John McKay
Machine Learning Engineer & Data Scientist
JMcKayPitt at gmail dot com
About Me
Hello! I'm John McKay, a research scientist for Amazon Transport Sciences where I focus on applying machine learning to Amazon Freight/Inbound/other transport service problems. This has included lane level forecasting problems for contract pricing, shipper willingness-to-pay cost adjustments, and more! From July '20 July '22 I applied my skills to Alexa where, in summary, I did a bit of NLP and neural embedding design to fix bugs and improve entity resolution. I have a PhD from Penn State where, under the watchful eye of my advisor Vishal Monga, I focused on synthetic aperture image formation and classification with neural nets. Before my time as a electrical engineer, I investigated topics in mathematical biology, which was the focus of my undergraduate research and masters degree. Simply put, there are few data science topics that I am not interested in. If you see anything on this website you'd like to know more about, feel free to contact me!
Education
Pennsylvania State University
Jan 2015 - June 2018
PhD Student
Dept of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Advised by Dr. Vishal Monga
Research: sparse reconstruction-based classification, non-uniform fast Fourier transforms, neural networks
Arizona State University
Jan 2013 - Dec 2014
Masters
School of Applied Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences
Advised by Dr. Yun Kang
Research: graph theory, social insect network models, deterministic epidemiological models, frame theory
University of Pittsburgh
Aug 2008 - May 2012
Bachelor's of Science (3.7 GPA)
Majors: Pure Mathematics, Africana Studies
Research Advisor Dr. Eunha Shim
Research: deterministic epidemiology models, agent based models
Employment
Research Scientist II (Cambrdige, MA)
July 2020 - Present
I design language networks to evaulate utterance relevance and rank entity options and I write and implement ingestion methods for large-scale knowledge graphs.
Imaging Scientist II at Indigo Ag (Boston, MA)
Dec 2019 - July 2020
I established a neural network infrastructure for hyperspectral image analysis pipeline of crop treatment effects, designed tree ensemble models to predict treatment performance, and participated in efforts to maintain our automation tools that write to databases.
Research and Development Engineer, Penn State's Applied Research Laboratory (State College, PA)
Aug 2018 - Nov 2019
I devised neural network architectures for limited training remote sensing imagery, worked in a team setting to resolve motion-induced errors in sonar imagery using signal processing techniques, and designed traditional classifiers for raw acoustic and radar sensor outputs.
Business Analyst at Management Science Associates (Pittsburgh, PA)
May 2012 - Jan 2013
I wrote statistical models to assess the impact of social media on consumer good sales, participated in team tasked with segmenting Twitter followers to gauge potential demographic targets, and wrote agent based models in Java to understand potential effects of company Twitter campaigns.
Publications
Robust Sonar ATR Through Bayesian Pose-Corrected Sparse Classification
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience & Remote Sensing
Coupling Rendering and Generative Adversarial Networks for Artificial SAS Image Generation
OCEANS 2019 MTS/IEEE Seattle
Bridging the Gap: Simultaneous Fine Tuning for Data Re-Balancing
IGARSS 2018
Fast Stochastic Hierarchical Bayesian MAP for Tomographic Imaging
2017 51st Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, & Computers
Using Frame Theoretic Convolutional Gridding for Robust Synthetic Aperture Sonar Imaging
OCEANS 2017 MTS/IEEE Anchorage
PDF bibtex [Code]
(Finalist, Student Poster Contest)
What's Mine is Yours: Pretrained CNNs for Limited Training Sonar ATR
OCEANS 2017 MTS/IEEE Anchorage
Robust Sonar ATR with Pose Corrected Sparse Reconstruction-Based Classification
OCEANS 2016 MTS/IEEE Monterey
PDF bibtex
(Finalist, Student Poster Contest)
Localized Dictionary Design for Geometrically Robust Sonar ATR
IGARSS 2016
Personal
I'm very proud of my two sisters, Mary McKay and Dr. Pilar McKay (co-founder of the Silver Lake Brewing Project). My mother has taught Spanish at SUNY Geneseo since 1989 and my dad is a high school educator (who, during his time in Texas for Teach for America, earned the 2014-15 Edcouch-Elsa Secondary Teacher of the year award).
