CV

Education

• B.Sc. in Mathematics and Linguistics (dual major), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016
  • GPA: 4.9 / 5.0
• M.Sc. in Computer Science (graduated with honors), Tel Aviv University, 2023
  • GPA: 98 / 100
• PhD student in Electrical Engineering, Tel Aviv University, 2023–present

Work experience

• 2019–present: Tech Lead and Lecturer, Israel Tech Challenge
  • Designing syllabus and course materials, delivering lecturers, mentoring student projects
• 2019–2021: NLP Data Scientist, Pipl, Inc.
  • Extracting information from unstructured free text and web data, including text summarization, entity recognition and relationship extraction. Designing customized deep learning architectures as well as using classic machine learning algorithms.
• 2018–2019: NLP Data Scientist, Reverso - Softissimo
  • Designing NLP algorithms to automatically correct and enrich linguistic data in Reverso’s ecosystem of language tools. Applying and innovating new NLP methods and data mining in various languages including English, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese.
• 2017–2018: Software Developer, K Dictionaries
  • Built REST API for linked lexicographic data, managed continuous integration and integration with cloud services, and developed algorithms for enriching linguistic data.
• 2015–2016: Software and Algorithm Engineer, Voiceitt
  • Prototyped speech recognition algorithms, integrated them into a REST server, documented and tested API, and was in charge of continuous integration.
• Summer 2016: Algorithm Development Intern, SECOM (Japan)
  • Improved facial recognition rate by 3% on company’s test database using machine learning techniques.
• 2012–2015: Undergraduate Research in Cognitive Linguistics, TedLab, MIT
  • Designed surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk and conducted statistical analysis on the data collected to study autism and linguistics, linguistic universals, word learning, and other topics.

Publications

Refereed Poster: Lexical items are privileged slots for meaning

K. Mahowald, S.T. Piantadosi, M. Alper, E. Gibson. (2015). Lexical items are privileged slots for meaning. Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, CUNY 2015. Los Angeles, CA. March 19-21, 2015.

Auto-generating bilingual dictionaries: Results of the TIAD-2017 shared task baseline algorithm

Alper, M. (2017). Auto-generating bilingual dictionaries: Results of the TIAD-2017 shared task baseline algorithm. In J. McCrae et al. Proceedings of the LDK workshops: OntoLex, TIAD and Challenges for Wordnets. Galway, Ireland, June 18, 2017.

Is BERT Blind? Exploring the Effect of Vision-and-Language Pretraining on Visual Language Understanding

Morris Alper, Michael Fiman, & Hadar Averbuch-Elor (2023). Is BERT Blind? Exploring the Effect of Vision-and-Language Pretraining on Visual Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

Talks

Writing Systems of the World’s Languages

November 18, 2012

Talk at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Understanding Impaired Speech

January 10, 2016

Talk at Afeka College of Engineering, Tel Aviv, Israel

Auto-Generating Bilingual Dictionaries

September 20, 2017

Conference proceedings talk at eLex 2017 Conference, Leiden, Netherlands

“Deeplomatics”: Deep learning for automatic analysis of cuneiform texts

December 07, 2022

Talk at AI-Humanity-Society: LMU-TAU Workshop for Early-Career Researchers, Munich, Germany

Teaching

• 2019–present: teaching and mentoring at Israel Tech Challenge (ITC) data science bootcamp
  • Includes giving lectures, writing coding exercises, and mentoring students
  • Topics of lectures given include:
    • Classification and regression algorithms
    • Unsupervised learning
    • Introduction to deep learning
    • Deep learning with TensorFlow
    • Computer vision and natural language processing
  • Serving as advisor to students for their final data science projects
• 2013: Guest lecture for 9.59/24.905J Lab in Psycholinguistics, MIT
  • Lecture: Coding for Amazon Mechanical Turk

Selected Awards and Honors

• 2011: International Linguistics Olympiad, Pittsburgh, USA
  • 1st place individual round (gold medal)
  • 1st place team round (team USA Red)
  • Best solution, problem 2
  • Zhurinski Memorial Prize
• 2008: International Linguistics Olympiad, Slanchev Bryag, Bulgaria
  • Tied for 6th place individual round (silver medal)
  • 1st place team round (team USA)

Volunteering

• 2017–2018: English tutoring at the Israeli African Refugee Development Center (ARDC)