William Short
Founder & CEO at Autumn Innovation
Exeter, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Short is a founder, academic and engineer who blends 8+ years of technical experience with a deep research background in cognitive semantics and conceptual metaphor theory. As Founder & CEO of Autumn Innovation and Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, he directs large-scale international digital humanities projects that apply semantics-driven corpus search and NLU to real-world text analysis challenges. His PhD from UC Berkeley underpins a publication record and a research-led approach to product development, bridging embodied cognitive science with practical tooling. He contributes to open-source back-end work—improving automatic schema generation in the popular piccolo-orm—to ensure robust, test-covered database representations for async applications. Known for turning theoretical insights into scalable software, he combines scholarly rigor with hands-on engineering and startup leadership. Based in Exeter, he’s equally at home publishing papers or shipping production-grade code that operationalizes conceptual semantics.
8 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at University of California, BerkeleyBachelor of Arts - BA, Bachelor of Arts - BA at University of Michigan
Latin, Greek, Italian
Github Skills (12)
schema-org10
schema-design10
postgresql10
orm10
query-builder10
schema10
python10
database-design9
testing8
sql8
asyncio7
fastapi6
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
piccolo-orm/piccolo
Sep 2021 - Oct 2021
A fast, user friendly ORM and query builder which supports asyncio.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 6 commits, 6 PRs in 27 days
Contributions summary:William focused on enhancing the automatic schema generation feature within the piccolo-orm library. Their contributions include implementing default value parsing for various data types, reflecting index information, and correctly handling self-referencing foreign keys. The user also updated example tables and tests to support these new schema generation features, ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the generated database schema. These changes involved modifications to the core schema generation logic and tests, as well as adjustments to example applications.
pythonstarletteasyncormsqlite
sanskritwordnet/sanskritwordnet-archive
Apr 2020 - Jun 2021
Contributions:7722 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 1 month
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