Alex Calderwood is a recent graduate of Columbia’s M.S. in Computer Science, where he specialized in applied natural language processing, after spending a year at the Columbia Journalism School.
His journalistic interests lie in the intersection of technology and society, policy, and the humanities. He has been published in WIRED, after he, along with his classmates at the Journalism School, uncovered an oversight in Twitter’s examination of accounts tied to Russian election interference.
His computational projects have included an effort to automate the Bechdel test; a tool to assist sociologists to examine social media discussions of interpersonal violence; an analysis of characters’ changing relationships over time in SparkNotes summaries; a generative poetry toolkit; and a political debate bot. He has interned at Oracle, as well as the startup Production Pro Technologies, where he is also now a part-time engineering consultant, working on an NLP-based tool for production management of film and theater.