| Paul Placeway, pwp+ (AT) cs dot cmu dot edu Last updated Mon May 13 2002 |
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The current version of this document can be found at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pwp/resume.html
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I am completing a Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from
the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University,
specializing in Computational Linguistics. In addition to my
demonstrated ability to do self-directed cutting-edge research, I am
also a very experienced programmer and software engineer with over a
dozen years of experience in academic and commercial settings. Some
of my efforts have been key parts of winning large development
contracts that resulted in the launching of new products. Other
pieces of my code are now shipped as standard parts of Unix and Linux
distributions and are used by millions of people world-wide.
My experience includes:
In addition to having experienced all phases of software engineering in practice, I've also assisted in teaching software engineering courses at Carnegie Mellon. |
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Ph.D. in Language and
Information Technologies
(Completed! May 2002) Dissertation title: High-Performance Unification Parsing. Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Master of Science in
Language Technologies (December, 1997)
Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics (September, 1988) |
| [1997 -- 2000; 2001 -- 2002] | Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University | Pittsburgh, PA |
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Research / Teaching Assistant. Dissertation:
High-Performance Multi-Pass Unification Parsing. My parsing
system avoids problems related to structural ambiguity. Created a
multi-pass architecture, and several new algorithms to support my
solution. Implemented the solution with over 10K-lines of new LISP
code in an over 18 KLOC system. Used constant testing during
development to assure correct operation.
Lead designer for initial CAMMIA effort: a dynamic dialog system using extensions to VoiceXML to allow fluent natural language interaction [Nyberg, et al. 2002]. Developed distributed client-server applications to support maintenance of an industrial machine translation system. |
| [2001] | 61C Networks, Inc. | Pittsburgh, PA |
| Senior Software Engineer. Worked on network performance optimization. |
| [2000 -- 2001] | Consultant | Pittsburgh, PA |
| Consultant to Tellme Networks, Inc.. Specialized in computer speech recognizer tuning and software engineering issues. |
| [1993 -- 1997] | Sphinx Group, Carnegie Mellon University | Pittsburgh, PA |
| Research Assistant. Investigated aspects of computer speech recognition, applied information theory, natural language processing, parsing, and related areas. Investigated various areas of acoustic modeling and multiple-model joint search [Placeway and Lafferty 1996]. Designed and ran numerous experiments. Designed and built an overall system superstructure, which supported several years of subsequent research [Placeway, et al. 1997]. |
| [1989 -- 1993] | Speech & Natural Language Dept., Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. | Cambridge, MA |
| Engineer. Research and development in computer speech recognition, signal processing, statistical estimation, and related subjects. Helped design, build, and launch BBN Hark (tm), a commercial speech recognition system product. See also Parlance NameConnector, which started out as a demo of Hark technology. Specialized in speed optimizations in signal processing and search, allowing a complete medium-vocabulary speech recognizer to be run in real time on an ordinary (approx. 20 SPECmark '89) workstation. Ported a signal processing system to a dual DSP subsystem using shared memory communication. Wrote and maintained multiple machine batch queuer. General Unix guru. |
| [1988 -- 1989] | Dept. of Computer & Information Science, Ohio State University | Columbus, OH |
| Systems Programmer. Specialized in Unix backup optimization, Unix text processing and maintenance of Macintosh computers. |
| [1997--2002] | Carnegie Mellon |
| Designer, sole implementer, and documenter of multi-pass unification parser and associated 274-page dissertation. This has been a non-trivial self-management exercise. |
| [2001--2002] | Carnegie Mellon |
| Lead designer and co-implementer for the CAMMIA project initial demo. Lead small team to successful and on-time creation of the initial demo. |
| [1997] | Carnegie Mellon |
| Led a competitive evaluation effort of Sphinx speech system. Organized a 6+ person, 7-month development and deployment effort with an inflexible deadline. This project was completed on time and under budget [Placeway, et al. 1997]. |
| [1993--1996] | Carnegie Mellon |
| Assisted in several competitive evaluation efforts. |
| [1991--1993] | BBN |
| As part of a four-person team, helped with the initial design, implementation, testing, and launch of a commercial speech recognition system. Assistant designer and principal tester of the initial system. System won a competitive evaluation resulting in BBN's selection as a sub-contractor for part of a very large civilian governmental project. |
| [1989--1991] | BBN |
| Assisted in several NIST-organized competitive evaluations of speech systems [Austin, et al. 1990 ... Placeway, et al. 1993]. |
| [1983--1988] | Ohio State |
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Wrote the command-line editor for and organized several releases of
tcsh, a freely available Unix command interpreter with
editing. tcsh is now shipped with most Linux and Free-BSD Unix
releases, including both Red Hat and Apple OS X.
Wrote substantial parts of Macintosh Kermit, a terminal emulator and file transfer program for the Macintosh computer. Designed and built a multi-queue, multi-server-per-queue line printer service [Zwicky & Placeway 1989]. Substantially enhanced the performance of a UNIX back-up system [Placeway 1989]. |
| [Spring 2002] |
Software Engineering for Information Technology II (11-792)
(undergraduate/graduate level) |
Carnegie Mellon |
| Teaching Assistant for Professor Eric Nyberg. Coached programming groups and reviewed group progress. |
| [Fall 2001] |
Software Engineering for Information Technology I (11-791/15-393)
(undergraduate/graduate level) |
Carnegie Mellon |
| Teaching Assistant for Professor Nyberg. Taught recitation sections, graded homework assignments and tests, and gave a lecture. |
| [1st Mini, Summer 2000] |
Core Java for eCommerce (20-753)
(graduate level) |
Carnegie Mellon |
| Teaching Assistant for Professor Nyberg. Taught recitation sections including special recitations for students without prior programming experience, graded homework assignments and tests. |
| [Spring 2000] |
Software Engineering for Information Technology II (11-792)
(graduate level) |
Carnegie Mellon |
| Teaching Assistant for Professor Nyberg. Coached programming groups and reviewed group progress. |
| [Fall 1999] |
Software Engineering for Information Technology I (11-791)
(graduate level) |
Carnegie Mellon |
| Teaching Assistant for Professor Nyberg. Taught recitation sections, graded homework assignments and tests, and gave a few lectures. |
| [Spring 1997] |
Language and Statistics (11-761)
(graduate level) |
Carnegie Mellon |
| Teaching Assistant for Professors John Lafferty & Roni Rosenfeld. Organized homework assignments and programming labs, and pre-tested tests. Debugged beta-release modeling software to be usable by students. |
| [Spring 1994] |
Algorithms (15-750)
(graduate level) |
Carnegie Mellon |
| Teaching Assistant for Professor Merrick Furst. Organized and graded a set of programming assignments in C++. Debugged beta-release software to be usable by students. |
As principal or sole authorPlaceway, P., High-Performance Unification Parsing, Ph.D. dissertation, available as CMU LTI tech report CMU-LTI-02-172.Placeway, P., "Tree-structured chart parsing with left-corner and look-ahead constraints", CMU LTI tech report CMU-LTI-00-161. Placeway, P., "Tree-structured chart parsing", Proc. IWPT 2000. Placeway, P., S. Chen, M. Eskenazi, U. Jain, V. Parikh, B. Raj, M. Ravishankar, R. Rosenfeld, K. Seymore, M. Siegler, R. Stern, and E. Thayer, "The 1996 Hub-4 Sphinx-3 System", Proc. DARPA Speech Recognition Workshop, Chantilly, Virginia, February 1997, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Placeway. P., and J. Lafferty, "Cheating with Imperfect Transcripts", Proc. ICSLP-96, International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, University of Delaware and A.I. duPont Inst., 1996. Placeway, P., R. Schwartz, P. Fung, and L. Nguyen, "The Estimation of Powerful Language Models from Small and Large Corpora", Proc. ICASSP-93, International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 27-30, 1993, pp. II-33-II-36. Placeway, P. W.,"A Better Dump for BSD UNIX", Proceedings Large Installation Systems Administration III Workshop, 1989, USENIX Assn., pp. 99-107 Zwicky, E. D., and P. W. Placeway, "Modifying the Line Printer System for a Large Networked Environment", Proceedings Large Installation Systems Administration III Workshop, 1989, USENIX Assn., pp. 53-57 As contributing authorAustin, S., P. Peterson, P. Placeway, R. Schwartz, and J. Vandergrift, "Toward a Real-Time Spoken Language System using Commercial Hardware", Proc. DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, Hidden Valley, PA., June 1990.Austin, S., D., Ayuso, M. Bates, R. Bobrow, R. Ingria, J. Makhoul, P. Placeway, R. Schwartz, and D. Stallard, "BBN HARC and DELPHI Results on the ATIS Benchmarks - February 1991", Proc. Fourth DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, Pacific Grove, California, February 1991, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Austin, S., R. Schwartz, and P. Placeway, "The Forward-Backward Search Algorithm", Proc. ICASSP-91, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Toronto, Ontario, CANADA, May 14-17, 1991. Austin S., R. Bobrow, D. Ellard, R. Ingria, J. Makhoul, L. Nguyen, P. Peterson, P. Placeway, R. Schwartz, "BBN Real-Time Speech Recognition Demonstration", Proceedings of the Speech and Natural Language Workshop, Harriman, New York, February 23-26, 1992, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Mateo, California, pp. 250-251. Chase, L., R. Rosenfeld, A. Hauptmann, M. Ravishankar, E. Thayer, P. Placeway, R. Weide, and C. Lu, "Improvements in Language, Lexical, and Phonetic Modeling in Sphinx-II", Proc. ARPA Spoken Language Systems Technology Workshop, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, January 1995. Kubala, F., S. Austin, C. Barry, J. Makhoul, P. Placeway, and R. Schwartz, "BYBLOS Speech Recognition Benchmark Results", Proc. DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, Pacific Grove, California, February 1991, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Makhoul, J., S. Austin, D. Ayuso, M. Bates, R. Bobrow, R. Ingria, P. Placeway, R. Schwartz, and D. Stallard, "BBN HARC and DELPHI Results on the ATIS Benchmarks", Proc. DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop, Pacific Grove, CA, February 1991, pp. 112-115. Makhoul, J., S. Austin, R. Bobrow, D. Ellard, R. Ingria, L. Nguyen, P. Peterson, P. Placeway, and R. Schwartz, "BBN Real-Time Speech Recognition Demonstrations", Proc. Fifth DARPA Workshop on Speech & Natural Language, Arden Conference Center, Harriman, NY, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, February 1992, pp. 250-251 Nguyen, L., R. Schwartz, F. Kubala, and P. Placeway, "Search Algorithms for Software-Only Real-Time Recognition with Very Large Vocabularies", Proc. ARPA Workshop on Human Language Technology, Princeton, NJ, March 1993. Nyberg, E., T. Mitamura, P. Placeway, M. Duggan, and N. Hataoka, "DialogXML: Extending VoiceXML for Dynamic Dialog Management", Proc. Human Language Workshop, 2002. Schwartz, R., S. Austin, F. Kubala, J. Makhoul, L. Nguyen, P. Placeway, and G. Zavaliagkos, "New Uses for the N-Best Sentence Hypotheses within the Byblos Speech Recognition System", Proc. ICASSP-92, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal, Processing, San Francisco, California, March 23-26, 1992, pp. I-1 - I-4. |
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Music and High-End audio (including DIY electronics and speakers) Historical research and reenactment Medieval philosophy Home Brewing |
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Personal and professional references available upon request. Paper and
machine readable copies of this résumé also available.
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