Who am I?
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Google in Mountain View, California. I graduated in 2015 from Washington University in St. Louis, where I did research in Machine Learning and studied Computer Science, Chemical Engineering, and Nanotechnology.
What do I do?
At Google, I work on internationalization (i18n) libraries, building infrastructure for the next billion users. I lead the ICU4X project, helping developers provide high-quality i18n in resource-constrained, client-side environments. I sit on TC39 and am chair of ECMA-402, the standards body tasked with improving support for i18n in JavaScript. I contribute to the open-source International Components for Unicode (ICU) project, the industry standard i18n library. Currently, I'm a collaborator on the Google Code Jam. I have been involved with competitive programming since attending my first ICPC at WashU; in Fall 2015, I taught WashU's class in competitive programming, CSE 232. I created and continue to maintain Octave Online, a tool that helps thousands of people from around the world use GNU Octave. I write about technology on my blog.
What have I done?
I have given talks at the Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC) (2017), the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) (2016), and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Annual Meeting (2015, 2016 poster). Previously at Google, I built and open-sourced Myanmar Tools, helping to solve character encoding issues in the Burmese language, and I contributed features to Kormo, Google's app for job seekers in emerging markets. For two summers (2014 and 2015), I was an intern at Microsoft in Bellevue, Washington where I worked on Cortana. My Master's thesis for WashU was entitled Applying Bayesian Machine Learning Methods to Theoretical Surface Science, based on work I did in the Computational Activated Materials Laboratory. My research advisors were Dr. Cynthia Lo and Dr. Roman Garnett. I also worked for a summer in the M&M Lab with Dr. Robert Pless. Also at WashU, I served as a teaching assistant, Student Union senator, and president of WashU ACM. I redesigned CSE 330: Rapid Prototype Development and served as student instructor in 2013. I played alto and soprano saxophone in the Slanderous Saxes quintet and the WashU Pops Orchestra. I helped organize the second WUHack hackathon (now known as ArchHacks) with UPE. Before WashU, I attended Whitfield School, where I developed the Aeneid online student magazine.
What else do I like?
I like to play strategy board games, such as Dominion, Macao, and many others. I have developed several of my own board games, and starting in 2017 I have been an organizer for Protospiel San Jose. I like to travel, and have been to 34 states and 12 countries. I enjoy photography as a hobby; whenever I go someplace new, I bring my Leica TL along for the journey. I like history and visiting museums. I play saxophone with the Google Saxophpone Quartet, the Google Orchestra, and the Stanford Saxophone Choir. I also can play the piano, The Chapman Stick, and Native American flute.
What is in your profile picture?
My avatar depicts a pair of 8-hole Peruvian ocarinas. These ceramic vessel flutes have bird-like tonal qualities with a range from approximately C5 to B♭5. You can purchase your own at Lark in the Morning.
Here is a recording of Scott Joplin's The Entertainer performed on one of the ocarinas depicted in my avatar:
More Information
Check out my profiles on GitHub, LinkedIn, Google Scholar, Stack Overflow, and Flickr. You can contact me at shane@sffc.xyz.