Trevor Fountain is a software engineer & product designer based in Toulouse, France. He’s the founder of Quail, a startup that sells software for managing antique stores and vendor malls. Prior to that he was a software engineer at Palantir Technologies, a co-founder and developer at Blazing Griffin (an indie game studio in Edinburgh, Scotland), and a co-founder and digital publisher at Far Off Places, a magazine of written whimsy. He obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, where he worked a member of ICCS and studied models of natural language categorization under Mirella Lapata.

He did his undergraduate degree at The University of Texas at Austin, in the Computer Science Department. He graduated as one of the first classes of Turing Scholars, and did his honour’s thesis work with the UT Computational Linguistics Lab as part of the Shalmaneser semantic role-labelling project.

He’s also an avid technologist, and has worked on a slew of projects across different platforms and stacks. He’s designed, developed, and released successful games for iOS, built multiple profitable SaaS businesses, created and distributed publications across modern & traditional media, and written more web-based tools than he can remember. He’s worked as part of a large team (at Palantir Technologies and Lockheed Martin), as part of a small team (at Sun Microsystems), as a founder (at Blazing Griffin and Far Off Places) and as a sole developer (on lots of other things).

Recently, he launched Quail, the world’s best store management software for antique malls and consignment shops, and Offramp, a tool to help SaaS businesses reduce churn by automating customer exit surveys. If you’re looking for a talented software engineer, an insanely fast interface designer/developer, or a technical co-founder, he can be bought.

Publications

• Fountain, T. (2012). Modelling the Acquisition of Natural Language Categories. Ph. D. Thesis. The University of Edinburgh [PDF]
• Fountain, T. & Lapata, M. (2012). Taxonomy Induction Using Hierarchical Random Graphs. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Language Technology and North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL 2012) Montreal, Canada [PDF]
• Fountain, T. & Lapata, M. (2011). Incremental Models of Natural Language Category Acquisition. L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]
• Fountain, T. & Lapata, M. (2010). Meaning Representation in Natural Language Categories. In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. [PDF]

Code

Like most programmer-folk, he has built up a small catalogue of useful tools over the years. He’s even made most of them publicly available, in the hope that others may find them useful — in particular, people seem to make use of:

• generator-dropwizard-gradle — A Yeoman generator for scaffolding API services using Java 8 and Dropwizard.
• Komet — A git commit editor for writing intelligent, well-formed log messages (contributor).
• classifier-service — Naive Bayes text classification as-a-service.
• rtypeset — A pure Ruby typographic pre-processor for HTML.
• rwordnet — A pure Ruby interface to Wordnet with a focus on ease of installation.
• ruby-regress — A re-implementation of Gary Perlman’s |STAT regress tool.
• progressbar — A clone of the similarly named Ruby gem, but for ANSI C.
• clusterfuck — A subversive distributed systems tool.

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