Alessandro Pedori

Alessandro Pedori Back-end Engineer, Data and NLP Consultant, Software Architect, Public Speaker ABOUT ME I am a broadly curious and experienced IT professional with a diverse skill-set and around 15 years of experience in various industries covering a variety of roles. I prefer back-end projects in language technologies, machine learning, open data science/analysis, and high parallelism, but I also have experience in automation and full stack projects. At the moment I am mostly interested in lead and architect roles, as long as I can also code at least 50% of the time. CONTACTS -linkedin.com/in/pedori/ pedori.com Donaustr. 99, 12043, Berlin, Germany DE: +49 PLEASE-ASK-BEFORE-CALLING Some bits of personal history and notable strengths • M.Sc. (Hons) Computer Engineering from Bologna University, Italy. • Weapons of choice: Python, Elixir. • IT professional with a diverse skill-set and around 15 years of experience in various industries covering a variety of roles. • I mostly concentrate on language technologies and (textual) data analysis. I have experience in offering services as a consultant in pre-localization, localization, internationalization, translation, project management, training. • Excellent ability to work in a team environment (both on-site and remote) or on my own. • Language enthusiast. Italian native – fluent in English, German, French and Spanish, but I can only write confidently in English. Knowledge of Swedish, Portuguese (Danish and Norwegian to a lesser extent). All in all, I can understand most western European languages, save for Finnish. I am always interested in learning more. • Thorough knowledge and practical use of state-of-the-art development fill-in-the-blank. Come on, I am an engineer: I can learn that new technology by next Tuesday, unless it is very math/theory intensive. Make it Friday in that case. • I am a hard core *nix (GNU/Linux, OS X, BSD, etc.) guy, open source if possible. • Currently based in Berlin, Germany. I travel often between Italy and Germany, or other locations depending on contracts/opportunities/weather/whim. • Strong communication & interpersonal skills • Experienced in teaching, public speaking, and facilitating workshops. • I enjoy using pragmatical tools from Design Thinking, RAD, Agile Specialties and buzzwords: Technical Leadership and soft skills NLP programming (computational linguistics, in academia) Big Data Machine learning, or AI for hype AWS, Docker ecosystem, virtualization Software Architecture Academic Qualifications Doctor Magister in Ingegneria Informatica (M.Sc in Computer Engineering) Alma Mater Studiorum, Bologna, Italy, 2004 (Main dissertation: Adaptation of Web Services to Mobile and Small Device use, and Location Awareness of Mobile Devices). Technical Skills Summary operating systems: Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows (**), *NIX (mainly GNU/Linux and FreeBSD); iOS and Android programming and scripting languages: weapons of choice: Python, Elixir likes to play with: JavaScript, Go, Haskell, Ruby, Scala (Clojure to a lesser extent) can use/has used: Perl, XML (*), SQL, Java(**), PHP (**), AutoIt!, Prolog can read/tinker with: C++, C specialization: distributed processing, data mining, knowledge engineering, NLP, process/VM automation web & platforms: 0MQ, Databases (mostly Postgres, CouchDB/CouchBase, other noSQL); Elasticsearch; CMS design; other: usability; strong research capabilities; internationalization & attention to languages/multiculturalism (*) not a programming language, I know (**) but I avoid it at all costs. NATURAL LANGUAGES fluent: Italian / English good enough: German / Spanish / French read only languages (I could recover them as spoken in a couple of weeks): Swedish, Portuguese (Danish and Norwegian with effort) I always welcome the opportunity to learn a new natural language. High priority to Mandarin, Russian, Hebrew, and Finnish Possibly noteworthy • I have lived, studied, worked for at least 3 months in the following countries - Italy, Sweden, Germany, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Vietnam, India, USA, Ireland. • I tend to be focused and goal oriented, but I also like learning and researching for its own sake • I consider myself to be a problem solver and a troubleshooter. • I enjoy the challenges of cross-cultural communication, may it be between people from different countries, or between people with different technical backgrounds. • I really enjoy the challenges of Natural Language Processing and Data Gathering/Mining Alessandro Pedori 1/2 PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE RECENT PROJECTS: NLP/Data engineering Senior NLP Engineer for expertlead in a project for Retresco GmbH, involving skills for the Magenta platform. Extraction and organization from wikidata, NLP for disambiguation, parallelization for performance. Lead developer/architect for an Alexa Skill for CodeControl: I designed the system from the first idea, managed a small team. We both had to use NLP on the inventory to extract the correct information, and for the interaction. Online reviews/data extraction and analysis for several startup in Berlin Teaching/public speaking/facilitating Several events, among the rest: * Data Science Retreat Berlin: I taught a 2 days class on real world data gathering, data extraction, web scraping, practical NLP, hand on deep learning: * Teaching advanced masterclasses in applied NLP for companies * Running workshops and organizing unconferences in the direction of "body awareness and relationship skills for geeks", under the umbrella project "body for brainiacs" body4brainiacs.com (website sadly really under developed) * Preparing some chapter of a master class on Computer Security for Nuclear plants (my specific areas were: Hacking and Cryptography) * Organizer of community hackathons PAST HIGHLIGHTS Founder and developer of the Open Speed Dating project, March 2016 – end of 2017 Developing a personal project to facilitate speed matching/networking events. On the technical side, it involves: * collecting requirements * back end development (Python + Flask) of a flexible matching algorithm for arbitrary identities * developing an administrative front end (Web 1.0 for now, React in the near future) * ReST API development and parallel processing On the event side: * offering coaching/training for quick networking * running events, collecting feedback, adapting the software * pitching the service to different people orderbird AG Senior Backend Developer, April-June 2017 Total revamping of the platform. Among the rest: architectural consideration for swarms of devices, moving the backend from Python to Java, creating a model for a REST interface, adapting CouchBase database usage and synchronization. Aaron GmBH (in connection with Humboldt-Universität, Berlin) Research Engineer, October 2016-,March 2017 NLP and Machine Learning Applying NLP and ML techniques to automate customer support tasks * data analysis, clean up, normalization * open source libraries, mostly Python based (scikit-learn, NLTK, spacy, etc.) * topic modeling and discovery ÜberResearch GmbH Senior Engineer, May 2015-August 2016 Big Data engineering, mostly with Python, on *nix environment. • data retrieval, QA, scraping, parsing, uploading • infrastructure development, mostly on massively concurrently models with 0MQ • high availability high parallel distributed systems • REST API development and support • knowledge extraction • intensive use and automation of the AWS platform, and Docker • full stack development, mostly Python on Pyramid/Flask with a Postresql back-end. Acrolinx – Berlin, Germany Technical Consultant, 2013 – 2015 • Workflow/process design, optimization and automation • Project management • Natural language processing development and debugging • Programming and scripting to troubleshoot problems, create and deploying solutions • Third level support: issue investigation, development of workarounds and root cause identification • Pre-deployment and testing of new technologies, NLP based and Machine Translation based Snap-On Diagnostic – Cork, Ireland Localization Engineer / Internationalization Specialist,- Processing of 30+ million words a day • Management of remote development, translation/content production, QA testing • Pre-localization, post-localization and processing • Liaising with language service providers and QA testers, query research and troubleshooting • Coordination with Chinese reverse engineering and QA teams • Building and testing of Machine Translation systems to integrate with the work of human translators Apple Inc. - Cupertino, CA, USA Language Technologies Engineer, 2012 Software engineering specific to translation and localization of Siri (user interfaces and back-end) into Italian. The tasks involved required knowledge of natural language modeling, software development, and techniques of translation, constantly switching between programming, translating, testing the results, and managing translators. •natural language parsing, production, regex design and optimization •mapping of a natural language system from EN_US to IT_IT and IT_CH, coordinating with work on French, Spanish and German •reverse engineering based localization on bleeding edge systems. MISCELLANEOUS Some of the things I have done that are not Real Work®: At the moment, I am managing workshops and groups dealing with "body awareness for mind people", big (70-100) groups of people interacting together, plus preparing software for managing gatherings. In the past, I organized and taught workshops on a broad range of subjects, from origami to linux, from fire performing to physics, from Italian to dancing and yoga. Founded performing groups, created shows and placed them; good experience in promotion, cooperation with agencies and marketing. Conceived and led workshops focused in teaching scientific and technological skills to artists, and body skills to technologists. In- I ideated, authored and conducted of the local community radio science and technology news program "Cronache Marziane": think of RadioLab, done on a shoestring budget. Alessandro Pedori 2/2