Brendan O'Connor

I'm interested in statistical machine learning and natural language processing, especially when informed by or applied to the social sciences: psychology, economics, political science, etc.

I'm a Machine Learning Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)'s School of Computer Science, in Noah's ARK research group. This summer I'm working as an intern on the Facebook Data Team.

Previously, I worked on crowdsourced annotations at CrowdFlower / Dolores Labs, and before that, engineering "semantic" search at Powerset (now part of Bing). I was an undergrad at Stanford with a BS/MS in Symbolic Systems: cognitive science, broadly construed. (bsthesis, msthesis)

Some fun blog posts:

• Comparison of data analysis packages: R, Matlab, SciPy, Excel, SAS, SPSS, Stata
• Statistics vs. Machine Learning

Recent Research

• From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series.
  Brendan O'Connor, Ramnath Balasubramanyan, Bryan R. Routledge, and Noah A. Smith.
  Presented at ICWSM-2010.
  (pdf) (video)
  
  Press: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Mashable, Ars Technica, New Scientist, CNN Tech, Fast Company, Science Now, Economic Times, BBC Radio 5 (at 13:00) and others.
• TweetMotif: Exploratory Search and Topic Summarization for Twitter.
  Brendan O'Connor, Michel Krieger, and David Ahn.
  Demo track of ICWSM-2010.
  (pdf)
• Superficial Data Analysis: Exploring Millions of Social Stereotypes.
  Brendan O'Connor and Lukas Biewald.
  In Beautiful Data, ed. Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher. O'Reilly Media. 2009.
  (blog post) (pdf)
• Cheap and Fast — But is it Good? Evaluating Non-Expert Annotations for Natural Language Tasks.
  Rion Snow, Brendan O’Connor, Daniel Jurafsky, and Andrew Y. Ng.
  Presented at EMNLP-2008.
  (blog post) (pdf) (slides)
  • Using Mechanical Turk for natural language processing (linguistic annotations).

Demos

• TweetMotif for summarizing twitter topics.
• PalinSpeak - ELIZA meets n-grams meets tf/idf - politics chatbot.
• ARKref, a coreference resolution system.
• KwicTwit - kwic layout for twitter search.
• Treeviz - quick and dirty parse tree/dependency visualization via graphviz.
• GhettoSearch - a shell script web search engine. Explanation and reddit discussion. The full site is down at the moment.
• read a fortune/quote (code: fun fact, you can write cgi in shell)

Code