Sebastian Ruder
Research Scientist at Meta
Berlin, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSebastian Ruder is a research scientist with 12+ years of experience at the intersection of NLP, machine learning, and deep learning, currently at Meta after leading multilingual research at Cohere and a multi-year stint at DeepMind. He specializes in cross-lingual, aspect- and entity-based sentiment analysis, creating algorithms and data-generation strategies to adapt sentiment systems across languages and domains. Sebastian bridges deep research with practical product impact—e.g., building AYLIEN’s aspect-based sentiment endpoint and improving large-scale multilingual LLM capabilities. He is an active open-source contributor, with work on influential projects such as the XTREME cross-lingual benchmark and contributions to seq2seq tooling and the OpenCog AGI framework. Based in Berlin, he combines a PhD in NLP with hands-on engineering across preprocessing, metrics, and rule-based reasoning. Notably, his background spans both probabilistic logic work in AGI contexts and production-focused sentiment systems, reflecting a rare mix of theoretical and applied expertise.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Natural language processing, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Natural language processing at University of GalwayBachelor's degree Computer Science and Language, Bachelor's degree Computer Science and Language at Trinity College DublinBachelor's degree Computational Linguistics English Linguistics, Bachelor's degree Computational Linguistics English Linguistics at Heidelberg UniversityAbitur, Abitur at Clara-Schumann-Gymnasium Lahr
German, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (19)
transformers10
python10
classification10
nltk10
machine-learning10
natural-language-understanding10
text-classification10
seq2seq10
classify10
tensorflow10
natural-language-processing10
transformer10
nlp10
evaluation9
pytorch9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
google-research/xtreme
Mar 2020 - Oct 2022
XTREME is a benchmark for the evaluation of the cross-lingual generalization ability of pre-trained multilingual models that covers 40 typologically diverse languages and includes nine tasks.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:1 review, 26 commits, 10 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Sebastian primarily focused on updating scripts and pre-processing steps related to the XTREME benchmark. They modified Python scripts, particularly those related to token classification tasks. The changes included adapting code for different model types, incorporating few-shot learning capabilities, and evaluating model performance, indicating a focus on improving the benchmark's functionality and evaluation metrics.
nlpdiverseninemultilingual-modelsbert
opencog/opencog
Mar 2014 - Aug 2014
A framework for integrated Artificial Intelligence & Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:224 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Sebastian primarily contributed to the development of rules and agents within the opencog/opencog repository. They added and modified rules, specifically focusing on creating, implementing, and refining rules related to the context and temporal reasoning components. These rules appear to be core to the project's goals of integrated artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence. They also added a new example to illustrate the use case of the be-inheritance-rule
unsupervised-learning-algorithmsroboticsnatural-language-understandingartificial-general-intelligenceintegrated
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.