User:MaxEnt

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I've never personally seen the need for a human helping hand improving my search results. There's a lot to be said for the leverage obtained by improving algorithms, rather than results. On the flip side, it takes a special brand of insight to tune an algorithm without degenerating into whack-a-mole, so perhaps broad and shallow also has its merits.

[edit] 27 April 2006

MaxEnt is a reference to maximum entropy. My primary interests lie in the area of statistical natural language processing (NLP), which included some work with Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean long ago. I'm presently working on technology targetted at the IBM Cell microprocessor.

[edit] 17 June 2006

I've been involved here a couple of months now. Lately I've explored system templates, custom templates, the search system (advanced features, good and bad aspects), the use of categories, most of the policy guides, and a few corners of the admin culture (RfA process and behaviour patterns of banned accounts). That was a lot to absorb and not all of it has sunk in yet, but more or less I'm now at the point where I should be held fully accountable for any blunders I might commit. One small thing: I'm normally good about adding edit summaries, but because I work so much within my personal wiki where those are not required, my fingers sometimes get ahead of my brain and I miss adding the comment.

A few more details about myself:

  • some reading ability in French, sadly my Asian language skills have vanished
  • highly proficient in C/C++ and template-metaprogramming
  • run my own MediaWiki to track my personal research projects
  • have mostly worked in startup companies as a technical lead
  • enjoy technical writing, which is my present livelihood
  • can program as needed in Perl, PHP, Ruby and all the food groups in XML soup

If time permits, I'll likely become active on Meta rather than escalate my involvement here. I enjoy tidying up loose ends when I stumble across them, but vandal patrol is not my cup of tea. Wouldn't surprise me at all if I end up running my own bot based on my programming skills and background in NLP and corpus linguistics.

[edit] user account customizations

So I don't forget where these changes went:

monobook.js
activate popups