CV

Ethan Hartzell


EDUCATION 

Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) Fellow (Cairo, Egypt) -- American University in Cairo June 2019 - June 2020

Tufts University (Medford, MA) - B.S. Class of 2018 Magna Cum Laude

   Major: Cognitive and Brain Sciences  Minor: Computer Science     Study Abroad: American University in Cairo Spring 2017

   Senior Honors Thesis: Lexical Variation in Central Taurus Sign Language

PUBLICATIONS

     (In Progress) Hartzell, E; Understanding Orthographic Variations of the Egyptian Arabic Future Tense Marker.

(Abstract) Hartzell, E; Kinship Terms in Egyptian Sign Language: Contact-Induced Morphology. TISLR14 2022. Osaka,  Japan. 

Dobbs, C.L.; Caselli, N.K.; Hartzell, E. et al. Understanding middle graders’ language borrowing: how lexical and demographic characteristics predict similarity. Read Writ (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10210-0

(Translation) From the Archives of the Egyptian Feminist Movement: Constructing a Graphic History by Hoda Elsadda and Maissan Hassan. The Women and Memory Forum. Cairo, Egypt.

Dobbs, C. L., Caselli, N., Hartzell, E. & Flanagan, C. (2020, Apr 17 - 21) Understanding Middle Graders' Language Borrowing: How Lexical and Demographic Characteristics Predict Similarity. AERA Annual Meeting San Francisco, CA.

Ergin, R; Kursat, L; Hartzell, E; Jackendoff, R; “Central Taurus Sign Language: On the edge of conventionalization.” Psyarxiv.

     (Abstract) Hartzell, E; Ergin, R; Kursat, L; Jackendoff, R; Lexical Variation in Central Taurus Sign Language. TISLR13 2019; Hamburg, Germany.

(Abstract) Kursat, L; Ergin, R; Hartzell, E; Jackendoff, R; Linear Order: a Minimal Syntactic Tool for Expressing the Modifier and the Modified. TISLR13 2019; Hamburg, Germany.

(Abstract) Hartzell, E; Lin, C.; Enhancing Clinical Temporal Relation Discovery with Syntactic Embeddings from GloVe.  ICIBM, 2016.

PRESENTATIONS 

(Poster) Hartzell, E; Kinship Terms in Egyptian Sign Language: Contact-Induced Morphology. TISLR14 2022. Osaka,  Japan.  

(Invited Talk) Hartzell, E; Understanding Orthographic Variations of the Egyptian Arabic Future Tense Marker. Arabic Sociolinguistics Reading Group, Sept. 2021; Newcastle University; Tyne, UK..

(Talk in Arabic) Hartzell, E. Challenges in Literacy Education for Deaf Children in Cairo. CASA Without Borders Virtual Conference, 2020. Cairo, Egypt.

(Poster) Kursat, L; Ergin, R; Hartzell, E; Jackendoff, R; Linear Order: a Minimal Syntactic Tool for Expressing the Modifier and the Modified. TISLR13 2019; Hamburg, Germany.

(Poster) Hartzell, E; Ergin, R; Kursat, L; Jackendoff, R; Lexical Variation in Central Taurus Sign Language. TISLR13 2019; Hamburg, Germany.

(Invited Talk) Hartzell, E; Lexical Variation in Central Taurus Sign Language. Boston University Course: Structure of American Sign Language (2019). Boston, US.

(Poster) Hartzell, E; Lin, C.; Enhancing Clinical Temporal Relation Discovery with Syntactic Embeddings from GloVe. ICIBM, 2016. Houston, US.


EXPERIENCE

Devo Inc.: Fullstack Engineer -- Cambridge, MA - Aug 2020-Present

  • developed and tested APIs and other software for managing and monitoring health of data ingest into customers’ Devo (data analytics platform) environments using Flask, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and SQL

  • developed and tested various aspects of frontend for onboarding new customer data sources using Node.js and Jquery

  • interfaced with customers and solution engineers to troubleshoot onboarding of data sources and support custom use cases

  • carried out long-term projects such as migrating data-onboarding infrastructure to AWS, and creating a Time Series Anomaly Detection application for customer use

  • developed automated end-to-end monitoring for core product using Selenium

  • created serverless APIs with AWS Lambda for data ingest

The Endangered Alphabets Project: Volunteer Researcher -- Burlington, VT - Oct 2021-Present

  • gathered resources for different orthographic systems, particularly those of Southwest Asia and North Africa

  • found community liaisons and verified different sources to determine endangerment status

  • gathered in-depth historical and manuscript data for Coptic and Samaritan scripts and their communities for data visualization purposes using Python to consolidate date ranges from various databases

  • created smartphone applications for learning endangered scripts

The Women and Memory Forum: Translator -- Cairo, Egypt - Mar 2020-Aug 2020

  • worked with team of translators on Arabic to English translation of historical book

  • translated, edited, and presented to team on various cultural issues arising in translation process

Old Cairo Deaf Unit: Volunteer -- Cairo, Egypt - Jan 2020-June 2020

  • taught English and computer applications to elementary and middle school Deaf children

  • translated Deaf Education materials into Arabic and led teacher discussion sessions

  • created web applications for games to support literacy and language development using HTML, CSS, JS, Jquery, React

BU LexLab: Research Staff -- Boston, MA - October 2018 - June 2019

  • managed database and improved UI for ASL CDI data collection with Prof. Naomi Caselli

  • built a phonological classifier for ASL videos using pose estimation data with Python

  • researched literacy development using Python and NLTK

QPID Health: NLP Developer Intern -- Boston, MA - June 2018 - October 2018

  • performed causal analysis of NLP classifiers used for automating clinical procedure adjudications with Python and Java

  • wrote unit tests for NLP codebase in Java

  • built full-stack web application for patent information viewing using Ember (JS), Python with flask, and SQL

Harvard Medical School/Boston Children's Hospital CHIP Natural Language Processing Lab: Research Intern – Boston, MA - May - August 2016 & 2017

  • designed and ran machine learning experiments using syntactic embeddings of clinical data corpora to improve relation extraction with Bash, Python, and Java using word2vec, GloVe, and fasttext

  • designed and ran experiments to improve temporal relation extraction using word embeddings from both clinical and non-clinical corpora. 

  • various Python scripting tasks to provide utility functions for other researchers

Tufts Center for Cognitive Studies: Research Assistant – Somerville, MA - September 2015 – May 2018

  • aided in research studies on an emerging village sign language, CTSL, exploring early language development of syntax, morphology, and phonology with Dr. Rabia Ergin & Prof. Ray Jackendoff

  • performed extensive annotation and glossing using ELAN

Arabic Summer Academy: Teacher –  Boston, MA - July 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017

  • planned and implemented daily lessons for three beginner classes and one music/culture class six days a week

  • collaborated with and mentored new teachers

  • performed administrative duties and helped plan curriculum

Tufts University: On-Call Tutor -- Medford, MA - September 2015- June 2018

  • planning and implementing one-on-one tutoring sessions for French and Arabic language students

  • staffing weekly language circles for modern standard and colloquial Arabic

Language Connections: Marketing Intern -- Brookline, MA - June 2014 - August 2014

  • managed contact information database

  • authored new legal translation newsletter

  • authored language profile blog posts

Other Projects:

  • Developing educational mobile applications for lesser-studied and resource-scarce languages, dialects, and orthographies with React Native: See on Google Play (complete resource list here)

  • Documenting an Egyptian Arabic cryptolect


COMPUTER SKILLS 

C++, Java, Python, Javascript, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, SQL,  HTML, CSS, JQuery, Ruby, ELAN, SPSS, Git, SkLearn, NLTK, Ember, Django, React, React Native, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Selenium


LANGUAGES

High Proficiency: French, Spanish, Arabic (MSA, Egyptian, Levantine)    

Intermediate Proficiency: American Sign Language, Portuguese

Novice Proficiency: Tachelhit, Mandarin, Egyptian Sign Language, German, Japanese, British Sign Language

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