About Me
Welcome! My name is Derek and I am a software engineer for Amazon Music. I am very interested in music technology and reinforcement learning (particularly with its applications in recommender systems). Although not a researcher, I enjoy reading research papers and am always happy to help others. Please feel free to reach out for course advice, career advice, or networking :)
I am most skilled in: Java, Python, C (from a past life) and Reinforcement Learning
Experience
Amazon Music
Software Development Engineer on the Music Data Quality Team
Jan 2020 - Present
music.amazon.com/
Detecting and mitigating data quality issues for your music streaming experience!
I work with mitigation (e.g. metadata quality enrichment and data sanitization) and detection (e.g. leveraging anomaly detection) of data quality issues.
Worked on language-related projects involving search typeahead, text summarization, keyword retrieval, name-scraping from researcher emails via CRF, large-scale approximative similarity search of research publication document embeddings and custom pre-processing for author identity disambiguation through clustering
Implemented a means for better field upgradability via SMBUS/I2C Protocols of the FPGA rear card that interfaces between the CPU and peripherals in a new line of network switches.
Education
UC Berkeley
BS Computer Science & BS Economics
2013 - 2017
I held many interests throughout my undergrad years, but if I had to sum up my main areas of focus, they would be computer architecture and behavioral economics. During my college years, I really enjoyed reading some of Richard Thaler’s works and really admired some of the greats in computer architecture & engineering (David Patterson & Rand Katz).
I spent a lot of my free time as a teaching assistant, tutor, recreational triathlete.
A Little More About Me
Tools of Trade
- Everything JetBrains (IntelliJ, PyCharm, DataGrip) with Vim Emulation
- Jupyter or DataBricks for Notebooks
What I’m Reading
- Papers on Distributional Reinforcement Learning
- “The Book of Why” by Judea Pearl
Hobbies & Other Interests
- Music Production: yet to figure out Ableton & make use of my MIDI Fighter
- Cycling ( 2016 Cannondale CAAD12, RIP 2014 Cannondale SuperSix Evo :( )
- Snowboarding ( 2019 LibTech T Rice Orca )
- Gaming: used to really enjoy Starcraft, Overwatch, Smash Bros & competitive Pokemon battling. I am also very interested in AI for all of those, except for Overwatch!