About

Adam graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in Linguistics, and has worked as an English teacher in India and South Korea. At 26, he has lived in 5 countries on 3 continents and completed intensive language studies in 2 other countries. His passion is combining cutting-edge language technologies with his professional teaching experience to create novel, engaging, and effective language-learning games. Starting with Algorithms for Natural Language Processing, Adam showed an aptitude for quickly understanding background concepts necessary to compete with his peers. By taking extra time and using all the resources available to him at the University he rapidly matched, and even surpassed, many other students in the class with stronger backgrounds in programming and analysis of algorithms. In his second semester, he repeated the feat in two courses that challenged the math and programming skills of far more experienced students: Information Retrieval, and Language and Statistics - and did so while auditing a seminar on digital privacy and cryptanalysis. Adam was on the two person team that had the best class project in the LTI Language and Statistics class: he used his linguistics background to create a novel feature set for a maximum entropy language model which had the best results both in-domain and out-of-domain. While doing straight-A work in these courses, Adam has also produced successful research. He has helped implement speech synthesis into an intelligent vocabulary tutor. He has mainly concentrated on the design and creation of an original multiplayer vocabulary-teaching web game and has published on one of the generation modules that was developed. Beyond the game design, he also implemented a scalable server-client architecture to support the game, and integrated it into Facebook. His work on educational games is cutting edge, combining multiple student models and very large databases to keep student interest by providing a constantly challenging level of play as well as a wealth of material.

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

M.S. , Computer Science

Class of 2011

Awards & Publications