Fred studied Linguistics and Computer Science at McGill University (Montreal, Canada), and went to graduate school in Cognitive Science at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada), specializing in computational phonology. After a year of post-doctoral research at The Ohio State University, he worked for a year with Google's Speech Team as a Data Ops Specialist, and was subsequently hired at About.com as a Research Scientist (NLP). Since 2013 he has been a Data Scientist (NLP) on the Search Intelligence team at Ask.com, focusing on text classification and natural language processing.