Matt Gardner

Timeline

1. 2010–2012

   Particle swarm optimization papers

   They coauthor papers on particle swarm optimization with Andrew W. McNabb and Kevin D. Seppi, including "Speculative Evaluation in Particle Swarm Optimization" at PPSN 2010 and "A speculative approach to parallelization in particle swarm optimization" in Swarm Intelligence in 2012.

2. 2013–2015

   Knowledge base completion at CMU

   As a PhD student with Tom Mitchell at Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute, they coauthor an EMNLP 2013 paper on learning and inference in a large knowledge base using latent syntactic cues. Their thesis explores the connection between graph-based and embedding-based methods for knowledge base completion, and in 2015 they and Mitchell publish "Efficient and Expressive Knowledge Base Completion Using Subgraph Feature Extraction" at EMNLP.

3. 2018

   A Best Paper Award at NAACL

   They coauthor "Deep contextualized word representations" with Matthew E. Peters, Luke S. Zettlemoyer and others, which receives the Best Paper Award at NAACL 2018. The paper introduces word vectors learned from the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model and improves the state of the art on six NLP problems.

4. 2018

   The AllenNLP toolkit

   At the Allen Institute for AI, where they are a senior research scientist on the AllenNLP team, they are first author of "AllenNLP: A Deep Semantic Natural Language Processing Platform", published in July 2018 at the Workshop for NLP Open Source Software. They are the original author of the toolkit, a library for applying deep learning methods to NLP research with command-line tools, declarative configuration-driven experiments and modular NLP abstractions.

5. 2019

   DROP and a UC Irvine visit

   In 2019, they work as a visiting scholar at UC Irvine, collaborating with Sameer Singh's NLP group. With Singh, Dheeru Dua and others, they coauthor DROP, a 55,000-question reading comprehension benchmark that calls for discrete operations such as addition, counting and sorting, published at NAACL 2019.

6. November 2019

   Co-hosting NLP Highlights

   In November 2019, they co-host NLP Highlights, a podcast from Ai2 researchers where guests discuss their work in natural language processing, with Pradeep Dasigi and Waleed Ammar.

7. 2022

   AllenNLP enters maintenance mode

   The AllenNLP library they first authored goes into maintenance mode in 2022: Ai2 adds no new features and answers questions and fixes bugs until December 2022, as it turns to new initiatives.

8. As of October 2026

   Technical staff at Microsoft AI

   After Ai2, they work at Microsoft's Semantic Machines and then at Scaled Cognition as Director, Research. As of October 2026, they are a member of technical staff at Microsoft AI.