I am an intern on the technology discovery team at TurboTax. One of my recent assignments has been to research the field of natural language question and answering (NLQA) in order to see whether we can leverage existing technology to answer user questions and improve the level of customer support that Intuit provides to customers, while saving support staff hours.

We want to alleviate demand on support representatives by making a smarter system for fielding customer questions.

The goal is to build a system that takes as input a context-free natural language query. e.g. “Where is my W2?” and spits out an answer like “Your W2 should arrive by {{ Date }}. If you do not receive it by {{ AnotherDate }}, contact your employer.” Success is not necessarily being able to field every single question. However, it is the goal that what we build substantially alleviates the demand on support...

When I walked out of Logan Airport at one o'clock in the morning, I felt a little uneasy. Would Boston live up to the expectations? The cab ride to International Village was expensive and the room that I eventually walked into a little less cozy than I anticipated. Curled up with a hoodie and an empty stomach, I survived the night on the bare mattress. Three out of ten, would not recommend.

I could talk about how great it was to meet so many people in the week that followed, but to be honest I felt lonely. Going on walks with the floormates was an awkward jumble of people trying to cut each other off. Getting a comforter a few days in, now that was nice. Feeling like I had something to look forward to with upcoming classes helped too.

As it often is with these things, I think the biggest motivator, and what makes us ultimately see our current position as being somehow better than it...

According to Northeastern’s website, three items are considered for admissions: grades, test scores, recommendations.

Notably missing: essays.

What does that tell us about the university’s goals? One thing is that Northeastern does not want to introduce bias to its admissions process.

The other is that the admissions process is optimized for one thing: rankings. Essays do not help with that. SAT scores and class rank do.

Does it make sense for the university to strip the life from an application? For Northeastern, it just might.

Unlike elite tier private universities, Northeastern has to deal with a yield in the teens. To fill a class of 2,800, the university has to admit some 15,000 students of a pool of 50,000. Compare that to Stanford which admits only 1,300 from 30,000. An elite tier school gets its pick of the litter. Northeastern has to optimize. When you have to choose...