About Me

I'm a Professor and hold the David R. Cheriton Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Previously, I was at the University of Maryland. I completed my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2004.

My research aims to build tools that help users make sense of large amounts of data. I work at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, and data management.

I'm passionate about translating research into real-world impact. Presently, I serve as the Chief Scientist of Primal, a Waterloo-based company focused on building enterprise-grade AI solutions that exploit the best of what neural networks and knowledge graphs have to offer. Previously, I was the Chief Scientist of RSVP, a Waterloo-based startup that builds deep natural language understanding technologies to facilitate seamless dialogues between users and systems.

From 2010-2012, I spent an extended sabbatical at Twitter working on services designed to identify relevant content to users (search, recommendation, etc.) and analytics infrastructure to support data science (Hadoop tools, machine learning libraries, etc.). Follow me on Twitter here! I've also worked for Cloudera: In 2009, I was responsible for helping them build out a training and certification program; in fact, I wrote their very first certification exam!

Interesting tidbit: Friedrich Leibniz was my (grand-14)advisor.

Jimmy Lin headshot

Contact Information

Jimmy Lin
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1
Canada

keywords: Jimmy Lin, information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), big data, MapReduce, Hadoop, large-scale distributed systems, data-intensive text processing, question answering