Updates: CMU, Facebook

It’s been a good year. Last fall I started a master’s program in the Language Technologies department at CMU SCS, taking some great classes, hanging out with a cool lab, and writing two new papers (for ICWSM, involving Twitter: polls and tweetmotif; also did some coref work, financial text regression stuff, and looked at social lexicography.) I also applied to CS and stats PhD programs at several universities. Next year I’ll be starting the PhD program in the Machine Learning Department here at CMU.

I’m excited! Just the other day I was looking at videos on my old hard drive and found a presentation by Tom Mitchell on “the Discipline of Machine Learning” that I downloaded back in 2007 or so. (Can’t find it online right now, but this is similar.) That might be where I heard of the department first. Maybe some day I will be smarter than the guy who wrote this rant (though I am much more pro-stats and anti-ML these days…).

Also, I was recently named a finalist for the 2010 Facebook Fellowship program. CMU did impressively well here, with the number of winners and finalists (5+22) per school being:

9 Carnegie Mellon University
3 University of Michigan
3 Stanford University
2 University of Washington
2 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne
2 University of California at Berkeley
1 University of California at Irvine
1 Princeton University
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1 Duke University
1 Cornell University
1 Arizona State University

And separately, I’ll be an intern at the Facebook Data team this summer (back in Palo Alto) starting in June. (Yes, notwithstanding my severe annoyances at bugs in the site itself.) I’ve enjoyed reading the work they’ve been doing there in the last year or two, and it seems like a very good place, if not the best place, to try doing some newfangled computational social science (whatever that is).