I discovered computing while I was a Ph.D. student in English at Berkeley and contemplating a life of underemployment.   Turns out, that was a good thing.  I discovered  that human language is larger than literature, and sometimes gives up its secrets to computation.  I also learned that computing has a dark side, something that I worry about (and study), especially privacy and surveillance.  

 

I like to teach.  I especially like to help first and second year students discover the fun (and joy) of writing programs.  My advanced courses are related to my research--natural language processing and intelligent systems.  I also teach courses in computational theory and cryptography, mostly because they are gorgeous human creations, like the poetry of Andrew Marvell or Venice in winter (but also because theory is neutral and crypto offsets my worries about privacy).

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I am currently Visiting Scholar in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Washington State University, where we are building software to make day-long recordings of child speech more readily available to researchers.