Maciej Ceglowski <maciej@ceglowski.com>

Personal

Currently living in San Francisco. Authorized to work in the United States and most of the European Union. Interested in offsite contract work in any of the following areas:

• Ad servers and recommendations engines (design, implementation)
• Javascript and Flash online maps
• Machine learning and clustering
• Textual analysis and NLP
• Expanded recall search algorithms
• High-availability web services

Work Experience

• June 2007 - present
  Independent Contractor

  Designed and built a spreading activation geographic recommendations engine for Platial. Overhauled and expanded ad server infrastructure for SixApart. Built a statistical language guesser for Sphere.

• January 2007 - June 2007
  Web Developer, Brickhouse, Yahoo!

  First engineer hired at what was supposed to be Yahoo's groundbreaking startup incubator. Worked as a backend development and bug squasher on Pipes visual Web programming environment. Designed and implemented a visual airfare search tool called FareMaps.

• April 2005 - January 2007
  Independent Contractor

  Designed and built a JavaScript web application for bookmarking New York City restaurants. Created an iTunes recommendations engine using principal component analysis for France Telecom. Cofounded and wrote codebase for Podlinez, a service for listening to podcasts over a regular phone line (sold in December 2006). Built recommendations engine for upcoming.org

• December 2004 - April 2005
  Assistant Program Officer, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

  Worked in the Research in Information Technology program. Helped solicit and evaluate grant applications, oversaw and attempted to rationalize large academic open source projects (Chandler, Open Courseware).

• January 2001 - December 2004
  Lead Developer, National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)

Built a number of open-source search engines and visualization tools for university use. These included a latent semantic search engine, a set of Perl modules for spreading activation search, a part-of-speech tagger for English, unsupervised clustering tools, and a weblog census.

• June 2000 - January 2001
  Web Programmer, Timberline Interactive

  Built database-driven websites for small retail businesses.

• May 2000 - August 2004
  Freelance Translator, Univers Traductions

Technical translator from French to English for a small LeMans-based agency. Recurring topics included financial reports, press releases, PowerPoint training slides, business plans, advertising copy and marketing materials.

• July 1997 - June 2000
  Oil painter

Projects

Most of my work has involved LAMP and AJAX web applications, with some smaller projects in Java and C++.   I maintain the following Perl modules on CPAN:

• Search::ContextGraph:   - spreading activation search module
• Search::VectorSpace - sample vector space search engine
• Language::Guess   - statistical language identifier
• Lingua::RU::NameParse - heuristic parser for Russian names
• Bloom::Filter - Bloom filter implementation

I also run the following online projects:

• LOAF

  (with Joshua Schachter, Peter Gadjokov)

LOAF is a way to share social network information through email without exposing private information.  LOAF files are Bloom filters (a kind of one-way hash) that ride along as attachments to email and can help recipients identify new correspondents who have exchanged email with people they already know.

• Languid

A statistical language identifier derived from TextCat.   Languid uses a statistical algorithm to select candidate languages from known training sets, and narrows its guesses based on which Unicode blocks are used in the unknown text. Technorati uses a version of the Languid engine.

• Pasta

  A plain-text pasting service for the popular bookmarking site del.icio.us.

• The Million-Marker Map

  (with Jason Williams)

  A set of Flash extensions to Google maps for displaying very large data sets.

• The Bedbug Registry

  A free online directory of bedbug reports at hotels and street addresses across North America.

Publications

• A Layman's Introduction to Latent Semantic Indexing (NITLE)
• Building a Vector-Space Search engine in Perl (O'Reilly network)
• Using Bloom Filters (O'Reilly network)
• Best Food Writing, 2006. "The Unbearable Thinness of Crust"
• Travelers' Tales Best Travel Writing, 2007. "Argentina on Two Steaks A Day"

Education

B.A., Middlebury College, 1997, summa cum laude (double major in Russian and Studio Art).

Languages

English, Polish, French, Russian, Modern Standard Arabic, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.