Jimmy Lin
About
I'm a Professor and hold the David R. Cheriton Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Previously, I was at the University of Maryland. I completed my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2004. My research aims to build tools that help users make sense of large amounts of data. I work at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, and data management. I'm passionate about translating research into real-world impact. Presently, I serve as the Chief Scientist of Primal, a Waterloo-based company focused on building enterprise-grade AI solutions that exploit the best of what neural networks and knowledge graphs have to offer. Previously, I was the Chief Scientist of RSVP, a Waterloo-based startup that builds deep natural language understanding technologies to facilitate seamless dialogues between users and systems. From 2010-2012, I spent an extended sabbatical at Twitter working on services designed to identify relevant content to users (search, recommendation, etc.) and analytics infrastructure to support data science (Hadoop tools, machine learning libraries, etc.). Follow me on Twitter (ops, I mean X!) here! I've also worked for Cloudera: In 2009, I was responsible for helping them build out a training and certification program; in fact, I wrote their very first certification exam! I'm a Fellow of the ACM, a member of the SIGIR Academy, and a Fellow of the ACL.
Research Performance Summary
First Recorded Paper
Aranea: Mining Answers from the World Wide Web
Year: 1997
Citations: 1
Venue: Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MiT, In Proceedings of the 5th RIAO
Latest Recorded Paper
Unifying Adversarial Robustness and Training Across Text Scoring Models
Year: 2026
Citations: 0
Venue: arXiv e-prints, arXiv: 2602.00857
Last 10 Years Publication Activity
This timeline shows the professor's yearly publication activity.