About
I am an nth year, ABD, PhD student at MIT in Cambridge, MA. I work in the Spoken Language Systems group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory under the direction of Stephanie Seneff. My office is in the Stata Center. It looks like a Dr. Seuss creation. I love it.
My research is on using interactive dialogue systems to detect and correct mispronunciations in learners of a foreign language. I am focused on the case of Americans learning Mandarin Chinese, though the techniques I am investigating should be applicable to other language pairs. Chinese is an interesting target foreign language due to its tonal qualities and relatively small syllable inventory.
I attended Drexel University in Philadalphia, PA for my B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science. I also completed a minor in Mathematics and studied Mandarin for many terms. My M.S. thesis explored the use of spectral graph theory to index and cluster CAD solid models in relational databases.
Chronologically, I am a 7th year student, but in reality, I am only a 5th year student. In 2005, I was placed on Active Duty by the US Army Reserve for 6 months of training. Near the end of 2006, I was placed on Active Duty for another 18 months. I spent 2007 and the first part of 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq. These 2 interruptions totaled 2 years - plus time off for decompression.
My advisor and MIT have been absolutely awesome with accomodating my departures.
I write a blog where I mostly write about programming, my research, impending fatherhood, and other geeky pursuits. I avoid politics due to my other job title. My partner, Natalija, and I maintained a blog during my deployment. I whimsically named it A Vacation from MIT. I should have named it MIT is a Vacation.
Professional
CV (PDF when I get to it!)
Resume (PDF)
Publications