Adsotrans

David Lancashire
email: david.lancashire |at| gmail.com

 

Selected Employment:

Praxis Language (ChinesePod)

Chief Technology Officer and Director of Research and Development at the world’s leading online language-learning company. Streamlined academic production processes to halve production team size and costs on hire. Managed and scaled a multi-server infrastructure and in-house development team. Oversaw multiple successful product launches and a doubling of company revenue. Work combined technical development, team management, creative product development and long-term architectural planning. (January 2007 - May 2008)

Adsotrans
Founder and head programmer of the Adsotrans natural language processing engine, the leading open source Chinese text analysis system and database. Our technology is widely used in the Chinese learning community, and our software provides advanced semantic search and segmentation services, along with data resources used for cutting-edge research into machine translation. (2003 - present)

China Foreign Languages Publishing House ( 中国对外翻译出版社)
Professional Chinese-English translator at Beijing-based translation company. Lots of policy papers from domestic and international institutions, private (real-estate) contracts, telecom and museum pieces. Freelance translation as well. (September 2005 – January 2007)

MFC Insight
Supporting analyst at boutique Beijing-based telecom consulting firm. Responsible for tracking industry news, assisting with research, translating Chinese documents, and producing a weekly industry newsletter. (2004 – 2005)

 

 

Academic Background

Tsinghua University (Beijing)
Enrolled in the Chinese Languages and Literature Department at Tsinghua University. Later continued language studies at the Beijing Culture and Language University. (2003-2004)

University of California, Berkeley ( 2001 – 2003)
Graduate student in the Political Science department with a focus on political economy, statistics, telecommunications and comparative technological development. Minor interests in wireless development, cryptography and baroque music. (2001 - 2003)

Trinity College, University of Toronto
Undergraduate specialist in International Relations with a minor in Chinese studies. Graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours in the spring of 2000 with a 3.7+/4.0 GPA, including Chinese language courses. (1996-2000)

 

Skills
Language Skills
Mandarin (fluent) and French (conversational)

Technical Skills
Experienced programmer in Java, Javascript, C/C++, Perl, PHP, Ruby, bash and more. Fast learner of frameworks and APIs. Strongly familiar with text analysis software in the search and statistical machine translation space, with several years of Unix server administration and web development.

Analytic Skills:
Advanced statistical methods (through non-linear regression), game theoretic modeling and survey research. Comfortable with approaches to statistical machine translation approaches and software such as GIZA++, the Champollion toolkit, etc..