Dominic Widdows is a software engineer and researcher at Google's Pittsburgh office at CMU. His interests lie in information extraction, text mining, GIS systems, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics and knowledge representation. (3043)
Before moving to Google, Dominic received a Doctorate in Differential Geometry from Oxford, and then led the InfoMap project at Stanford, researching the uses of geometric models for human language acquisition, text mining, ontology learning and data integration. This synthesis of rationalist modelling techniques and empirical observation is described for a general scientific audience in Geometry and Meaning. More technical papers can be found at this here. Between Stanford and Google, Dominic worked on community information systems and peer-to-peer technologies at MAYA Design.{nid 3044} (3OB7)
Software (3050)
Publicly available software developed through the InfoMap project is available at http://infomap-nlp.sourceforge.net/ (3051)
The software implements a text-mining and modelling technique related to Latent Semantic Analysis, and has been used to infer underlying similarities between terms and documents by researchers in several domains, including medical informatics, cultural anthropology, legal informatics and (of course) natural language processing. (3052)