Simon has a PhD in Computer Science from DePaul with a concentration on NLP and machine learning, and has over 8 years experience working as a data scientist and 15 years experience working within software development. He was worked on multiple search and recommender engines, including building job and resume search engines for Dice.com as well as working on Home Depot’s e-commerce search platform in his current role. He is currently the Principal Data Scientist on the core search team, leading initiatives to improve overall relevancy and conversion on their search platform. He is also co-author of 3 SIGIR papers published during his time at Home Depot, and 11 papers on applying AI for educational purposes, and has given many industry talks over the years on semantic search and relevancy tuning.