Articles by: Kevin Luu

Welcome Will Hare – Sales Development Representative

Kevin Luu • May 12, 2020

Hello everyone! William (Hare) here, but you can call me Will. I will be joining the sales team at Diffbot as a Sales Development Representative. I am looking forward to meeting everyone – eventually in person – and welcome any opportunity now for a virtual get-together. 

I have always been interested in problem solving and negotiation for mutual benefit, i.e sales! I was actually hired for my first sales job at 14 years old when I was hanging out at the local lacrosse store and started talking with customers about equipment. Ultimately, I was able to refine my skills to not only guide people into the gear and “cosmetics” that would fit them best, but also learned to love the client facing aspect of the job. 

As I moved through college at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, I became very interested in technology. I was able to work an internship with a team doing inside sales at Uber for a new project for on demand delivery, and fell in love with the sales development process. After that internship, I went into the wine industry and worked as a tasting room associate at a local winery, learning as much as I could about wine, the industry, and the nuances of pouring. After I graduated, I became the first Sales Development Representative at a small social engagement start-up in Palo Alto working directly with the CEO on sales development and strategy. Once I saw the breadth of Diffbot and understood its mission, I was immediately intrigued. I now consider myself extremely fortunate to be a part of the team!

On a personal note, I love hiking, snowboarding, and wine. I also coach high school lacrosse (go PALY Vikings). Once we are back in the office, I am looking forward to using the pool table and organizing a tournament. 

I’m absolutely thrilled to join the sales team at Diffbot and engage with prospective clients to understand the power and vision of the company!

Welcome Jerome Choo – Director of Growth Marketing

Kevin Luu • May 12, 2020

Hello! My name is Jerome Choo and I lead Growth Marketing at Diffbot. I spent the majority of my childhood in Singapore, eventually moving to Atlanta, GA, for high school and college where I started a career in biomedical engineering. My research focus, mostly unintended, was on mammal urination. Since then, I’ve found a new passion in leading data driven growth teams. I’m fascinated with blending objective scientific rigor and problem first design to create seven star user experiences. I’m pumped to help Diffbot solve the absolutely essential function of accessible structured data for everyone!

Welcome Andrew Harrold – Data Curator

Kevin Luu • March 13, 2020

Hello! My name is Andrew Harrold, a new data curator at Diffbot!

I was born and raised in Denver Colorado, and studied economics at the University of California, Berkeley. During my time at Berkeley, I took on a senior thesis which involved looking at the relationship between employee sentiment (scraped employee review data) and stock market returns.

Needless to say, I have a passion for data and love the many creative ways it can be used to derive meaningful insights; specifically within machine learning and web-scraping technology. Diffbot takes on the challenge of exracting data to find meaning out of chaos and can be used to help a wide range of businesses solve problems— which I am all about. I am very excited to join a talented team with such awesome technology!


Welcome Maosheng Guo – Machine Learning Engineer

Kevin Luu • February 18, 2020

Hello there! My name is Maosheng Guo and I am from China. I had just started recently as a Machine Learning Engineer in the research group. It’s my great pleasure to join the Diffbot family!

When pursuing my Ph.D. at the Harbin Institute of Technology, I focused my research on recognition, extraction and generating the reasoning relations in natural language (i.e., Textual Entailment and Natural Language Inference). During this time, I successfully improved several question-answering and dialogue systems/chatbots using inference techniques. On the one hand, reasoning in natural language is inseparable from the accumulation of knowledge. On the other hand, inference techniques also help the construction of knowledge graphs. When I learned about the Diffbot’s mission to build the first comprehensive map of human knowledge, I decided to join without any hesitation.

As for my hobbies, I enjoy traveling and doing outdoor sports in my free time. When I am not outdoors, I also find playing online party games with friends exciting. I am excited to start my new adventure at Diffbot!

Welcome Eriq Huang – UX Design Intern

Kevin Luu • January 16, 2020

Hi there! My name is Eriq Huang, a new User Experience (UX) Design intern at Diffbot!

I grew up in China. Currently, I am studying Web Design & New Media at Academy of Art University. I have been a visual designer for 6 years with multidisciplinary design skills in the area of UX, brand strategy, visual presentation, and ergonomics. The reason why UX is so fascinating to me is that I derive huge satisfaction by creating solutions that can positively impact people’s lives and their behavior.

As for my hobbies, I’m currently diving into aerial cinematography. I take my equipment with me whenever I travel so I can share stories of my journey.

Diffbot has solid technologies and approaches that solve the problem of acquiring human knowledge, and this is the exact problem that will be encountered whether in your daily life or business use cases. We possess a common vision of solving the user’s problem by addressing technology and design into sophisticated solutions. This is the reason why I joined Diffbot. I hope that I can contribute my own strength to the team by utilizing my multidisciplinary design approaches.

I look forward to starting my new journey here at Diffbot!

Welcome Ben Lin – Account Executive

Kevin Luu • December 30, 2019

Hi Everyone! My name is Ben and I’m joining Diffbot as an Account Executive.

I grew up in the Bay Area and attended school at UC Berkeley studying economics. During my time there, I became interested in Data Science and Machine Learning and how this emerging field would play a key role in business operations. I knew I wanted to pursue a career that would enable me to work on both the technical and business sides of a product.

After graduation, I began working at a Machine Learning startup called Vidora. I dove right into sales being their only sales hire and worked closely with the CEO to prospect, generate meetings, and close deals. During my tenure at Vidora, I realized that I was missing the technical knowledge to resonate with Data Scientists, CTOs, and engineering teams. I then enrolled in a data science bootcamp, Metis, a 3 month full-time program that taught basic coding, statistics, and machine learning models and pipelines. Having experience in web scraping and data collection, Diffbot is truly building a world-class product and I’m excited to be a part of the team and contribute to the growth.

On a personal note – I love watching basketball (Go Dubs!), MMA, and going to concerts. I also enjoy hiking and adventuring so I try to go to at least one new trail every month. I look forward to my adventure here at Diffbot!

Welcome Dan Urman – Lead Technical Support Engineer

Kevin Luu • November 26, 2019

Hi, folks! Dan here!

I’ve always been interested in psychology and technology. My first website was a bunch of personality tests from my high school psychology class implemented in JavaScript. These hobbies led me to a career in web development, but eventually I realized that the best part of my job was actually when I got to help colleagues solve whatever technical problems they’d run into in their own work. Because of that, I transitioned to technical product support and have never been happier.

Building websites is still a hobby of mine, and it’s given me frequent opportunity to lament how difficult it is to make use of the immense amount of human knowledge that exists on the internet. When I heard about Diffbot’s mission to collect and structure this knowledge to enable truly intelligent systems, I was immediately excited!

I’m thrilled to join Diffbot’s Technical Support Engineering team where I’ll be working to empower our customers to meet their goals and to improve the resources available to our developer community.

Welcome Oliver Lehmberg – Machine Learning Engineer

Kevin Luu • November 15, 2019

Hi! My name is Oliver and I am a new Machine Learning Engineer at Diffbot!

I am from Germany and I have always been passionate about computer science as well as how to use computers to automate everyday tasks. After obtaining my master’s degree in Business Informatics, I joined the Data and Web Science Group at the University of Mannheim, where I worked on the large-scale integration of tabular data from web sites and knowledge graphs for five years.

I finished my PhD this year and will now work with the research team at Diffbot. My work here will continue in the area of large-scale data integration and focus on record linking and sub-record linking. These are critical tasks for the construction of knowledge graphs, as they determine which pieces of information from different source web sites are combined into the same entity, and how such entities are interlinked with each other.

In my free time I like to travel around the world and spend time with friends and family. I look forward to my new adventures at Diffbot!

Welcome Joone Hur – Software Engineer

Kevin Luu • April 25, 2019

Hello everyone! 

My name is Joone, and I am a new Software Engineer at Diffbot where I own the renderability and performance of the rendering farm here. For many years, I worked on web engines such as Gecko, WebKit and Chromium at Samsung and Intel Open Source Technology Center. Currently, I am pursuing a new adventure with a machine learning company.

Human beings have advanced with the internet. We can easily share information and communicate with anyone in the world, but sometimes we face issues such as the information being impermanent and inaccurate. Also, it is still hard to find information from the web even though we have good search engines and Wikipedia. In fact, they have not changed much since they were invented. Diffbot is building a knowledge graph that will be the future of human knowledge, which motivated me to join. Essentially, my role here is to make the web machine readable for our machine learning systems. I have also studied data mining using neural networks for my Masters degree which will help when working with our researchers.

In my free time, I’m a professional comic artist, and I post my comics about free/open source software at https://joone.net. If I have the chance, I will draw comics about machine learning and Diffbot’s services. Stay tuned for our blogs and follow us on Twitter!