I am a senior research scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). Before that I was a PhD student with Tom Mitchell at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
At AI2, I am on the AllenNLP team. My research focuses primarily on getting computers to read and answer questions, dealing both with open domain reading comprehension and with understanding question semantics in terms of some formal grounding (semantic parsing). I'm particularly interested in cases where these two problems intersect, doing some kind of reasoning over open domain text.
I am the original author of the AllenNLP toolkit, and I co-host the NLP Highlights podcast with Waleed Ammar.
Back in the day, I spent a lot of time working on knowledge base completion (KBC). Much of my thesis was exploring the connection between graph-based and embedding-based methods for KBC. I have code on github that implements a few (rather dated by now) KBC methods.
Outside of work, I enjoy playing harp and flute duets with my wife (with me on the flute, her on the harp), spending time with my three kids, and playing ultimate frisbee and soccer.