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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Egyptian Arabic Resources

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As a learner of Arabic it was always easy to find resources for standard Arabic, but finding quality resources for colloquial varieties was not. Egyptian Arabic is luckily one of the better resourced ones, owing maybe to its large film and music industries, its history of French and British colonialism, and its ancient monuments drawing in tourists and researchers from abroad. Still, it's harder to find resources for than abundantly-resourced western European languages like French and Spanish. For that reason, I wanted to start off my blog by making a list of resources I recommend.  Dictionaries   -One of the best dictionaries out there is the one by Hinds and Badawi , but in the modern day and age I think the best dictionaries should be available in digital form, and with more functionality. One of the best online dictionaries for colloquial Arabic varieties is Lughatuna . It contains probably most of the entries from Hinds and Badawi, is full of useful examples, and being able to
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Kunuz Nubian: Indefinite Article النوبية الكنوزية: أداة التنكير

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