Hi friends! My name is Lj Miranda, and welcome to my website!

I build things.

I started this site to tell the story of my tech journey. I believe in technology that is open, enabling, and life-giving. I aspire to usher that potential—even for just a tiny bit. But, there is still a long way to go, and this site records my progress.

Here, you’ll find some of my thoughts, works, and notes on software development, machine learning, and research. I hope you’ll spend a nice time here, so go grab yourself a coffee and feel free to look around!

Other links: [Game Dev] [Game Boy Camera Photos]

Background

I’m a Predoctoral Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) as part of the AllenNLP team. Previously, I’ve worked at the following places:

  • Explosion (Berlin): a natural language processing startup where I worked on the open-source spaCy library and the Prodigy annotation tool. I co-authored our first technical report and developed several features and projects for our software libraries.

  • Thinking Machines Data Science (Manila): a data science consultancy where I built multiple natural language processing products for large enterprises. I worked with several of our biggest clients in Southeast Asia and led teams in the Document AI space.

  • Preferred Networks (Tokyo): as an intern, I implemented a training parallelization framework for ChainerRL, an open-source reinforcement learning library.

I obtained my master’s degree from Waseda University and my bachelor’s in Electronics Engineering, minor in Philosophy from Ateneo de Manila University. I used to be a bioinformatics researcher but moved on to language— text, like proteins, are sequences after all. My research interests include low-resource and multilingual NLP, efficient NLP, and corpus linguistics.

Lastly, I’m well-involved in open-source and have authored several projects of my own. Pyswarms has been quite successful; I’ve seen it being used in quantum physics, chemistry, and teaching, amongst other things. I love indie games and dabble in game development using Pico-8 and Godot.

Short background
Lj Miranda specializes in natural language processing with over five years of experience in consulting, open-source development, and research. He helped maintain notable open-source libraries such as spaCy and Pyswarms. He dabbles in game development during his free time.

Contact

Lester James V. Miranda
Seattle, Washington, USA
Email: ljvmiranda [at] gmail [dot] com
Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

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