commit c318a85 (2022-01-29 09:53:50 -0500) Torsten Scholak: add ServiceNow Research entry
Resume
Below is my resume. A PDF version is available upon request.
Basics
Name: Torsten Scholak
Label: NLP researcher and project lead at ServiceNow Research
Summary: I'm a researcher, tech and research lead, mentor, developer, and innovator who can drive and guide academic and product-focused research projects from their beginning to their end.
Location
City: Montreal
Region: QC
Country Code: CA
Profiles
GitHub
Username: tscholak
URL: https://github.com/tscholak
Username: tscholak
URL: https://twitter.com/tscholak
Username: tscholak
URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tscholak/
Work
Sr Applied Research Scientist
Company: ServiceNow Research
Website: https://www.servicenow.com
Start Date: 2022-01-28
Sr Applied Research Scientist
Company: ServiceNow
Website: https://www.servicenow.com
Start Date: 2021-08-01
End Date: 2022-01-27
Applied Research Scientist
Company: ServiceNow
Website: https://www.servicenow.com
Start Date: 2021-01-01
End Date: 2021-07-31
Applied Research Scientist - Research
Company: Element AI
Website: https://www.elementai.com
Start Date: 2020-03-11
End Date: 2020-12-31
Highlights:
- Developed research tracks and projects, oversaw and participated in their execution, and reported results to stakeholders and product teams
- Liaised with product teams to drive collaborative research agendas and align values
- Worked on program synthesis in the context of human-machine interaction
- Researched, designed, and built a state-of-the-art model for text-to-code translation in PyTorch
- Developed a fast training method for grammar-constrained sequence decoding
Applied Research Scientist - AI Core
Company: Element AI
Website: https://www.elementai.com
Start Date: 2017-10-02
End Date: 2020-03-10
Highlights:
- As an NLP tech lead, conducted stand-ups, defined projects and goals, set expectations, and regularly liaised with product teams and management
- Mentored junior researchers and interns
- Researched, designed, and implemented effective and novel methods for improving the time-quality-cost tradeoffs in data crowdsourcing
- Researched, designed, and implemented unconventional and effective models for tree-structured decoding
- Reimplemented state-of-the-art models for extractive document summarization in PyTorch
- Reimplemented state-of-the-art models for document question-answering in PyTorch
- Organized and hosted a weekly Haskell office hour and hacking group
- Was an invited speaker at the Montreal NLP Meetup and gave a talk on closed-world factual question answering (see here)
Data Science Engineer
Company: Unata Inc.
Website: https://unata.com
Start Date: 2016-08-31
End Date: 2017-09-30
Highlights:
- Reimplemented Unata's user-to-item and item-to-item recommender systems from the ground up in Scala and Spark
- Maintained and refactored Unata's legacy recommender systems based on Postgres, Cassandra, and Redis
- Hosted a 3.5 hour tutorial seminar on Bayesian machine learning at PyCon 2017 (a recording can be found on YouTube)
Scala Developer
Company: Infomart
Website: https://www.meltwater.com/infomart
Start Date: 2016-04-30
End Date: 2016-07-31
Highlights:
- Leveraged functional programming and Akka to build various data ingestion and analysis pipelines for large data sets
- Built a sentiment classification pipeline
Postdoctoral Researcher / Visiting Research Associate
Company: University of Toronto
Website: https://sites.chem.utoronto.ca/cptg/
Start Date: 2011-06-30
End Date: 2016-03-31
Highlights:
- Introduced a new mathematical framework for quantum coherent control interferometry
- Studied quantum transport in large complex systems
- Employed my own data analysis toolchain on the SciNet supercomputer cluster
- Used OPENMP, MKL, MAGMA to speed up computation dramatically on modern multicore CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs with CUDA capability
- Crunched through TBs of scientific data stored in HDF5 format
- Dealt with correlated random variables with heavy-tailed marginal probability distributions
- Employed random matrix theory to classify, interpret, and replicate numerical results
Graduate Student/Research Assistant
Company: University of Freiburg
Website: https://www.quantum.uni-freiburg.de/home
Start Date: 2008-02-28
End Date: 2011-06-30
Highlights:
- Studied quantum transport in complex systems
- Performed large-scale Monte-Carlo simulations using a modularized software package written by myself in C
- Developed my very own data analysis software stack
- Implemented a toolchain in C, Python, Cython, and Mathematica for the creation and interpretation of multidimensional histograms
- Deployed genetic optimization algorithms (CMA-ES) to find optimal configurations of complex, fully-connected networks
- Used MPI-2 to delegate data streams from worker nodes to masters
- Worked with the Black Forrest Grid supercomputer cluster
Teaching Assistant
Company: University of Freiburg
Website: https://www.quantum.uni-freiburg.de/home
Start Date: 2008-02-28
End Date: 2010-06-30
Highlights:
- Graded various graduate courses in special topics of quantum mechanics
- Hosted and taught in course exercise groups
Undergraduate Researcher
Company: University of Bayreuth
Website: https://www.physik.uni-bayreuth.de/en/index.php
Start Date: 2007-02-28
End Date: 2008-02-28
Highlights:
- Discovered a new way of entanglement detection through quantum interference
- Optimized entanglement witnesses numerically in Mathematica
Teaching Assistant
Company: University of Bayreuth
Website: https://www.physik.uni-bayreuth.de/en/index.php
Start Date: 2007-01-31
End Date: 2008-01-31
Highlights:
- Graded various graduate courses in special topics of quantum mechanics
- Hosted and taught in course exercise groups
System Administrator
Company: University of Bayreuth
Website: https://www.physik.uni-bayreuth.de/en/index.php
Start Date: 2004-12-31
End Date: 2007-01-31
Highlights:
- Planned, implemented, deployed, and administered heterogeneous general-purpose computer lab
- Setup and maintained both Linux and Windows workstations
- Setup and administered Linux, NetWare, and OES servers
Civilian Service (conscientious objector)
Company: Friedrich Fröbel School
Start Date: 2001-09-30
End Date: 2002-06-30
Volunteer
Google Summer of Code Mentor
Website: https://www.haskell.org/
Start Date: 2021-06-07
End Date: 2021-08-15
Summary: Mentored a GSoC student in the "Gradually Typed Hasktorch" project. The project details can be found on the GSoC website. The student's report is available as this gist.
Google Summer of Code Mentor
Website: https://www.haskell.org/
Start Date: 2020-06-01
End Date: 2020-08-24
Summary: Mentored a GSoC student in the "Custom Dataloader for Hasktorch" project. The project details can be found on the GSoC website.
Education
The University of Freiburg
Area: Theoretical and Mathematical Physics
Study Type: Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Start Date: 2008-12-31
End Date: 2011-12-31
GPA: magna cum laude
University of Bayreuth
Area: Theoretical and Mathematical Physics
Study Type: Diplom (German equivalent of M.S. degree)
Start Date: 2002-12-31
End Date: 2008-12-31
GPA: 1.2
Skills
PyTorch
Level: Advanced
Keywords:
- transformers
- language models
Python
Level: Advanced
Keywords:
- numpy
Haskell
Level: Advanced
Keywords:
- generics
- gadts
- type classes
- type families
- singleton types
- monads
- transformers
- extensible effects
- recursion schemes
- lenses
- attoparsec
- aeson
- hedgehog
- cabal
Nix
Level: Intermediate
Keywords:
- haskell.nix
- flakes
Scala
Level: Intermediate
Keywords:
- cats
- scalacheck
- spark
SQL
Level: Advanced
Keywords:
- postgresql
- sqlite
Scientific Writing
Level: Advanced
Keywords:
- publishing
- bibliography
- references
Public Speaking
Level: Intermediate
Keywords:
- talks
- presentations
- lectures
- reading groups
Teaching
Level: Intermediate
Keywords:
- graduate courses
- teaching assistance
- course exercises
Rust
Level: Beginner
Keywords:
- serde
- cargo
Languages
English
Fluency: Fluent
German
Fluency: Native Speaker
French
Fluency: Basic Knowledge
Interests
Biking
Keywords:
- road biking
- urban biking
- trail biking
- mountain biking
- bike commuting
Running
Keywords:
- road running
- cross country running
- trail running
- snow shoe running
Open Source
Keywords:
- software
- community
Projects
Hasktorch
Description: A Haskell library for tensor math and differentiable functional programming
Highlights:
- Member of the core contributor team
- Contributed massively to the typed tensor API and the Nix toolchain
- Made it possible to check tensor shapes, data types, and compute devices at compile time
- Implemented typed neural network layers including Transformers, LSTMs, and GRUs
- Created typed neural network examples
- Gave a live-coding demo of Hasktorch at the FP Berlin Meetup (a recording can be found on YouTube)
Keywords:
- Haskell
- Torch
- neural networks
- generics
Start Date: 2019-08-30
URL: https://github.com/hasktorch/hasktorch/
Roles:
- Core contributor
- Maintainer
- Developer
- Tester
Type: Open Source