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Dan Quine

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Dan Quine
Alma materUniversity of Leeds
Known forSongkick, AltSchool, Google Squared
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Leeds
Apple Computer
Google
Songkick
AltSchool
ThesisExploring the use of pattern recognition, pattern identification and machine learning to support active collaboration between the user and the computer (1996)
Websiteuk.linkedin.com/in/dancrow
twitter.com/crowquine

Daniel Nicholas Quine (formerly known as Daniel Nicholas Crow[1]) is a computer scientist. He is the AI and Engineering lead for education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Early career

[edit]

Quine learned to program on a ZX81 and a BBC Micro in the 1980s.[2][3]

He received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Leeds,[4] and earned his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Leeds in 1995. His thesis work used machine learning algorithms to discover patterns in user interactions.[5][6][7]

In the mid-1990s he was Head of Software Development for Art of Memory[8] where he produced the Story of Glass multimedia kiosk and CD-ROM amongst others.

Silicon Valley

[edit]

In 1996, Quine joined Apple Computer where he initially worked as the lead software engineer on the Apple Media Tool. He was also the manager of the Hypercard engineering team and the QuickTime applications team. He worked closely with Steve Jobs on the QuickTime Player application[9] and was co-inventor of two software patents with Jobs.[10] In August 2011, Quine was interviewed by the BBC to discuss Steve Jobs' resignation as CEO of Apple.[11]

After leaving Apple in 2000, Quine worked at a number of technology startups. He was the Chief Scientist of guru.com where he developed the SmartMatch intelligent search engine.[12] After guru.com was acquired by Unicru, Quine stayed on as Chief Scientist and Chief Architect until 2005.[13]

In 2005, Quine co-founded Blurb.com.[13][14] As Chief Technology Officer of Blurb[15] he led the development and launch of their first BookSmart product.[16]

Google

[edit]

In 2006 Quine joined Google as Product Manager for the crawl infrastructure group.[17] In this role, he regularly spoke at search engine optimisation conferences[18][19][20] and led the company's teams working on the Robots Exclusion Protocol and other crawler technologies; he also represented Google on the proposed ACAP standard.[21]

In February 2008, in an interview with the Technology Review, Quine discussed Google's "alternate views" search interface experiments and described Google's vision for the future of search: "One thing to remember is that (search is) still the early days. People think that search is a solved problem. I think we're still in the early days of making search work on a universal global scale. We know we can do better."[22]

In 2009, Quine led the engineering team that developed Google Squared,[23] a large-scale knowledge extraction technology that is part of the Knowledge Graph technology.[24] He then moved to Google's London office where he led the development of Google's mobile search applications and Google Ads Professionals and Rich Media Dynamic Ads projects.[13]

Songkick

[edit]

In January 2011, Quine left Google to join Songkick.[13][25][16] At Songkick he helped create the Silicon Milkroundabout hiring fair.[26] He also led Songkick's transition to a Service Oriented Architecture[27] and helped the company adopt continuous integration.[28]

In May 2014, Quine was interviewed by Silicon Real and talked about his experience at Songkick, as well as his earlier career and the future of the tech industry.[29] In May 2014, Songkick had more than 10 million monthly unique users and generated more than $100m of ticket revenue through referrals.[30] In June 2015, Songkick announced its merger with direct ticket vendor CrowdSurge and a $16.6m Series C investment round;[31] Quine remains the CTO of the combined company.

In September 2015, Quine chaired a roundtable discussion with a panel of experts in Artificial Intelligence who talked about the risks and opportunities in the field.[32]

Tech City

[edit]

In March 2012, Quine was named one of the "jobs ambassadors" for Channel 4 News.[33] He regularly comments on startups in Tech City, including writing for The Guardian,[34] talking at conferences,[35] and promoting UK startups for the London Olympics.[36] He is one of the founding members of the Tech London Advocates group.[37] In December 2013, Quine was interviewed on BBC World News by Linda Yueh discussing entrepreneurship.[38]

Leeds University

[edit]

Quine is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at the University of Leeds.[39] He lectures at the university on entrepreneurship and startups.[40] He also writes on Computer Science.[41][42] He is one of the prominent engineering alumni of the University.[43]

Return to Silicon Valley

[edit]

In July 2016, Quine returned to Silicon Valley, where he joined education startup AltSchool.[44] In 2019, he joined Lever as VP of Engineering, Product and Design.[45] In 2022, Quine was working at Mode Analytics.[46]

In 2024, Quine joined the education team at the Chan Zukerberg Initiative, leading AI and Engineering.[47]

Railway historian and author

[edit]

Quine writes books and articles about narrow-gauge railways, including the Ffestiniog,[48] Corris[49] and Talyllyn Railways[50] in Wales; and the Kettering Ironstone Railway,[51] the Waltham Iron Ore Tramway[52] in England.[53] In 2019, Quine presented a paper at the Social History Conference on the "impact of English industrialists on rural Mid Wales",[54]

In 2022, Quine presented at the Society for Industrial Archeology's conference, on "Rail transport at the Yellow Aster gold mine".[55] He published a related article on the Yellow Aster Mine later that year.[56] In December he published a book on the Hendre-Ddu Tramway.[57]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Dan Quine (24 December 2015). "Crowquine: why I changed my name".
  2. ^ Dan Crow (11 May 2012). "The Return of the Tinkerer". Huffington Post.
  3. ^ "The BBC Microcomputer and me, 30 years down the line". BBC News. 1 December 2011.
  4. ^ "From Leeds to Silicon Valley and back again – The School of Computing welcomes back alumnus Dan Crow". University of Leeds. 11 November 2013. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 17 April 2014.
  5. ^ Crow, Daniel (1996). Exploring the use of pattern recognition, pattern identification and machine learning to support active collaboration between the user and the computer (PhD thesis). University of Leeds.
  6. ^ Beale, Russell; Finlay, Janet (1992). "DB_Habits: comparing minimal knowledge and knowledge-based approaches to pattern recognition in the domain of user-computer interactions". Neural networks and pattern recognition in human-computer interaction. Ellis Horwood. ISBN 0-13-626995-8.
  7. ^ Crow, D.; Smith, B. (1993). "The role of built-in knowledge in adaptive interface systems". Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Intelligent user interfaces - IUI '93. p. 97. doi:10.1145/169891.169919. ISBN 0897915569. S2CID 14526323.
  8. ^ "Apple Media Tool consultants list". Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 30 April 2007.
  9. ^ Jemima Kiss (25 August 2011). "Steve Jobs: the computer and design guru who inspired absolute devotion". The Guardian.
  10. ^ Shan Carter (25 August 2011). "Steve Jobs's Patents". New York Times.
  11. ^ "BBC News at Six". BBC. 25 August 2011.
  12. ^ Crow, D.; Desanto, J. (2004). "A hybrid approach to concept extraction and recognition-based matching in the domain of human resources". 16th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence. p. 535. doi:10.1109/ICTAI.2004.12. ISBN 0-7695-2236-X. S2CID 13378806.
  13. ^ a b c d Mike Butcher (18 March 2011). "Songkick poaches big hitter CTO out of Google". TechCrunch.
  14. ^ Hugo Cox (15 August 2012). "Europe's 100 hottest startups 2012: London". Wired.
  15. ^ "Blurb launch information from Demo conference".
  16. ^ a b Ben Sisario (1 May 2011). "A Go-to Site for Tracking Music Acts". New York Times.
  17. ^ Johnson, Bobbie (27 March 2007). "Interview in The Guardian technology blog". London. Retrieved 30 April 2010.
  18. ^ "Search Summit 2007 in Sydney". Archived from the original on 31 March 2007.
  19. ^ "Search Engine Strategies New York, 2007. Conference agenda". Archived from the original on 29 April 2007.
  20. ^ "Search Engine Strategies Chicago, 2006. Conference agenda". Archived from the original on 18 April 2007.
  21. ^ "Search engines baulk at tighter reins on their spiders". Archived from the original on 8 March 2008. Retrieved 11 February 2008.
  22. ^ Greene, Kate (March 2008). "A New Perspective on Search Results". MIT Technology Review.
  23. ^ "European Conference on Information Retrieval, 2010".
  24. ^ "OIC speaker interview 6: Dan Crow, CTO, Songkick" (Interview). Interviewed by Andrew Cleary. Ovum. 24 April 2014.
  25. ^ Jemima Kiss (2 May 2011). "Songkick shows how a UK startup can have global ambition for live music". The Guardian.
  26. ^ Dom Pollard (2 November 2011). "Interview: Dan Crow, CTO, Songkick". The Cloud Circle. Archived from the original on 6 January 2012.
  27. ^ Joe McKendrick (14 September 2012). "One rockin' vendor's journey to SOA". ZDNet.
  28. ^ Hit It with a Big Axe. Hacker News Meetup.
  29. ^ "Dan Crow, CTO of Songkick". Silicon Real. 1 May 2014. Archived from the original on 14 May 2014.
  30. ^ Tim Bradshaw (27 May 2014). "Songkick makes a noise with 10m subscribers". Financial Times.
  31. ^ Stuart Dredge (4 June 2015). "Songkick and CrowdSurge merge to make a splash in live music market". The Guardian. London.
  32. ^ Natasha Lomas (6 September 2015). "Not Just Another Discussion About Whether AI Is Going To Destroy Us". TechCrunch.
  33. ^ Channel 4 News (14 March 2012). "Channel 4 Reveals Jobs Ambassadors".{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  34. ^ Dan Crow (21 November 2011). "Watch out, Silicon Valley – Silicon Roundabout is the new kid in town". The Guardian.
  35. ^ The Changing Landscape with Dan Crow. Digital London. March 2012.
  36. ^ "Olympics Legacy – Silicon Roundabout". Engineering and Technology Magazine. 18 March 2012.
  37. ^ Olivia Solon (17 April 2003). "Private sector advocacy group aims to support London tech scene". Wired UK. Archived from the original on 17 September 2013.
  38. ^ "Talking Business with Linda Yueh". BBC World News. December 2013.
  39. ^ Dan Crow (7 February 2014). "Why every child should learn to code". The Guardian.
  40. ^ "The accidental entrepreneur: from Leeds to Silicon Valley and back again". Leeds University. Archived from the original on 8 May 2016. Retrieved 14 April 2014.
  41. ^ Dan Crow. "The basics of Computer Science". Medium.
  42. ^ Dan Crow (23 June 2012). "Why we owe it all to Alan Turing". GigaOm.
  43. ^ "Prominent alumni – Science and technology". University of Leeds. Archived from the original on 11 August 2020. Retrieved 15 April 2014.
  44. ^ "AltSchool Team Page".
  45. ^ "Lever Continues its Rapid Expansion With New CFO and VP of Engineering". Lever. 9 September 2019.
  46. ^ "Mode Engineering Blog". Medium. Retrieved 22 June 2022.
  47. ^ "New Education AI, Engineering lead aims to help educators access the best of learning science". 20 November 2024.
  48. ^ Quine, Dan (2013). The George England locomotives of the Ffestiniog Railway. London: Flexiscale.
  49. ^ "Not to Go: The sad end of the Corris Railway". Heritage Railway. No. 220.
  50. ^ Quine, Dan (March 2015). "The Talyllyn Railway in the Late Haydn Jones Era". Heritage Railway. No. 200.
  51. ^ Quine, Dan (2016). Four East Midlands Ironstone Tramways Part Two: Kettering. Vol. 106. Garndolbenmaen: Narrow Gauge and Industrial Railway Modelling Review.
  52. ^ Quine, Dan (2016). Four East Midlands Ironstone Tramways Part One: Waltham. Vol. 105. Garndolbenmaen: Narrow Gauge and Industrial Railway Modelling Review.
  53. ^ Quine, Dan (March 2015). "Private railways of the West Midlands in the 1960s". Narrow Gauge World.
  54. ^ "43rd. Annual Conference" (PDF). Social History Society. June 2019.
  55. ^ Quine, Dan (4 June 2022). "SIA 2022 Paper Conference: Paper Sessions". Society for Industrial Archeology.
  56. ^ Quine, Dan (September 2022). "The Yellow Aster gold mine". Narrow Gauge and Industrial Railway Modelling Review (132).
  57. ^ Quine, Dan (December 2022). The Hendre Ddu Tramway: Blue Stones and Green Trees. Lightmoor Press. ISBN 9781915069153.