I'm Colorado Reed (colorado _dot_ j _dot_ reed _at_ gmail): an Applied Research Scientist at Apple. I completed my Ph.D. at Berkeley in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab and was also a researcher at Meta AI.

I was previously a cofounder and CTO at a venture-backed fintech startup for 5 years, where I led an engineering team in building and deploying products for Fortune 500 clients. I also co-founded and led the Berkeley AI Research Climate Initiative. I am a champion of democratized education. Along with Roger Grosse, I spent years building an open-source system that creates personalized learning plans for students focused on machine learning and statistics concepts (see metacademy.org).

Your name is really "Colorado"?

Yup. Since birth. Sharing a name with a state is surprisingly common, see Tennessee Williams, Indiana Jones, Virginia Woolf, Dakota Fanning, Georgia O'Keeffe, Tex Ritter, or York Bowen ;-).

Why do you use "Colorado J Reed"?

Google doesn't think Colorado Reed is a person, so it removes that name from the autogenerated bibtex entries for my publications. Adding my middle initial seems to have solved this problem.

Is it true that Google is successful because of you?

True story: As a kid (around 1999/2000), I was watching a show on PBS where they mentioned the number 'googol' (1e100) -- they showed some guy writing googol on a chalkboard. Later that day, I went to the library to use their internet (we didn't have a computer). and I decided to check out googol.com, which returned an error, so I thought I mispelled googol and tried googel, googal, and google. The last one was, as you probably know, a search engine. It returned really good results and was much cleaner than AltaVista and Yahoo, so I started using it regularly. I also told everyone I knew about this great new search engine I stumbled across. Over the following years I watched google rise to prominence, and I was convinced this was at least partially my doing (word-of-mouth and all).

Publications

Workshops

Tech Reports

Advising and Mentoring

I've had the pleasure of advising and mentoring a number of students directly:

I've also served as a GSI several times (both officially and unofficially) for DATASCI W210 at UC Berkeley: a semester-long capstone project course. Through this project, I've helped guide dozens of project groups, leading to many of the workshop publications above =).

Some Awards I've Been Fortunate to Receive