Chris Tanner - Head Of R&D at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Chris Tanner

Head Of R&D at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

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Summary

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Senior

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Top School

Chris Tanner is Head of R&D and an NLP/ML researcher with over a decade of experience building production and research systems across academia, industry, and government. He leads ML research at Kensho—focused on tokenization, long-context and multi-document QA, document inconsistency detection, benchmarks, and LLM development—while lecturing at MIT and formerly Harvard, bridging cutting-edge research with large-scale teaching. His work since 2006 spans language modeling, QA (Kensho, IBM Watson), entity linking and coreference (Harvard, Brown), IR and query generation (JHU), and diverse ML applications from face recognition to anomaly detection at MITLL and government labs. Chris combines hands-on model development and dataset curation with product-facing R&D, and contributes practical teaching materials and data science notebooks (e.g., updates to Harvard’s CS109A lecture content). He holds a PhD in Computer Science and maintains an active presence mentoring students and shipping research that transitions into real-world systems.

11 years of coding experience

6 years of employment as a software developer

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at Brown University

B.S. Computer Science Mathematics, B.S. Computer Science Mathematics at Florida Institute of Technology

University of California, Los Angeles

Github Skills (10)

data-visualizations10

pandas10

jupyter-notebook10

data-visualization10

data-visualisation10

data-analysis10

python9

beautifulsoup6

scikit4

scikit-learn4

Programming languages (3)

HTMLJupyter NotebookPython

Github contributions (5)

Harvard-IACS/2019-CS109A

Sep 2019 - Dec 2019

https://harvard-iacs.github.io/2019-CS109A/

Role in this project:

Data Scientist

Contributions:26 commits, 22 pushes in 2 months

Contributions summary:Chris's commits center around updating a lecture notebook, specifically lecture 3 on Pandas and Beautiful Soup, with solutions and new code. The code changes focus on the addition of exercises, solutions and data analysis examples demonstrating loading, cleaning, grouping, and plotting data using Pandas, indicating hands-on application of data science techniques. The commits suggest the user is actively involved in preparing and refining teaching materials that showcase data science practices.

harvard

chriswtanner/AC295_NLP

Jul 2021 - Jul 2021

Contributions:229 pushes, 1 branch in 5 days

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