Chris Quirk
Partner Researcher at Microsoft
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChris Quirk is a Partner Researcher at Microsoft with 13+ years driving applied NLP and ML across products like Outlook, Teams, Word, and the Microsoft Search and Assistant stack. He specializes in dense content representations, graph learning for recommendations, and bridging publishable research with production systems. His background includes over a decade on machine translation, predictive text, semantic parsing, and applying NLP to biology, reflecting deep domain breadth. Chris also contributes to high-performance ML tooling—having improved Vowpal Wabbit’s core performance and cross-platform compatibility—highlighting pragmatic systems skills alongside research. Based in Seattle, he combines academic rigor (published work) with hands-on engineering to move novel language models from prototype to customer-facing products.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, Mathematics, BS, Computer Science, Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University
German
Stackoverflow
3reputation
57reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (10)
windows10
c-language10
threaded10
cpp10
cprogramming-language10
thread10
hyper-threading10
multithreading10
elearning9
machine-learning9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
VowpalWabbit/vowpal_wabbit
Jul 2012 - Sep 2012
Vowpal Wabbit is a machine learning system which pushes the frontier of machine learning with techniques such as online, hashing, allreduce, reductions, learning2search, active, and interactive learning.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:25 commits in 2 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on improving the Vowpal Wabbit's core functionality and performance. Their contributions include removing unnecessary memory allocations, making the codebase compile cleanly in both debug and release modes, and initial porting of the threading calls to Windows. The user also made updates to fix issues related to line endings on Windows, and refactored the code to lessen reduplication.
hashingtechniquescpppythonactive-learning
chrisquirk/chrisquirk.github.io
Aug 2015 - Dec 2022
Contributions:5 pushes, 1 branch in 7 years 4 months
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