3.6 / 4.0

Graduate level coursework

• Machine Learning
• Statistical Inference I
• Automated Knowledge Based Construction
• Graphical Models
• Research Methods
• Algorithms
• Advanced Databases
• Distributed Operating Systems
• Optimization
• Artificial Intelligence

Queens College — City College of New York

June 2011 BS in Computer Science

3.75 / 4.0

Magna cum laude

Graduate level coursework

• Natural Language Processing
• Bioinformatics
• Machine Learning
• Human Computer Interaction

Publications

• Chidubem Arachie, Manas Gaur, Sam Anzaroot, William Groves, Ke Zhang, and Alejandro Jaimes.

  Unsupervised Detection of Sub-Events in Large Scale Disasters.

  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2020.

• Shan Jiang, William Groves, Sam Anzaroot, and Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes.

  Crisis Sub-Events on Social Media: A Case Study of Wildfires

  AI for Social Good Workshop at the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning (AISG@ICML 2019), 2019.

• Cheng SJ, Augustin C, Bethel A, Gill D, Anzaroot S, Brun J, DeWilde B, Minnich RC, Garside R, Masuda YJ, Miller DC, Wilkie D, Wongbusarakum S, McKinnon MC.

  Using machine learning to advance synthesis and use of conservation and environmental evidence.

  Conservation Biology, 2018.

• Sam Anzaroot, Alexandre Passos, David Belanger, Andrew McCallum.

  Learning Soft Linear Constraints with Application to Citation Field Extraction.

  52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL2014), 2014.

• Sam Anzaroot, Andrew McCallum.

  A New Dataset for Fine-Grained Citation Field Extraction

  ICML Workshop on Peer Reviewing and Publishing Models (PEER), 2013.

• Qi Li, Sam Anzaroot, Wen-Pin Lin, Xiang Li and Heng Ji.

  Joint Inference for Crossdocument Information Extraction

  20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2011), 2011.