Varden Wang, is a current CLMS student and analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. In this interview, Varden describes how the work he is conducting as part of his MS is already helping him in his current job.

Varden Wang

What is your educational and professional background?

I majored in Linguistics and Economics at UC Santa Cruz, where I was first exposed to computational linguistics as a discipline. After graduating I was recruited at a start-up as a computational linguist to work on natural language and semantic search that improves CRM for businesses. I was able to bootstrap my programming skills and gain considerable experience working in the NLP (natural language processing) space. After three years, I switched careers to focus on developing systems and technologies for non-profits, primarily for fundraising and other types of data analysis. Currently I am an analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which involves a lot of programming and data analysis.

Can you describe a project you have worked on?

A memorable group project involved building a factoid Question and Answering system that can correctly answer natural language factoid questions, e.g. "What is the capital of Kansas?" It is a little like Ask.com but restricted only to newspaper sources. It was a fun project that allowed our team to be creative in utilizing a variety of NLP techniques. We were given the chance to explore and figure out on our own how to make the system work. We were also encouraged to test our own theories and solutions, analyzing why they worked or didn't work. It was great to put all of our experience and learning into developing a real-world application.

What was your experience working with other students?

I found the fellow students I worked with to be extremely talented and knowledgeable, and the skill level and preparedness very high. It was easy to tap into their energy and enthusiasm to help push myself to do my very best. The program has a great network, with both faculty and students having many strong connections to companies and individuals within the computational linguistics and software engineering communities.

How have the skills you've learned in the program apply to your job?

A lot of what I’ve learned can be used for large-scale modeling and predicting for many types of complex real world problems, or in my case, identifying and targeting individuals most likely to give money to the ACLU. The CLMS program has exposed me to the newest ideas in the industry while also providing a more in-depth and thorough look at what I had previously learned. While the program is professionally oriented, it is also very academic. There is a flexibility to choose topics of research that interest me. Essentially, I like that this is a practical degree that can enhance a career, but still appeals to the linguistics geek in me.

Read more student profiles »