Bob Arens, Ph.D Email & Phone Number

United States

Leading technical efforts for transitioning from tools using traditional NLP methods to LLMs, prioritizing quality, correctness, and ethical, responsible use.

Richfield, Mn

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Technical lead for Services Data Science at Best Buy* Directly leads a team of four data scientists, coordinates their activities on diverse projects across company verticals* Partners with stakeholders throughout the business to consult and educate on data science opportunities and best practicesHelps develop policy for Best Buy Services Data ScienceAnalyzed customer chat activity through multiple service channels to better understand their immediate needs, and to support the development of an automated chatbot. NLP analysis included topic modeling, clustering on sentence embeddings, sentiment analysis, and named entity extraction. The chatbot is on track to drive $2-3M in cost reductions for services.Directed analysis of product failure in major appliance manufacturers, successfully proving anecdotal reports of significantly higher failure in one manufacturer’s product line. These results are expected to drive $5-10M in concessions.

Eagan, Mn

* Conducted machine learning research and development on internal projects for legal question answering, legal document analysis and synthesis* Lead research team for proof-of-concept analytics project to predict outcomes and likelihoods for breast cancer malpractice litigation* Adviser to multiple internal teams on machine learning practice, with a focus on kickstarting and managing ML projects* Authored numerous articles for internal and external consumption on machine learning technologies

Boston

* Worked with CTO to set company-wide data science strategy* Sole responsibility for training machine learning models for web page categorization (NaiveBayes, SVM, k-means clustering)* Directed data annotation effort, including creation of web-based annotation tool* Sole responsibility for creation of multi-lingual TF-IDF models for web page categorization* Sole responsibility for evaluation of legacy machine learning system

* Designed, implemented programs to support large-scale data annotation and warehousing* Supported data analysis and delivery for model learning* Created, maintained, sole responsibility for database tracking annotation progress for 20+ annotators, dozens of fluctuating and evolving annotation tasks* Worked with IBM joint development team to write components for Watson learning engine (SIRE)* Designed, implemented, maintained programs providing data interoperability between multiple annotation platforms.* Co-responsibility for implementation of active learning system to increase annotation efficiency.

Greater New York City Area

* Sole responsibility for warehousing, analyzing, filtering human genome sequencing data* Designed, implemented filtering algorithms for data analysis* Designed, implemented analysis software to identify copy-number variations leading to disease in patient genomes

Ph.D, Computer Science

Master’S Degree, Computer Science

Bachelor’S Degree, Mathematics

Bachelor’S Degree, Linguistics

Bachelor’S Degree, Computer Science

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science