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I am currently working for DeviantArt for the third time. I left once to become a professor and another time to form a company but am currently back once more, co-leading the DeviantArt AI team. Why? It’s a good job that has gotten even better. DeviantArt has always appealed to my contrarian sensibilities, and building machine learning and artificial intelligence systems there lets me play with its immense amounts of interesting data in a small group while having a direct impact on our end users to make their experience a better one....

After my Ph.D. and postdoc, despite having a great experience, I was ready to be done with academia for a while. It was also difficult to accept one of the academic positions on offer in New England because I was waiting for Cydney to be done her Ph.D. and move back to Vancouver. I had met Ian Davis during my time at M.I.T. and started working for his game company Mad Doc Software as an AI programmer, and later as the studio AI head....

From 2016 to 2018 Chris Nell and I owned a Machine Learning Consulting company called Tideline Data. We spun out of our Artificial Intelligence group at DeviantArt and provided AI services for a number of Vancouver clients including BuildDirect and Widerfunnel but also kept a contract with DeviantArt going. Soon after, DeviantArt was purchased by Wix and hired us back to re-form an Artificial Intelligence team for the company here in Vancouver....