About Me
I'm Brian. I am writing to you on Apr 3, 2025.Hobbies
Nowadays,- I get a lot of reading in. You can find my reading list here. I try to get a 50-50 split of fiction and non-fiction books.
- I'm in a crew that does a weekly trivia night. We're good! We pretty reliably bring home the 25-bar-dollars prize.
- I like rock climbing, especially now that both my kids can join in. Can't wait for Movement to open their gym over on San Antonio here in Mountain View.
- And I'm very slowly spinning up some simple, ad-free, in-browser games my kids can play on the iPad, like this Lights Out game.
- I used to have a job, but I quit in late March 2025. Here's my resume.
- I've taken part in exactly one Fantasy Football season, and it went pretty good, for not really knowing what I was doing. The real fun was I wrote an ML routine to rank players for the draft. It worked! For the coming season, I'll support re-ranking midseason, or with respect to "who's this player playing against this week" kind of stuff.
- Skiing is a lot of fun, but it's hard driving up to Tahoe from Santa Clara county.
- I did some beginner-level glass blowing. To show for it, I have a pair of little cups and a large, wonky vase that do their jobs just fine. It's really fun, and I hope to pick it back up again. Maybe even make something someone else would want in their home!
- And I used to have a three-movies-a-week habit. Netflix was mailing me discs as recently as Oct 2020. Noir and crime worked especially well on me.
Find me on the internet:
- Email: bgawalt@gmail.com
- BlueSky, my main social media venue: @brian.gawalt.com
- Mastodon (on hiatus): @bgawalt@lebrady.net
- Github: https://github.com/bgawalt
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/bgawalt
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgawalt
Twitter(indefinite hiatus; I don't have the app and I'm no longer logged in anywhere): @bgawalt
Fun Stuff I've Made
- BlueSky Bots:
- #ReaderBot (you might have to be logged in for that link to work), which parrots a spreadsheet of my reading list to my personal account. [github]
- @theslides, which parrot's Sam Biddle's collection of cold war D.o.D. slide projector decks. [github]
- Twitter Bots: Read about how I made a bunch of bots for Twitter, including @each_wordsquare, @fakespearean, and @ellipsabelle.
- My Wordle: The online word game Wordle lets you share a little green-yellow-grey tile pattern that reflects how you did on today's puzzle. (You know the ones; they were all over Twitter; it's why the game was such a hit.) I generated the average color of each tile over a history of 160-odd puzzle results. It looks like this. (Apr. 2022)
- Wiggly Distributions and Nonparametrics: A blog post that exploring what happens if you apply a nonparametric estimator to data drawn from discontinuous distributions. (Jan. 2019)
- WAVProject: You can take a short snippet of audio, and repeatedly layer scaled-and-time-shifted copies of it. If you do this enough times, with the right scale factors applied at the right time-shifts, you can make the big pile of short snippets start to aurally resemble one much longer snippet. (You're projecting the long .wav file onto the basis defined by the short .wav file, is where the name comes from.) The effect this makes is pretty cool. You can hear a demo here, where the short snippet "BUILD" is used to recreate a longer snippet, "THE MACHINE." (Dec. 2016)
- Dice Roller: Gentle lil' JavaScript exercise to roll "four eight-sided dice" or "three six-sided dice", etc., from back when I played D&D. Mostly now use it to randomly pick albums to play from my Spotify library. (May 2015)
- UUID Baby Names: A goofy utility for turning the output of https://www.uuidgenerator.net/ into a human-pronounceable name. (May 2013)
- City Picker: Selects an American ZIP code at random, proportional to that ZIP's population, and gives you its city name. Inspired by the wide and diverse array of cities found in Josh Boruff's SkyMall reviews. (May 2012)
- Mandelbrot Oscillations: A one-minute video demonstrating the recursively-calculated magnitudes of the iterations of the Mandelbrot set's complex quadratic polynomial, as a function of different values of c. (Jun. 2011)
- BART Fares and the Triangle Inequality: Finding routes on BART where it's actually more expensive to take a single, direct train than to take the train part way, leave the system, re-enter, and finish the route on a second train. (Jun. 2011)
- Get Drunk But Neither Broke Nor Fat: Considering calorie count and costs of alcoholic beverages. (Sep. 2010)
- 69 Love Songs, Illustrated: “Roses”: My contribution to the joint effort to illustrate all the songs from the Magnetic Fields' triple album. You can check out the video version on Youtube. (June 2010)
- RISK STATS: An almanac of the probable outcomes of battles in the game Risk. (Feb. 2010)
- The New York Times Columnist Comparator: A list of a few distinguishing keywords from the regular columnists of the New York Times Op/Ed section. (Updated daily from Oct. 2008 to Aug. 2009.)
- The BoingBoing Filter: A list of a few distinguishing keywords from the major contributers to BoingBoing. (Updated daily from Oct. 2008 to Apr. 2009.)
Career & Education
(Again: here's my resume.)My last professional team was at Google, working on AI for troubleshooting your Cloud Platform infrastructure. You'd supply symptoms of what was wrong -- long latencies trying to reach Server X, or receiving Error Y when talking to Endpoint Z -- and the AI agent would smartly trigger just the right diagnostic tools, and read off their output, to help diagnose the problem. This was a component of Gemini Cloud Assist.
Previous Google teams: an analytical SWE helping optimize the various planet-scale storage systems, an ML SWE on Google Fi's cell network selection & quality, and another analytical SWE role working on the public web index.
Pre-Google, I was a data scientist at Upwork, working on matching and ranking for their online labor marketplace. Before that, I was a data scientist at Quantifind trying to mine social media comments in a way that could predict the health of a product's marketing campaign.
I got my Ph.D. at the U.C. Berkeley EECS department in 2012, working with Laurent El Ghaoui as part of the StatNews research group. Before that, I got my B.S. in electrical engineering in 2005 from the University of Virginia, where I concentrated on statistical signal processing with a computer science minor.
Publications and Conferences
- Brian Gawalt. Convex Approaches to Text Summarization. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Dec. 2012. [UCB EECS] [eScholar]
- Kurtis Heimerl, Kashif Ali, Joshua Blumenstock, Brian Gawalt, and Eric Brewer. Expanding Rural Cellular Networks with Virtual Coverage. Proc. USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'13), pp. 283-296. Lombard, IL, April 2013. [Portal.ACM]
- Kurtis Heimerl, Brian Gawalt, Kuang Chen, Tapan Parikh, and Bjoern Hartmann. CommunitySourcing: Engaging Local Crowds to Perform Expert Work via Physical Kiosks. Proc. SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). Austin, TX, May 2012. [website] [Portal.ACM]
- Luke Miratrix, Jinzhu Jia, Brian Gawalt, Bin Yu, Laurent El Ghaoui, Summarizing large-scale, multiple-document news data: sparse methods & human validation, UC Berkeley Dept. of Statistics Technical Report #801, May 2011. [abstract] [pdf]
- Saheli Datta, Brian Gawalt, Guan-Cheng Li, Luke Miratrix, Laurent El-Ghaoui, Bin Yu, Abigail De Kosnick, Gaining Contextual Insights into Media from Keywords Derived from Machine-Learning Based Analysis, Crossing Boundaries 2011, Berkeley, CA March 2011.
- Brian Gawalt and Youwei Zhang and Laurent El Ghaoui, Sparse PCA for Text Corpus Summarization and Exploration, NIPS 2010 Workshop on Low-RankMatrix Approximation, Whistler, BC, Dec. 2010. [pdf]
- Brian Gawalt and Jinzhu Jia and Luke Miratrix and Laurent El Ghaoui and Bin Yu and Sophie Clavier, Discovering Word Associations in News Media via Feature Selection and Sparse Classification, Proc. ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR2010), Philadelphia, PA, Mar. 2010. [website] [Portal.ACM]