I'm Scott Preece. I'm a software engineer. I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
I spent twenty years at Motorola, working on Unix system development and, later, cellular phone software, especially for Linux-based phones and ten years at Yahoo! working on MapReduce processes for Machine Learning, Classification, and grid data management at Yahoo!.
Before that I did information retrieval research at the University of Illinois. About thirty years ago I came up with the idea of using a Spreading-Activation model to do information retrieval; I didn't invent either spreading activation or information retrieval - just the idea of using a network representation of text documents combined with a spreading activation process for searching, clustering, and indexing documents. This was an idea good enough to earn my PhD and continues to turn up in published papers.
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