Jason Katz-Brown

jasonkatzbrown at gmail (full CV)

• M.S., Computer Science, MIT, August 2008. Thesis: Dependency Reordering Features for Japanese-English Phrase-Based Translation, supervised by Michael Collins
• B.S., Computer Science, MIT, January 2008.

• Represented the US at the World Scrabble Championships in 2005, 2007, and 2009.
• Cowrote Quackle, the strongest Scrabble AI, which is cross-platform and open-source.

• Original author of Kolf, the miniature golf game in the KDE Games package
• Wrote Kiten, the Japanese-English dictionary tool in the KDE Education project
• Dabbled in writing an XIM client and a Monopoly-like board game editor

• From 2008 to 2011, I worked in Google's Tokyo office on Web Search quality and Google Translate's translation quality.

• Since October 2011, I work at Airbnb. I love it because I love travel and delightful neighborhoods.

• Training a Parser for Machine Translation Reordering
  Jason Katz-Brown, Slav Petrov, Ryan McDonald, Franz Och,
  David Talbot, Hiroshi Ichikawa, Masakazu Seno, EMNLP 2011
  [paper (pdf)]   [slides (pdf)]   [slides (keynote)]  
• Training dependency parsers by jointly optimizing multiple objectives
  Keith Hall, Ryan Macdonald, Jason Katz-Brown, Michael Ringgaard, EMNLP 2011
  [paper (pdf)]  
• A lightweight evaluation framework for machine translation reordering
  David Talbo, Hideto Kazawa, Hiroshi Ichikawa, Jason Katz-Brown, Masakazu Seno, Franz J. Och, WMT 2011
  [paper (pdf)]  
• Syntactic reordering in preprocessing for Japanese-to-English translation: MIT system description for NTCIR-7 patent translation task
  Jason Katz-Brown, Michael Collins, NTCIR 2008
  [paper (pdf)]