Expertise and Capsule Summary

I'm a Lyon, France-based data science consultant with 20+ years industry and research experience in data analysis and data science, customer research, and interaction design. Current specialties:

  • Data mining and analysis: Data scraping, processing and cleaning; databases and BI tools; clustering/modeling, charts and interactive visuals, interesting stories.
  • Textual data (NLP): Got lots of text? I can help you scrape it, parse it, mine it, summarize it, navigate it, view it. I use AI tools (HuggingFace models, SpaCy, etc) for analysis and model building.
  • Creative AI: I'm interested in uses of AI for human-in-the-loop creative support tools. Doing this right requires a strong mix of UX design chops and algorithmic knowledge. I have given invited talks about this topic and done consulting work on generative text and building knowledge bases for games.
  • Customer research data analysis: Create customer segments or personas from data, textual analysis of customer comments/feedback/posts, survey response analysis, log mining...

I have a Ph.D. from Stanford University and an M.Phil. from Cambridge University (more here). I worked in research for several years and published 2 books about internet community (more here). Here's a PDF long version of my resume. For more information and work samples, send me email!

Sample of Previous Experience

  • Google Arts & Culture Creative Lab: I have been a part-time machine learning Artist in Residence for 2 years. I built a cute narrative game and did work with Smithsonian open source data to identify women in metadata records.
  • HiddenDoor: For an AI-based games startup, I worked for 8 months on the knowledge base and tooling associated. NLP and Python work.
  • SpiritAI: For a London-startup, I worked remotely from France as lead NLP data scientist for a year on toxic speech detection using SpaCy models, keywords, and neural net models. There was a lot of Spark involved, which I set up.
  • EM-Lyon Business School (Lyon, France): As an Associate Professor in Marketing, I created and taught introductory data science classes to non-programmers, including a Python Bootcamp, Pandas/NLP, Intro to Excel, SQL and Tableau for Analytics, Intro to AI, Python Web Database Programming with Flask. I was also a founding creator of the former Data Institute at EM-Lyon.
  • University of Miami: I was a visiting Knight Chair teaching for the academic year of 2015-16. I taught interactive data vis. My now out-of-date d3.js course files are here.
  • Kensho: At Cambridge financial startup Kensho, I consulted for a year as a data vis engineer and then NLP engineer.
  • Brandeis University: I was a part-time statistical programming consultant, doing primarily Python and R programming. Example projects include creating graphs on demand for a website front-end; creating a visual D3.js interface for researchers to review outliers detected in a database; running Bayesian models in R, developing a map visualization of org addresses.
  • SolidWorks (Concord, MA): In a 3-year consulting role for marketing and development, I performed quantitative and qualitative customer research, did data analysis on survey responses, stability and installation customer issues, and did cluster analyses to develop quantitative customer personas. I also led the investigation of software reliability reports and designed several tools for visualization of these reports.
  • Autodesk (Waltham, MA): I was the manager of a small interaction design team. I instituted many of our design and usability processes and personally performed quantitative and qualitative data analysis to inform design: analysing product usage patterns, doing survey creation and data analysis, and establishing product performance measurements based on perception data.
  • The Mathworks (Natick, MA): I worked on bioinformatics, data/infovis, and simulation products (usability, user research, design). I'm a co-author on a patent from work here on a multi-dimensional data explorer.
  • Adobe Systems (Seattle and San Jose): Specifically I worked on UI for cross-suite color management and PDF features, among other issues. My designs shipped in CS2, and I share a patent from this work.
  • Axance.com (Paris, France): Axance is a usability consulting company in France. As Director of Methodology, I helped expand the company consulting business into design work as well as more usability evaluation methods.
  • TiVo (Alviso, CA): Hired as a user interface designer for the second UI release and first DirecTivo, I ended up manager of UI and usability for a brief time. Two years later, I was back as a consultant for a few months.
  • Excite (later Excite@Home) (Redwood City, CA): One of the first UI designers there, I worked on complex web applications (mail, planner, invites) and consulted internally on chat and community products. My products were very well received by our users and the Planner received and industry analyst award.
  • AT&T Labs (Morristown, NJ): I worked on online community, games, and chat interfaces for 3 years before leaving research to build shipping commercial products!

Excerpts from Client/Colleague/Student Recommendations

"I just wanted to thank you for all the things you have taught us and all the time you took ! I was a real novice in that field and you managed to sharpen my curiosity and develop a genuine interest for datas and data visualisation. You have totally completed your teacher missions and even more as it has been a long time that I did not have such a good and truly invested teacher!!!" (Former student)

"I've learnt an insane amount from you, both about data science and getting stuff done when everything's on fire. I've learnt that even experts have to wrestle with obscure stack overflow threads, and that wading through data at the message-by-message level is an invaluable part of the process of data discovery." (Junior Data Science Colleague)

"I hired Lynn to work on a project to enhance a web based data analysis program. She soon identified issues in the existing approach, simplified the problem and designed a solution that was easier to use and faster to execute. She developed clean, concise and modern presentations for the results. She did this quickly and efficiently. She is a real professional, friendly, and easy to work with. I truly enjoyed working with her and highly recommend her for any project." (Senior Web Programmer, Brandeis University)

"Lynn is brilliant. She is thoughtful and decisive. Her experienced input guided us around potential roadblocks on many occasions. Without hesitation, I would recommend her services to any organization that wants to win with customer-centric design." (Social Marketing Manager, SolidWorks)

"In a 3 day project, Lynn was able to absorb the objectives and target audience of our service, earn the trust of the engineers, designers, and product mangers, and recommend important design corrections. Several months later those mid course user experience and design corrections are still spot on, and still being followed." (Steve Brand)

"Lynn is highly professional, knowledgeable and experienced in her domain, very well-organized, a hard-worker who aims at only top quality deliverables." (Product Manager, Autodesk)

See more and full profile on LinkedIn.

Old Research on Online Community

In grad school and at AT&T Labs (formerly Bell Labs), I studied internet communities and chat systems and looked a bit at computer games. Here's a sample:

ww coverWired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, Seal Press, 1996. Co-edited with Elizabeth Reba Weise.

cc coverConversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World, CSLI/U of Chicago, 1999. A revised version of my dissertation from Stanford University, one of the first in-depth social and socio-linguistic studies of an online chat community with customizable environment (like many online games now). Includes ethics discussion and overview of socio- and anthro- definitions of the concept of "community."

After a long time and many broken links, I've resurrected and uploaded my old MUD and research papers: Lynn's Papers.

Educational Background

I've got a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics; an M.Phil. from Cambridge University in Computer Speech and Language Processing; and a B.A. from University of Maryland in Linguistics.

I studied a lot of speech recognition, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing while I was in school. I worked at SRI in California during grad school and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (the speech group) in Maryland.