Lightfield AI San Francisco, CA

Co-founder and Head of AI Nov 2024 – Present

Redefining the CRM category with AI.

Tome AI San Francisco, CA

Head of AI/ML Apr 2023 – Nov 2024

Developing new paradigms for AI-powered products in the productivity space.

MBZUAI Abu Dhabi, UAE

Adjunct Professor Oct 2023 – Present

Advising research efforts on LLMs and their applications to real-world problems.

Facebook / Meta Inc Menlo Park, CA

Applied Research Scientist Manager Jul 2018 – Nov 2022
Research Scientist Jan 2013 – Jul 2018

Project Highlights

  • MultiRay Built a service to run multiple very large and accurate models on the same input, and share the majority of the computational costs. MultiRay makes it possible for very accurate self-supervised models to be run on every piece of content. (paper, blog)
  • Cross-lingual NLP through XLM-R Trained XLM-R, a state-of-the-art large-scale multilingual language model (paper, blog) and applied it to extend Integrity classifiers to many languages (blog). Extended upon previous work on multilingual word embeddings (blog).
  • RoBERTa and applications to Integrity Trained RoBERTa, a robustly optimized BERT pretraining approach, a state-of-the-art self-supervised method (paper, blog, blog). Applied it to identifying violations such as hate speech (blog) and bullying (paper, blog).
  • Neural Machine Translation Shipped the first large-scale commercial Neural MT system with big improvements to translation quality. (blog, news)
  • NLP for Search Shipped several impactful NLP features to Facebook Search including phonetic name search, intent classification and keyword typeahead.

CLSP, Johns Hopkins University

Assistant Research Scientist Oct 2010 – Jan 2013
  • Computing Innovation Fellowship (awarded by CRA).
  • Performed research on Machine Learning for Structured Prediction.

Cornell University

PhD in Computer Science Aug 2010
MSc in Computer Science May 2005

Advisor: Prof. Claire Cardie.
Thesis: Opinion Summarization: Automatically Creating Useful Representations of Opinions Expressed in Text.

University of Delaware

Honors BSc, with Distinction in Computer Science May 2002

Graduated Summa Cum Laude; GPA: 4.00/4.00. Minors in Mathematics and Cognitive Science.

65,000+ citations. Full publication list on Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar.

Full publication list on Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar.

Outside of work I am an avid runner. I enjoy cooking and all things culinary and traveling. I love learning languages and can speak Bulgarian, English, Spanish, some Russian, Serbian, Croatian and Japanese.