Congratulations to our alum Ted Levin (PhD 2015) on his new job at Facebook in Seattle! Here’s what he writes to us about his new position:
“I’ve been working as a Linguist at Facebook Reality Labs for the past month or so. I’ve found the work to be challenging with lots of new things to learn, and am enjoying it despite it being quite different than my academic work. Broadly speaking, the team of ~20 linguists that I’m a part of sits at the very beginning of a pipeline to make Facebook apps better at understanding user intentions through voice or text.
“Narrowly, my job is to identify ways in which users might want to interact with Facebook apps (e.g. send messages, get recommendations, set reminders), collect data to exemplify the utterances that satisfy requests within these domains, and oversee the annotation of this data so that it can be utilized to train machine learning algorithms farther down the pipeline.”
Before joining Facebook, Ted was a post-doc at the University of Maryland and at the National University of Singapore. It is very exciting to learn of the many new possibilities available for linguists (and the increasing importance of linguistics expertise) in today’s world! Wonderful news, Ted!!