cwt at mit dot edu
Hi, I’m Chris Tanner.
I research and teach Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning.
I serve as the Head of R&D at Kensho, a 120-person ML/NLP company headquartered in Harvard Square. Kensho is owned by S&P Global and independently operates as S&P's tech "innovation hub." I created the research lab in 2022, and we continue to grow. Additionally, I hold a joint faculty appointment at MIT, where I teach NLP in the Fall and Machine Learning in the Spring.
Currently, my Kensho lab's research mostly concerns LLMs and includes tokenization, long-document QA, building challenging evaluation tasks, and alignment. If you are interested in working together at Kensho, please see our current openings. Research Scientist roles are for my lab; all other positions report to other teams.
Before joining Kensho and MIT in 2022, I spent three wonderful years teaching full-time at Harvard’s Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS), which centers around two Master’s programs: Data Science; and Computational Science and Engineering. Brief application advice. At MIT, I am not accepting PhD students, and I tend to only advise 1 Master's Thesis from Harvard or MIT each year.
I received my PhD in Computer Science (NLP) at Brown University and was fortunate to be Eugene Charniak’s final student. My "grand-adviser" is Marvin Minksy (me --> Eugene --> Marvin). Before then, I worked at MIT Lincoln Lab as an Associate Staff NLP researcher from 2009-2012. I'm from a suburb of Atlanta, GA.
Current hobbies include woodworking, designing and sewing hiking gear, hi-fi audio, skiing, and going on challenging hikes. My fiancée and I enjoy the outdoors together (e.g., trail running races in different countries). She's set a bunch of world records for speed-hiking trails in the shortest amount of time (mostly self-supported, but some supported hiking records, too), including the Appalachian Trail, Swiss Via Alpina, The Vermont Long Trail, etc.