Kevin Dela Rosa
Carnegie Mellon University
Masters of Computer Science Language Technology 2011
University of Texas at Arlington
B.S. Software Engineering & Physics 2009
Amazon.com, Inc. · Software Engineer II
Sep 2011 - Current

  • Leading the re-architecture, resource planning, project management, and data migration of Amazon's external identifier cross reference system from a massive RDBMS to NoSQL
  • Enabled the launch of 30 new product categories in multiple countries into Amazon's catalog by collaborating with the business teams to develop appropriate product validation logic and implementing matching criteria
  • Designed and implemented a tool used daily by hundreds of seller support agents to correct mismatched seller product listings in the catalog. Drove down related merchant contacts by 43% and reduced the time to resolve such issues into a few mouse clicks
  • Built tools for auditors to measure quality of catalog impacting decisions made by the item authority's product matching algorithms, leading to insights and policy changes that reduced duplicate creation for non‐Novelty items by an estimated 58% 
  • Drove engineering excellence by instituting code review guidelines, pushing for the adoption of well documented SOPs for operations, and migrating  manual deployment processes to continuous deployment pipelines

  • Consulted with clients and internal customers, lead design reviews, bar raised deployments for Amazon Marketplace teams, mentored multiple engineers, active in recruiting having conducted over 125 technical interviews

Java, AWS, CloudSearch, DynamoDB, S3, REST, API Design, Scrum, Spring, Large Scale Distributed Systems

Carnegie Mellon University · Research Assistant
Jan 2010 - Aug 2011

  • Assessed the impact of various methods of instruction on ESL students through a web based intelligent tutoring system
  • Conducted research in the fields of natural language processing, information retrieval, social media analysis and machine learning
  • Authored 8 papers published in venues such as ACM SIGIR, Interspeech SLATE, ACL‐HLT, AIED, SIGML MLSLP, FLAIRS

Java, Python, PHP, MySQL, Weka, NLTK, Mechanical Turk, Hadoop, User Centered Design, NLP, Machine Learning

Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command · Naval Research Enterprise Intern
May 2009 - Aug 2009

  • Designed experiments and developed text classifiers for use on military chat posts. Results published in ICMLA

Python, NumPy, NLTK, NLP, Scientific Research, Experiment Design, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval

University of Texas at Arlington · Research Assistant, Teaching Assistant
Oct 2007 - May 2009


Personal Projects
SparkCore RC

Simple open source Particle Core (formerly Spark) enabled RC car that can be controlled via the web

Spark, HTML, JQuery, REST, Internet of Things: https://github.com/kevd1337/SparkCoreRC

TwitPulse

Web app created at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon that summarizes conversations and tracks the evolution of sentiment over time around topics like sports or politics

Java, Node.js, Highcharts, Mallet, Twitter, NLP: https://youtu.be/JkCtSET5LW8

CTRL+FREAK

Prototype developed during the Music Hackday Boston 2011 which allows viewers to control a music video stream by voting via SMS. Featured in Wired

Python, Django, MySQL, EchoNest, Twilio: http://www.ctrlfreak.tv/

Miscellaneous Activities

WinnerAmazon.com Internal IR2 hackathon 2015 (Best platform feature), StartupBus 2014 (Semifinalist), Lincoln Labs Seattle Open Government Hackathon 2013 (3rd place), SXSW Accelerator 2013 (Official Selection), Music Hackday NYC 2011 (Best use of API)

Scientific Committee Member: International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation 2014

Invited  Talks: Adding intelligence to your JS application (CascadiaJS 2015):  https://youtu.be/CcSo_9Gwb9I

Kevin Dela Rosa
Select Publications
Topical clustering of tweets - Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval's 3rd Workshop on Social Web Search and Mining
2011

Kevin Dela Rosa, Rushin Shah, Bo Lin, Anatole Gershman, Robert Frederking

Text classification methodologies applied to micro-text in military chat - Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications
2009

Kevin Dela Rosa, Jeffrey Ellen

The Advection of Supergranules by the Sun's Axisymmetric Flows - The Astrophysical Journal, 725:1082-1090, 2010 December 10
2010

David Hathaway, Peter Williams, Kevin Dela Rosa, Manfred Cuntz

Self-assessment of motivation: explicit and implicit indicators in l2 vocabulary learning - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education
2011

Kevin Dela Rosa, Maxine Eskenazi

Impact of Word Sense Disambiguation on Ordering Dictionary Definitions in Vocabulary Learning Tutors - Proceedings of the 24th International FLAIRS Conference
2011

Kevin Dela Rosa, Maxine Eskenazi

Effect of word complexity on L2 vocabulary learning - Proceedings of the the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies's 6th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
2011

Kevin Dela Rosa, Maxine Eskenazi

Multimodal learning of words: A study on the use of speech synthesis to reinforce written text in L2 language learning - Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education
2010

Kevin Dela Rosa, Gabriel Parent, Maxine Eskenazi

Boosted ranking models: a unifying framework for ranking predictions - Knowledge and Information Systems 30 (3), 543-568
2012

Kevin Dela Rosa, Vangelis Metsis, Vassilis Athitsos

LADS: Rapid Development of a Learning-To-Rank Based Related Entity Finding System using Open Advancement - Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval's First International Workshop on Entity-Oriented Search
2011

Bo Lin, Kevin Dela Rosa, Rushin Shah and Nitin Agarwal

Improving Cross-Document Co-Reference with Semi-Supervised Information Extraction Models - Proceedings of the Symposium on Machine Learning in Speech and Language Processing
2011

Rushin Shah, Bo Lin, Kevin Dela Rosa, Anatole Gershman, Robert Frederking

Self-Assessment in the REAP Tutor: Knowledge, Interest, Motivation, & Learning. - The International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 21 (4), 237-253
2013

Kevin Dela Rosa, Maxine Eskenazi