David Reitter
Senior Staff Research Scientist at The University of Edinburgh USA Development Trust
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Reitter is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind with 21 years of experience bridging cognitive science and large-scale generative AI, including key contributions to the Gemini LLM and grounding-based factuality evaluation. A former tenured professor and cognitive psychologist, he has authored 100+ papers and led $1.8M in funded research translating human language models into production-grade systems. He co-invented the "Attributable to Identified Sources" metric and led its deployment in Google's AI Overviews and Gemini factuality pipelines, reflecting a blend of rigorous evaluation and product impact. Comfortable both in academia and industry, he has shepherded graduate students into research careers and continues to serve on the University of Edinburgh USA board. An active open-source engineer, he improved build systems and cross-platform tooling for the widely used XCSoar glide computer and previously founded the popular Aquamacs Emacs distribution. Based in New York and an instrument-rated pilot, he combines technical depth with unusual real-world rigor and a global perspective from living in four countries.
20 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Informatics, PhD Informatics at The University of EdinburghMSc Computer Science, MSc Computer Science at University College DublinDipl.-Ling. Computational Linguistics, Dipl.-Ling. Computational Linguistics at University of Potsdam
German, English, French
Stackoverflow
31reputation
15kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (19)
c-language10
crossbuild10
configuration-management10
makefile10
gcc10
build-automation10
cross-compiling10
cprogramming-language10
c119
linux9
android9
c179
navigationbar8
navigation-drawer8
aviation8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
XCSoar/XCSoar
May 2011 - Apr 2012
... the open-source glide computer
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:15 commits in 10 months
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to build and configuration scripts for the XCSoar project, which is an open-source glide computer. Their work includes adding and modifying configure scripts for both Mac and Linux environments, along with setting up Android SDK/NDK paths. The user also modified the build system, updating Makefile, and handling toolchain configuration for improved build environments, as well as introducing more efficient builds for various OS environments. They also adjusted the build process for SDL libraries and integrated toolchains.
aviationlinuxc-plus-plusandroidwindows-mobile
dholm/tabbar
Jun 2005 - Mar 2017
Tabbar is an emacs minor mode that displays a tab bar at the top, similar to the idea of web browser’s tabs.
Contributions:434 commits in 11 years 10 months
tabsbrowsersimilardisplaystabbar
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