John Brandon Lowe

Coordinates

24 Parnassus Road
Berkeley, CA 94708
USA

academic email
personal email
ucb home page

jblowe@berkeley.edu
johnblowe@gmail.com
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~jblowe

cell
skype

+1 415 309 5841
jblowe77

Employment History and Education

2022-now	Centre d’études sud-asiatiques et himalayennes (CESAH) / CNRS, Paris	Membre Associé
2011-2023	Research, Teaching, and Learning/ RTL UC Berkeley [CollectionSpace]	Service Manager / Engineer
2010-2015	Department of Linguistics UC Berkeley [STEDT]	Specialist
2008-2009	Skygrid, Inc.	Senior Scientist, Analytics
2006-2008	Powerset, Inc. now part of Microsoft Bing	Manager of Knowledge Resources
2000-2001	Ask Jeeves, Inc.	VP Language Engineering, Chief Linguist
1999-2000	Ask Jeeves, Inc.	Sr. Software Eng., Director Core Engineering
1997-1999	International Computer Science Institute [Framenet]	Technical Director
1995	University of California, Berkeley	Ph.D. in Linguistics
1993-1999	Institute for Cognitive Studies UC Berkeley [C B OLD]	Researcher
1991-1995	LACITO/CNRS Paris, France [Projet Archivage, now Pangloss] [The Reconstruction Engine, “R.E.”]	Chercheur, Membre Associé
1987	School of Lib and Info Studies now the “iSchool” [UC Berkeley]	M.L.I.S.
1980-1987	Division of Library Automation now the California Digital Library [MELVYL]	Principal Programmer, DBA
1977-1980	Library Plans and Policies. [UC Systemwide]	Programmer/Analyst
1972-1977	Yale University Dept. of Linguistics	B.A. in Linguistics

Skills: Leadership

Set strategic direction for technology development at Ask Jeeves, Inc.
Initiated efforts to form an international division at Ask Jeeves, now Ask Jeeves International.
Developed (in collaboration with other faculty at UC Berkeley) over 2.5 million dollars of research funding for more than half a dozen research projects over a ten year period.

Skills: Software Engineering Management

Created and managed the Powerset Knowledge Engineering team at Powerset.
Managed the Ask Jeeves Core Engineering team in the development of the next generation of the Ask Jeeves question-answering system, a unique suite of both high-performance web-centric C++ components and database-centric GUI components written in C++ with MFC.
Managed the work of graduate students, postdocs, developers, and others on several long term academic research projects.
Principal team member (one of six) in the design and implementation of U.C.’s MELVYL online catalog.

Skills: Programming

Design and implemented software components to support dictionaries, morphologies, ontologies, onomastica, gazetteers and other language functionality in the Ask Jeeves question-answering system, in the Powerset search engine, and elsewhere.
Architected and led development of several research databases and textbases (and associated software) in support of NSF-funded research projects.
Designed and administered several Very Large Database Systems, including the University of California’s MELVYL online catalog and the creation of the REMARC database for the Library of Congress.
Years of experience coding in a variety of declarative, functional, and object-oriented programming languages.

Skills: Education, Writing and Speaking

Numerous presentations at conferences (both academic and enterprise).
Taught courses and seminars on Computational Linguistics, on Linguistics, and on programming at UC Berkeley and in commercial enterprises.
At Ask Jeeves, I developed marketing and training materials, and successfully presented the message to customers and analysts, in formal presentations and impromptu one-on-ones.
I am an experienced and successful grant writer.

Selected Publications

Improving Search Results Quality by Customizing Summary Lengths, Proceedings of ACL/HLT, 2008. (with M. Kaisser and M.A. Hearst).
Creating a Research Collection of Question Answer Sentence Pairs with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco, 2008. (with M. Kaisser).
Linguistic documents synchronizing sound and text, Speech Communication 33. (2001) pp. 79-96. (with Michel Jacobson and Boyd Michailovsky).
The reconstruction engine: a computer implementation of the comparative method, Association for Computational Linguistics Special Issue in Computational Phonology 20.3 (September 1994) pp. 381-417. (with Martine Mazaudon).
Regularity and exceptions in sound change, Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of Belgium, Bruxelles, December 13-15 1993. (D. Demolin, ed.). (forthcoming) (with Martine Mazaudon).
Bibliography of the International Conferences on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics I-XXV. 407pp. Berkeley: Center for Southeast Asian Studies. (1994) (with Randy J. LaPolla).
Du bon usage de l’informatique en linguistique historique, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 86.1, pp. 49-87. (1991). (with Martine Mazaudon).
Gambling on CD-ROM: Speculations on the Economics of a New Technology, Library Journal (July 1988).Over a dozen articles published in a variety of journals, magazines, and conference proceedings, including: Library Journal, Computational Linguistics, Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de Paris, Bulletin de la Cercle Belge de Linguistique, Conference Proceedings for SPIE, Berkeley Linguistics Society.

Patents

Natural language query processing, USPTO# 7403938 issued on 22-Jul-2008. (with M. Barrett, G. Chevsky, T. Harrison, and S. Reddi).

Other Facets

Moderate fluency and reading skills in French, Hindi-Urdu. Basic communication ability in Spanish, Portuguese.
Rusty reading skills in Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Old English, Dutch, Brahmi, Kharosthi, Burmese, and Tibetan.
Born in 1954 in Champaign IL, USA and grew up in the Philippines, Thailand, and India. US Citizen.
Offline activities: aviation, sailing, martial arts, radio, hiking

References

Furnished upon request