Eric Brill's Home Page
Eric Brill is the General Manager of AdCenter Labs (AdLabs) at Microsoft. I used to be Director and Principal Researcher and head of the Text Mining, Search and Navigation Group at Microsoft Research.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Home Pages are so last week, so this page is probably not at all up to date. Check out my blog and my other blog, and find me on facebook and linkedin.
My job is basically acting as an innovation facilitator. These three quotes really capture the secret to successful innovation:
"Whether you think you can or can't, you're right." -Henry Ford
"There's no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." -??
"Don't be afraid to dance badly." -- A fortune cookie fortune
About Me: I joined Microsoft in July, 1999. I was in the Natural Language Processing Group (1999-2000), then the Machine Learning and Applied Statistics Group (2000-2003), then I started the Text Mining, Search and Navigation (TMSN) Research Group, which I currently lead. Academically, I've done work in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, speech recognition and artificial intelligence.
Prior to joining Microsoft Research, I was a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University. Before going to Johns Hopkins, I was a Research Scientist in the Spoken Language Systems Group, in the Laboratory for Computer Science, at MIT. And prior to that, I was a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at U.Penn. I no longer remember what I was doing before that. I vaguely recall trying to teach sign language to ferrets, but I'm not positive.
I have worked for years to hone my creative portraiture skills. To learn more about creative portraiture and see samples of my work, click HERE.
Finally I get what blogs are all about. At first I thought, why in the world would anybody want to read my blog? But now I understand. Please read my blog. I also have a read-only wiki HERE.
Want to email me? Click HERE.
Don't want to email me? Click HERE.
You can still get my part of speech tagger HERE. Please carefully read the copyright and readme documents that are included in the distribution. Some other code (unsupervised learning for pos tagging, pp attachment program) is available from my old Johns Hopkins web page.
The Pacific Northwest Rocks:
I'm addicted to fly fishing. I have four times more fly rods than I have hands. Some of my favorite places to fish in Washington are the Skykomish River, the forks of the Snoqualmie River, Beckler River, Lake Lenore, Pass Lake, and in Idaho the Big Wood and Silver Creek.
In British-English, BRILL is slang for brilliant, cool. Tragically, this is not yet the case for American-English. In an effort to bring this usage to America, I am offering the following deal. I will pay $50.00 to any Hollywood producer who creates a movie where the word BRILL is used at least once to mean brilliant, cool.* Some examples: "Wow, that was so BRILL". "I used to think you were a loser but now I realize I was so wrong. You are BRILL. Amazingly BRILL. Perhaps the BRILLest person I have ever met". "BRILL".
*Conditions: The movie must gross at least $10 million. The actor who utters the expression CAN NOT be Richard Gere. The movie must not be a pornographic movie, nor a remake of the 1978 smash hit The Wiz.
Some Random Super Cool Stuff: