User:JustinWick

Hello fellow Wikipedians!

Quick facts

 * I am currently an AI researcher specializing in automated speech recognition (ASR) and computational linguistics at Microsoft.
 * I hold a Bachelors degree in Applied Physics and a Masters in Computer Science, both from Cornell University.
 * I worked on the operations staff for the Mars Exploration Rover mission during 2004 at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Among other things, I am one of the developers of Maestro.
 * I have worked on astrophysical MHD simulations at Cornell University in Fortran, focusing on accretion of charged matter onto highly magnetic neutron stars.
 * I have credits for special effects on the Nova Documentaries Welcome to Mars and Is there Life on Mars, as well as the IMAX Film Roving Mars. For these films I developed and applied algorithms for processing terrain data and rendering inhomogenous, high-albedo volumes, as well as a cache-efficient out-of-memory kd-tree point cloud storage format, as well as a high-performance piecewise convolutional rendering algorithm for antialiased moving starfields.
 * I was the lead engineer on a massively multiplayer online game with over one million monthly active players at Blue Fang Games, developed in Scala using Project Darkstar.
 * I hold the patent US20150039854A1 "Vectorized lookup of floating point values", which accelerates dequantization of block data (usually matrices) on embedded processors.
 * More information can be found on my LinkedIn, Google Scholar, and IMDb page.

Why am I on Wikipedia
I enjoy Wikipedia because it's a productive way for me to work on writing skills, no matter how much or little time I have available. It is a bit addictive, however.

What are my goals on Wikipedia?
I used to enjoy starting new articles, but nowadays I'm mostly concerned with factual inaccuracies, lack of citations, and copyright violations.

Why is Wikipedia useful?
The two most useful things in any Wikipedia article are the introductory text (usually contains reasonably good definitions), and the references/external links. On a good article, there's plenty of places to go to learn more if you really want to know about a subject.

I think Wikipedia's Featured Articles tend to make it a great source of intellectual entertainment. FAs are usually far beyond encyclopedic articles in a real encyclopedia, more an amazing work of nonfiction. Because they have been polished to a gleaming near-perfection, Featured Articles represent very well what Wikipedia wants so desperately to be (and may yet some day become, at least on some topics).

Also the Talk pages serve to illuminate controversies on an issue and gauge different opinions. I find these instructive to read on occasion as well.

More info on me

 * My LinkedIn profile,, and IMDb
 * My Google Scholar profile
 * My IMDb profile