About me

Hi, I’m Jacob. I’m a graduate student in Machine Learning at Mila and data science intern at MSAI.

I completed my undergraduate studies in the honors computer science program at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where I worked with the wonderful Professor Majid Komeili and TA’d for courses like Introduction to Web Development and Storytelling with Data.

Research Interests

My research focuses on search and exploration in specialized domains as part of the Complex Data Lab, where I’m supervised by Professor Reihaneh Rabbany. I also work on personalized search with MSAI. I’m particularly interested in the following topics:

• Information retrieval
  • Exploratory/interactive search
  • Entity-oriented IR
  • Personalization
• Information extraction
  • Low-resource NER
  • Knowledge graph construction from text
• Legal NLP/IR

Updates

• April 2021: Our work, The Surprising Performance of Simple Baselines for Misinformation Detection, was presented at WWW 2021.
• November 2020: Our short paper Detecting Informative COVID-19 Tweets by Attending over Linked Documents appeared in the W-NUT workshop at EMNLP 2020.
• September 2020: I wrote a tutorial on document ranking with AllenNLP.
• May 12, 2020: Here are the results of my graduate school applications as well as some supporting materials, for anyone who feels unsure about the process like I did. (repo)
• 2019:
  • August: My work, Trouble with the Curve: Predicting Future MLB Players Using Scouting Reports, was a finalist in the reproducible research competition at the the 2019 Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference.
  • July: I completed my second internship at Microsoft (MSAI), using deep learning to extract meeting suggestions from Outlook emails.This was part of a larger project, for which a patent is pending.