Jacob Eisenstein. (Jacob Eisenstein Photo)

— Natural language processing expert Jacob Eisenstein is taking a gig as a research scientist with Google AI in Seattle.

Eisenstein is an associate professor at Georgia Tech and has published extensively on language in the context of online platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia and online forums. He was recently on sabbatical and spent time with Facebook as a visiting scientist.

“Google is making tremendous contributions to natural language processing, both in basic research and in applications that have made NLP part of daily life. The team in Seattle is amazing, and Google’s broader AI group is full of superstars. I’ll be lucky to learn from them,” Eisenstein wrote in a farewell note. He’ll start the new job in July.

The hire is yet another example of big tech’s seemingly boundless appetite for artificial intelligence talent, the result of which is many of the field’s best and brightest leaving academic and research institutions.

Tami Wood. (Tami Wood Photo)

— Seattle-based female-focused co-working startup The Riveter is opening a Portland location and has hired Tami Wood as the general manager. Wood was formerly community lead at Jaguar Land Rover Innovation Labs and did community-building work at eBay prior to that.

“I’ll be joining their amazing team in June as GM of the soon-to-be Portland location and I legit could not be more excited,” Wood wrote on Twitter.

Following a $15 million funding round, The Riveter is in the midst of a national expansion that includes locations in Dallas, Denver, Portland, Ore., Minneapolis – St. Paul, Atlanta and Austin, Tex.

Scott Chancellor will leave AWS to join business software company Apptio as chief product officer, GeekWire has learned. Chancellor is the head of AWS Insights, which helps customers manage their costs and usage of the cloud platform.

Last year, Apptio ceased to be a public company when it was bought by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners in a massive $1.9 billion deal.

Kevin Conroy and Michelle Griffin. (Adaptive Photos)

— IPO-bound Adaptive Biotechnologies named Kevin Conroy and Michelle Griffin to its board of directors.

Conroy is CEO of Exact Sciences and oversaw the launch of a DNA screening test for colorectal cancer. Griffin is a pharma and biotech veteran who has helped a number of companies navigate the public markets, including assisting on the IPOs for Trubion Pharmaceuticals and Corixa, which was bought by GSK.

Adaptive filed to go public this week in a surprise announcement that gave us the first look inside the company’s financials, including the details of its deal with Microsoft to develop a universal blood test.

—Digital media veteran Chris Okroy has opened up Detroit Northwest (DNW), a new media agency in Seattle. Okroy was previously at Seattle’s Add3 and Detroit-based agency Campbell Ewald prior to that.

Audinate, a maker of audio-visual systems with offices in Portland, Ore. and Sydney, named Aidan Williams as the successor to CEO Lee Ellison. Williams co-founded Audinate and previously served as the company’s CTO.

— New York-based online pharmacy Blink Health hired three former Amazon executives to leadership roles, including Madan Nagaldinne as chief people officer, Bharath Chinamanthur as executive vice president of engineering and operations, and Christopher Plambeck as senior vice president of data sciences and monetization.

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