We’re happy to announce the addition of Will Fitzgerald to Wordnik!

Will is leading the effort to build Wordnik’s analytics platform. Before coming to Wordnik, Will was a senior research development engineer for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. He joined Microsoft as part of their acquisition Powerset and their semantic search engine, where he was in the first round of employees. While at Powerset, Will led the development of their lexical server (a kind of Wordnik light) and spent a lot of time tuning models to find references to people, places, and organizations.

Prior to Bing and Powerset, Will helped build an autonomous helicopter for NASA, led some translation projects at Canada’s National Research Council, taught computer science, built dialog systems for NASA and others. He got his PhD from Northwestern University at the Institute for the Learning Sciences, where he built semantic dialog systems for embedding in educational tools.

Will proudly evidences the Northern Cities Shift, likes to sing loudly, and is an editor of The Trumpet, a thrice-annual periodical for singers and writers of dispersed harmony and fasola music. Based on a statistical analysis of his writings, his favorite word is the. He blogs at Will.Whim, and can be reached at will@wordnik.com.