About Me

I am an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Richmond, researching artificial intelligence with a focus on deep learning and natural language processing.

Background:

I received my bachelor’s degree from Boston College and my juris doctorate from the University of Virginia School of Law. I practiced law for several years. My favorite part of my job was trying to understand the technology involved in patent cases I litigated. My least favorite part was document review: reading thousands of documents to figure out which were relevant to a case and to pick out the few needles of useful information in a massive haystack of emails and corporate documents. When I saw IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy in 2011, I could not help but be fascinated, both by the potential application of taking over the tedious parts of my job and by the apparent ability of a machine to understand language. In 2013, I left my job as a litigator to study natural language processing and machine learning full time.

I earned my PhD in computer science at the University of Michigan, where I studied under the supervision of Dragomir Radev. Upon graduating, I worked as a Research Staff Member at IBM Research for several years before returning to academia.