Hi! My name is Brandon Ko, and I am currently a software engineer intern at Airbnb. I completed my BS (2020) and MS (2021) in computer science at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Throughout my MS program, I focused on sharpening my technical machine learning skills and expanded on my knowledge in NLP. I am also interested in machine learning ethics, and wrote a paper on gender biases in NLP systems with my peers.

I spent my summer of 2020 working as a research intern focusing on NLP at Giving Tech Labs. GTL is a nonprofit company that works in the public sector of technology, focusing on addressing systemic social issues through AI, data sciences and sustainable models. My first project involved a binary classifier for grant-providing web pages that was integrated into their production pipeline. The second project focused on topic modeling for websites containing information on the older workforce. I dove deep into data cleaning and text mining, using various vectorization and clustering techniques to build an understanding of my corpus.