Alexander Thomas

Alexander Thomas is an American data scientist, author, speaker, and natural language processing expert. He currently serves as the principal data scientist at Wisecube and is the author of the book Natural Language Processing With Spark NLP.
During his career, Thomas has been known for applying natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to clinical data, identity data, and (now) employer and jobseeker data. He excels at working with Apache Spark since version 0.9 and NLP libraries and frameworks, including UIMA and OpenNLP.
==Education==
Thomas holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics from the University of Washington. Before beginning his professional data scientist career, Thomas worked as a tutor for children with disabilities at Edmonds Community College.
==Career==
After completing his bachelor’s, Thomas worked at Atigeo, a software development company, for three years. He began as a science intern and later rose to the position of software engineer and senior software engineer. During his tenure, Thomas gained experience in clinical data analysis, auto-coding, and NLP Corpus processing.
In October 2015, Thomas joined ID Analytics as an associate data scientist. He worked on projects such as building tools for cross-referencing the data to improve financial credit monitoring and fraud detection models, building Ozie workflow by incorporating data from MySQL, and setting up software for several data science organizations.
In 2016, Thomas joined Atigeo as a senior software engineer and was responsible for building annotators, local and Spark-based pipelines, and interfaces for building the NLP library. Later in the same year, Thomas shifted to Voicebox Technologies Corporation as a senior data science engineer. Thomas tutored employees across the organization during his tenure on Apache and Databricks basics. He also built ETL pipelines on Databricks to facilitate music data gathering and led teams in building tools to enhance the efficiency of speech-to-text models.
In April 2017, Thomas joined Indeed.com as a data scientist. During his two-year tenure, he is known to have worked on several notable aspects, including tutoring, providing lectures, and consultancy to employees across the organization about Apache Spark, Apache Pig, NLP, data sciences, and machine learning tools and tasks. He has also been associated with building the Bayesian Inference model, researched the effects of products on user behavior, mentored data scientists, working with product managers, and assisted a government project by analyzing six years of various job descriptions.
Since June 2019, Thomas has worked at Wisecube as the principal data scientist, building and implementing Knowledge graph frameworks like Graphster, Cheminformatics Modelling, mentoring other data scientists, and reviewing research papers.
In July, 2020, Thomas released his first book titled “Natural Language Processing with Spark NLP: Learning to Understand Text at scale.” The book is a practical guide for data scientists and software engineers on the technical aspects and know-how of building applications using natural language text, Apache Spark, and NLP library, and facilitates deep learning.
==Bibliography==
* Natural Language Processing with Spark NLP: Learning to Understand Text at scale (2020)
==References==
==External links==
* 
Category:Data scientists
Category:American authors
Category:American motivational speakers
Category:Natural language processing researchers
Category:University of Washington alumni