Posted by Ancestry Team on March 14, 2013 in Inside our Offices

When people think of Ancestry.com the first thing that comes to mind might not be technology. But Ancestry.com is a really great technology company. Our engineers are working on some very interesting technical challenges and solving a range of complex problems.

This new blog will be written by engineers for engineers and will focus on the fun and challenging projects that we are working on as well as our approach to software engineering and other projects around the company. Coming up, you’ll hear about our adventures in Big Data, how we extract semantic meaning from semi-structured historical sources and internal games we have used to learn agile concepts. We hope this forum will provide some insight into the fun and challenging environment where our engineers work.

At Ancestry.com we connect people with their past but to do that we have to invent the technology solutions of the future. Here is just a sample of some of the interesting technology challenges that we are working on today:

  • Natural language processing for entity extraction in order to provide contextual search of historical documents
  • Machine learning for record linking and tree stitching algorithms
  • Image processing technology to enhance the readability of time-worn images
  • Mobile platforms development that leverages mobile specific features for family history
  • Using DNA to match distant cousins and determine ethnicity

My colleagues and I are passionate about technology so thank you for reading and participating.

Scott Sorensen
SVP Engineering, Ancestry.com

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