Alexander Yates

Senior Software Engineer

MobiTech 3000 LLC•  January 2014 - Present

MobiTech 3000 LLC produces business and productivity apps for web and mobile, mostly under the brand name JotNot. I was the lead architect and full-stack developer for our two flagship products (document scanning and faxing), and I managed other engineers for the rest of our portfolio (signing and invoicing, plus a number of smaller apps). Google Cloud Platform (GCP) backend development (AppEngine/WebApp/Cloud Datastore/ python): • I added sign-in, identity management, and sessions (previously each device had its own account) • receiving faxes through Twilio and Faxage, Inc. (previously the apps were send-only) • subscription options, including interfaces with Stripe, the App Store, and the Play Store Front-end development: • I designed and developed a web frontend for faxing from scratch (javascript, React), and worked with a UI designer to re-implement the iOS app to conform to his new design. • I converted iOS apps from paid to subscription models (Swift and Objective-C)

Associate Professor (tenured), Computer and Information Sciences

Temple University•  September 2007 - December 2013

My research lab at Temple and my dissertation work at the University of Washington focused on web-scale NLP using machine learning techniques. My research areas of focus were: 1. Scale NLP algorithms to the Web: we built systems for performing information extraction, entity resolution, semantic parsing, and other tasks on the largest publicly-available corpora available at the time (TREC news corpus, our own web crawls, Wikipedia dumps, and ClueWeb). Several prototypes rely on Hadoop for scale. 2. Develop novel machine learning algorithms that handle the diversity of language on the Web: we invented embeddings and semi-supervised algorithms for training on a biased sample of labeled text, so that the model could remain effective across more diverse samples (e.g., train on identifying products in store page text, test on consumer reviews of products).

University of Washington, Washington

Computer Science & Engineering, PhD•  September 2001 - August 2007

My dissertation research focused on web-scale information extraction and natural language processing. I studied under Prof. Oren Etzioni.