short bio of Matt Post in the second person
Your name is Matthew Post, but there are too many of those, so you prefer to go by the more distinctive “Matt”. You are a researcher at Microsoft, working remotely from Baltimore in their Translator group since June of 2021. For nearly a decade before that, you were a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University, also in Baltimore, where the summers are miserable and the winter temperatures lap up only once or twice per season against the cold temperatures your upbringing on the shores of Lake Michigan established as your ideal range. That in turn followed graduate school at the University of Rochester, where graduate students can own houses within walking distance of the university, and where the winters are real. You have managed to get paid for your work in machine translation, but mostly you like doing what you like, when you like it, thank you very much. In 2017–2018, that impulse led you to spend the academic year as a member of the excellent Amazon research team in the fantastic city of Berlin, working on Sockeye, when it was still based on MXNet. On some days your interests include providing advice to your graduate students.
You possess above-threshold competence and find it hard to say no, a killer combination in a field that’s mostly volunteer-run. During your children’s formative years, you have spent countless hours volunteering for the community. You currently serve as the (unpaid) director of the ACL Anthology. You helped organize (at no charge) the manual evaluation of the annual Conference on Machine Translation. You served (pro bono) on the NAACL executive board. And for many years, you maintained (for free) the Joshua decoder. You are also the author of sacrebleu, a simple tool with an excellent name that seems destined to define you.