Sen Xu is a Senior Scientist for INOME, Inc. (previously known as Intelius, Inc.). Sen's current R&D focus is on spatial record linkage, entity extraction, and building people graph. From December 2011 to Jan 2013. Sen delivered evaluation of current geocoding services, lead develop of in-house geo-referencing tools for Big Data (see recent publication) to support spatial record linkage and analytics for Big Data. He codes primarily in Java (some Python, js, php), uses Hadoop and a variety of AWS services for Big Data processing. Refer to Sen Xu's LinkedIn profile for more info.

Sen Xu is also a Ph.D candidate (ABD since December 2011) in Geography at GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University. He is also enrolled in Ph.D Minor in Computational Science from Department of Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering, PSU.
Sen specializes in spatial linguistic analyses, exploring the application of various KDD approaches. He is also interested in spatial cognition, thematic cartography, visualization, crowd-sourcing, and knowledge mining (from the Web). His PhD topic will be focusing on information generalization techniques for directed spatial interaction (e.g, developing different arrow representation and how they effect viewers' perception of underlying information).

He serves as a research assistant for GeoCAM project, STempo project. He leads the client group development of PSUMobile, which is a android-based mobile VGS (volunteered geographic service) project. He is also a member in Human Factors in GIScience Lab.

He received his M.S. Degree in Geography from the Pennsylvania State University, with a Master Thesis titled "EXPLORING REGIONAL VARIATION IN SPATIAL LANGUAGE: A CASE STUDY ON SPATIAL ORIENTATION BY USING VOLUNTEERED SPATIAL LANGUAGE DATA". In this study, through web crawling with postal codes, machine learning-based text classification and geo-referencing, a data collection schema for collecting spatially-distributed topic-specific web document is design. Focusing on spatial language usage, the Spatially-strAtified Route Direction Corpus (the SARD Corpus) is build (available for download here). After applying a semantic categorical analysis on cardinal vs. relative direction term usages, he uses TermTree Tool and Visual Inquiry Toolkit to explore regional linguistic variations in spatial language usages. For illustrated examples please refer to publication and presentation in Portfolio.
He received his B.S. Degree in GISci Major from Peking University, China, 2008, with a thesis titiled "Research on Chinese POI Name Abbreviation Matching Problem using a Statistical Approach".
Refer to his personal website for research update and more.

First rule of graduate life is:
you do NOT talk about graduate life.

Among the various hobbies Sen has, there are quite a few side projects going on. Including musical instrument recording & sound effect experiments, a guitar building project, android app development, and photography.
Travel info in Boston

Penn State University |GeoVISTA Center | maskVISTA | Bryant Smith