Brooke Cowan Post-Doctoral Lecturer MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory 32 Vassar Street, 32-G480 Cambridge, MA 02139 617•253•7781

About

I am a Clare Boothe Luce post-doctoral lecturer at the MIT Computer Science and Aritficial Intelligence Laboratory. I am currently teaching 6.042: Math for Computer Science with Tom Leighton and Marten Van Dijk.

In June 2008, I finished my PhD thesis under the supervision of Michael Collins. My doctoral thesis research was the area of in statistical natural language processing, in particular machine translation and parsing. In January 2004, I finished my master's thesis on natural language generation with Stephanie Seneff of the Spoken Language Systems Group.

Before I started graduate school, I spent a year teaching Spanish at the Keys School before deciding to become a credentialed teacher through UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. I then spent two years teaching in a Spanish immersion program at Hatch Elementary School in Half Moon Bay, CA.

I graduated with a B.A. in American Studies from Stanford University.

Teaching

• Post-Doctoral Lecturer, 6.042: Math for Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Fall 2008
  
• Teaching Assistant, 6.034: Artificial Intelligence, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Spring 2004
  
• Teacher, 4th and 5th Grade Spanish Immersion Program, Hatch Elementary School, Half Moon Bay, CA, 1997-1999
  
• Student Teacher, English and ESL, Pinole Valley High School and El Cerrito High School, Contra Costa County, CA, 1996-1997
  
• Teacher, Spanish grades 1-8, Keys School, Palo Alto, CA, 1995-1996
  
• Teacher, Mamá Program, Guadalajara, Mexico, Fall 1994 (International Partnership for Service Learning) and Summer 1995
  
• Tutor, Catholic Worker House, Redwood City, CA, 1993-1995
  
• Teacher, Summerbridge Program, New Orleans, LA and San Francisco, CA, Summer 1991 and Summer 1989
  

Awards

• MIT Clare Boothe Luce Post-Doctoral Lecturer, Fall 2008
  
• NSF-Johns Hopkins Grant Recipient, 2006-2007
  
• Departmental Honors and Distinction, American Studies Department, Stanford University, 1994
  
• Phi Beta Kappa, 1993
  

Publications

PhD Thesis

• A Tree-to-Tree Model for Statistical Machine Translation [pdf] [slides]

Master's Thesis

• PLUTO: A Preprocessor for Multilingual Spoken Language Generation [pdf]

Conference Papers

• A Discriminative Model for Tree-to-Tree Translation, EMNLP 2006
  Brooke Cowan, Ivona Kučerová, and Michael Collins [pdf]


• Morphology and Reranking for the Statistical Parsing of Spanish, EMNLP 2005
  Brooke Cowan and Michael Collins [pdf]

Last updated: October 2008