Pablo Mendes
Sr. Director AI ML at Upwork
United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPablo Mendes is a senior AI/ML leader and entrepreneur with 15+ years building production knowledge systems, currently Sr. Director of AI/ML at Upwork after Upwork acquired his startup Objective, Inc. He previously led large teams at Apple developing multilingual, billion-user question-answering systems and shipped innovations in MLOps and entity recognition (e.g., work related to Overton). His research-to-product track record spans IBM Watson, Lattice Data (acquired by Apple), and academic projects that produced tools like DBpedia Spotlight and a topical-concepts extractor for large-scale knowledge extraction. Comfortable moving between founding roles and senior engineering management, he combines deep NLP and knowledge-graph expertise with pragmatic system design to drive scalable, multilingual ML products. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and has a history of impactful open-source contributions to core information-extraction tooling, reflecting both research rigor and production focus.
15 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
University of GeorgiaDoctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science and Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State UniversityMaster Computer Science, Master Computer Science at Universidade Federal do Rio de JaneiroBachelor Computer Science, Bachelor Computer Science at Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora
Portuguese, English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (11)
lucene10
javas10
templater10
template-engine10
back-end-development10
java10
text-processing10
scala10
api-design9
configuration-management9
query-optimization9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
dbpedia-spotlight/dbpedia-spotlight
Feb 2011 - Sep 2013
DBpedia Spotlight is a tool for automatically annotating mentions of DBpedia resources in text.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:362 commits, 5 comments in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Pablo added functionality to the core of the DBpedia Spotlight tool, focusing on enhancements to the candidate selection process. The commits added `CandidateResourceQuery` to extend `TermQuery`, wired it into `CachedSimilarities`, and refactored the server to use only one disambiguator instance. This indicates involvement in core functionality and likely integration of new features or bug fixes for improved performance and accuracy.
dbpediadbpedia-spotlightspotlight
dbpedia/extraction-framework
Mar 2012 - May 2012
The software used to extract structured data from Wikipedia
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:34 commits, 2 issues in 1 month
Contributions summary:Pablo contributed to the extraction framework by adding a `TopicalConceptsExtractor`. This extractor leverages "Cat main" and "Commons cat" templates within categories to identify and extract DBpedia resources considered topics. The user also updated the `GenderExtractorConfig` by including reflexive pronouns, enhancing the system's ability to extract gender-related information. Furthermore, the user modified configuration files to support "cat main" templates in multiple languages by introducing new templates.
pythonstructured-datastructuredwikipedia
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