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I am a Principal Applied Scientist Manager at Microsoft, where I enable computers to understand natural language text from millions of users. Recently, I've led the creation and development of Natural Language understanding for Windows (Engadget, PC World, CNN), intent understanding for Page Zero (Engadget, Neowin), and also systems for entity extraction.

I have a Ph.D. from UW Computer Science, where I studied NLP and AI and was advised by Professor Oren Etzioni and Professor Mausam. Professor Etzioni's group developed Open Information Extraction to read and extract billions of text assertions from the Web, and my research solved challenges in how to transform these noisy unstructured text assertions into Web scale actionable knowledge directly usable by people and in software. I was supported by the Turing Center and an NDSEG fellowship.

Prior to UW, I worked at Lockheed Martin ATL's AI Lab where I developed software agents and also led research on scalable AI architectures. I have Masters and Bachelors degrees from MIT in Computer Science. My Master's Thesis under Professor Hal Abelson and Professor Dick Yue demonstrated an automated teaching algorithm that can effectively tailor presentations to learning styles. My undergraduate research was in Commonsense Reasoning with Push Singh in Marvin Minsky's group at the MIT Media Lab. The project collected 100k+ commonsense statements from internet volunteers, and I developed techniques to reason over this data and rapidly collect more data.

Publications:

  No Noun Phrase Left Behind: Detecting and Typing Unlinkable Entities
Thomas Lin, Mausam, Oren Etzioni
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2012)

  Mining Entity Types from Query Logs via User Intent Modeling
Patrick Pantel, Thomas Lin, Michael Gamon
50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2012)

  Entity Linking at Web Scale
Thomas Lin, Mausam, Oren Etzioni
Knowledge Extraction Workshop (AKBC-WEKEX) at NAACL 2012

  Active Objects: Actions for Entity-Centric Search
Thomas Lin, Patrick Pantel, Michael Gamon, Anitha Kannan, Ariel Fuxman
21st International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2012)

  No Search Result Left Behind: Branching Behavior with Browser Tabs
Jeff Huang, Thomas Lin, Ryen White
5th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2012)

  Commonsense from the Web: Relation Properties
Thomas Lin, Mausam, Oren Etzioni
AAAI Fall Symposium on Commonsense (CSK 2010)

  Identifying Functional Relations in Web Text
Thomas Lin, Mausam, Oren Etzioni
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2010)

  Machine Reading at the University of Washington
Hoifung Poon, Janara Christensen, Pedro Domingos, Oren Etzioni, Raphael Hoffmann, Chloe Kiddon, Thomas Lin, Xiao Ling, Mausam, Alan Ritter, Stefan Schoenmackers, Stephen Soderland, Dan Weld, Fei Wu, and Congle Zhang
Workshop on Formalisms and Methodology for Learning by Reading (FAM-LbR) at NAACL 2010

  Identifying Interesting Assertions from the Web
Thomas Lin, Oren Etzioni, James Fogarty
18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009)

  Filtering Information Extraction via User-Contributed Knowledge
Thomas Lin, Oren Etzioni, James Fogarty
User-Contributed Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy (WikiAI09) at IJCAI 2009

  Open Mind Common Sense: Knowledge Acquisition from the General Public
Push Singh, Thomas Lin, Erik T. Mueller, Grace Lim, Travell Perkins and Wan Li Zhu
1st International Conference on Ontologies, Databases, and Applications of Semantics for Large Scale Information Systems (ODBASE 2002)

  Analogical Inference over a Common Sense Database
Thomas Lin
18th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2002)

I've been a teaching assistant for UW courses on: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
I've been a reviewer and/or PC member for these conferences: AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, IJCAI, IUI and KDD

Other/Class Projects:

 TextRunner Salient Attributes (CSE 573)
 Word Sense Disambiguation with Images (w/Janara Christensen, Tony Fader) (CSE 510)
 Knowledge Guided Schema Discovery (w/Cynthia Matuszek) (CSE 544)
 Finding Interesting Tuples with Human Computation (KIA Meeting)
 Using AI to Identify Interesting Assertions (NPUC 2008)

I enjoy writing AI algorithms in Perl CGI:

 Concept Relator - Find the relation between two concepts
 Tic Tac Toe Program using MiniMax with Alpha-Beta Pruning
 Simple Eliza Implementation
 Context Aware Computing Final Project - MBTI Scheduler
 Intro to Artificial Intelligence Project #1 - Cgi/A* TA Allocator

I play badminton in my free time. At MIT, I was vice president of the badminton club, played on the intercollegiate badminton team, and was an intramural team captain. I was also on the organizing committee of the Boston Open badminton tournament from 2003-2006.

Random: Gizmoball, se011 style, Thoughtsticker Undergraduate Times, Push Singh, Soda cans!, Google Scholar