Rob Ennals Email & Phone Number

Mountain View, Ca, Us

New York, Ny, Us

I designed, implemented, and user-tested eight different online social platforms, with the aim of building something that encouraged good social behavior. Read more about what I built here: https://messyprogress.substack.com/p/eight-pro-social-platforms-that-didntFrom March 2020 - Feb 2022 I was mostly a full time parent, since we pulled our kids out of school during Covid.

Led a team responsible for understanding the origins of fake news and outrage and Facebook. Identified previously unknown factors affecting the spread of bad content, and drove implementation of changes that significantly reduced spread.Improved the ranking of comments on public posts to reduce the prominence of uncivil comments.Helped define Facebook's rater guidelines for bad content and designed a core metric for misinformation.I joined Facebook in the aftermath of the 2016 election, having been recruited due to my work on Dispute Finder at Intel Research. I left Facebook because I felt that Facebook's integrity issues couldn't be fully fixed without significant changes to the way the product worked, and I wanted to show that it was possible to design a product that encouraged better behavior.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

Drove a major company-level strategy change, shifting focus towards trustworthy high-status answers that create long term value, replacing the previous focus on short-term engagement metrics.Assisted with the launch and development of Sessions, Knowledge Prizes, Credentials, and (early work on) Spaces, as part of the new strategy.Reworked the company-level planning process to empower teams to execute with greater autonomy - which had become necessary as the company grew..I joined Quora because I was excited about the potential for Quora to be the place where people with different points of view could find common ground. This seemed to be something that was sorely needed, give the apparent tendency of social media to increase polarization.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

I was Product Manager for various parts of Google Search, including* Featured Snippets - using quotes from third party web pages to answer questions (responsible for the majority of Google's direct answers)* Credibility - click to see information about how credible a site is* Authorship - understand who wrote a page, and how trustworthy they areI also assisted with Google PageSpeed and early versions of AMP.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

I was an engineer in search, where I worked on various projects including Authorship (as founding engineer) and various experimental projects.

Wakefield, Ma, Us

Served as Intel's representative to the HTML5 and WebApps working groups.

Santa Clara, California, Us

My job was to help Intel understand the future, prototype technologies that could drive demand for Intel processors, help Intel build relationships with universities, assist Intel Capital, and generate good PR by building prototypes of awesome stuff.I was Intel's representative at the W3C, in the HTML and WebApps Working Groups - the committees that draft the standards for how the web works.I created and led the "Dispute Finder" project which examined online misinformation and prototyped ways that technology could be used to manage it - one of the first projects in what was to become a hot space. This work got a lot of media attention, including New Scientist, NPR, BBC TV, NYTimes, The Guardian, and various other publications.I created and led the "Mash Maker" project, which explored ways of enhancing a web browser so that it understood the information on the page a user was reading and could automatically show widgets that enhanced the page in useful ways. This work also got a load of media attention, including Slashdot, TechCrunch, MIT Tech News, The Guardian, and others. From 2004 to 2007 I worked primarily on programming languages. Notable work included developing what was then the fastest implementation of Software Transactional Memory, and helping develop tools that allowed one to give C code safety guarantees.My work in Dispute Finder eventually led me to join Google.

EXE magazine was a UK print magazine for software engineers (back when that was a thing). They were later acquired by Dr Dobbs (back when that was a thing) I wrote a six feature/opinion articles, two of which were cover stories.

Us

This was "old SCO", who built the Unixware operating system, not "new SCO" who bought their IP sued people.I worked for SCO for two summers while I was an undergrad at Cambridge. I built a kernel profiler and parellel performance debugger, ported parts of IBM AIX to UnixWare and fixed some bugs.

Phd, Computer Science

Ba, Computer Science