Work Experience | Karina Halevy

Selected Research Positions

Research Intern @EPFL NLP (summer 2023): to be revealed after anonymity period passes lol
Research Partner @Radcliffe Institute (2021 - 2022): visualized relationships across semi-structured natural language documents under Prof. Elena Glassman.
- Extended into joint CS-History senior thesis, co-advised with Prof. Cemal Kafadar, (first CS + History thesis from Harvard, I think!) submitted March 2023.
- Thesis title: “Woven into War: Digital Humanities and Sephardi Women in the Late Ottoman Empire and its Diaspora, 1908 - 1945.”
- Built OverText_history, a tool for historians to make side-by-side sentence-level comparisons of groups of primary sources.
Research Partner @Radcliffe Institute (2019 - 2020): investigated novel methods of evaluating multilingual word embeddings under Dr. Damián Blasi.
Research Intern @Raytheon BBN (summer 2020): experimented with COVID-related biomedical named entity recognition for news articles as part of DARPA’s AIDA project.
Research Intern @Affectiva (summer 2018): tried to use speech and facial cues to detect human frustration. Failed but built a GIPHY scraper which was cool.

Tableau (a Salesforce company, summer 2022): prototyped a centralized server resource management service in Java that improved resource (memory & CPU) monitoring efficiency from O(N^2) to O(N).
Microsoft (summer 2021): built a command-line app to partially automate the prioritization and triaging of bugs for the team that gets your “Report” notifications when Windows crashes.
Bloomberg (summer 2019): built a Bloomberg Terminal app that recommends photos for photo editors to incorporate into Bloomberg news articles.

Class projects in Computer Science:
- A failed attempt at using transfer learning from Chinese character embeddings to improve Japanese word embeddings (CS 287 - Deep Learning for NLP, fall 2021).
- An in-progress attempt at data augmentation for algorithmic fairness (CS 226R - Topics in Theory for Society, spring 2022).
Class projects in History:
- “Autism and Emotion in the Public Eye, 1943 - 2019”: a historical investigation of public perceptions of emotions and emotionality associated with autism from 1943 to 2019 (Hist 12P - History of Emotions, spring 2022).
- “Colonial Communication: The Telegraph and the Cheyenne People”: an exploration of how the construction of the telegraph around present-day Colorado impacted the Cheyenne people from 1860 - 1871 (Hist 60O - American Indian History in 4 Acts, fall 2021).
Tech Officer for Congresswoman Anna Eshoo’s Student Advisory Board (fall 2017-spring 2019): wrote policy proposals for bilingual education and regulating personal data acquisition, sitting somewhere in the Library of Congress. Learned what a categorical grant was and answered a question about it on the spot at the 2019 Modeling the Future Challenge (won 1st place).
Research Fellow @AI4ALL (spring 2018): built a multi-label toxic text classifier for English Wikipedia comments.
- Talked about it at Stanford HCAI 2019.
- Wrote some stuff about it.

Started and organized a high school NLP hackathon (2018 & 2019, possibly some sort of first?) and conference (2017).
Launched and wrote curriculum for a network of computational linguistics clubs.
Started and keep running a blog, email newsletter, and resource page for NLP-related stuff.
Returned in 2D form to judge hackathons, advise new hackathon directors, teach workshops, recruit event staff, talk on panels, & send people club curricula.

Organizing NLP-related events
- Co-organized (mainly tech support) CMU Agent Workshop
Reviewing for conferences
- EACL 2023
- EMNLP 2022
Mentoring
- CMU SCS Graduate Application Support Program Mentor
- Harvard WiCS Alumni Mentor
- (in undergrad) Harvard CS Department Peer Concentration Advisor
- (in undergrad) Harvard History Leadership Council member

Developed workshops on machine learning, artificial intelligence, & natural language processing for middle school girls.