Biography
I'm a researcher and Ph.D. student of Henry S. Thompson and Andy Clark in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. I am currently engaged in a study of the architectural principles of the World Wide Web as being developed by the W3C through a philosophical lens, particulary the work of B.C. Smith, Pat Hayes, Fred Dretske, Jon Barwise, and others. I'm also interested in how the Web is currently converging computational phenoumena, from databases to programming languages due to its universality. On the side, I'm also working with Ewan Klein on making NLP components available as Web Services for Semantic Web-enabled service composition. I've received my funding in part from an ORS award. All that rises must converge.
I received my MSc. in Informatics (my major specialism in Learning from Data and my minor specialism in Natural Language and Language Engineering) with distinction from the University of Edinburgh. For my thesis, I explored the idea of flexible representations that combined statistical and symbolic knowledge for automated plot analysis in the context of the StoryStation, an intelligent writing tutor . My Masters thesis has its own web-page,www.semanticstories.org and won an 2003 Award for Best MSc. Dissertation. My time here was in part funded by the American Friends of the University of Edinburgh and the St. Andrew's Society. StoryStation is currently being funded by the Stanford-Edinburgh Link and test-run in Scottish schools.
I graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2001 with a B.S. with Honors in Mathematical Sciences (Computer Science Concentration) and a Minor in Cognitive Science . While there, I worked with Peter C. Gordon on creating corpora software for experiments. My senior thesis was on topic segmentation, both from computational and psychological experiments. I also worked with Jon Tolle on neural network models. Many to Thomas Wallsten, who helped me realize I can study computation and cognition in the first place, and my friend Ken Vaden (currently pursuing his Ph.D. at UC-Irvine) for getting me interested in Artificial Intelligence. I developed some software that may be of use for speech synthesis and corpora searching.
In between various academic adventures, I've been employed by the non-profit NetCorps doing everything from developing computer literacy programs for low-income communities to installing wireless networks in homeless shelters (really!), spending a summer doing computer education work in Mexico. I also spent years as a system administrator at UNC-Chapel Hill's CS Department under the supervision of Bil Hays and was a software engineer under Dr. Thissen working on psychometric item-response theory programs.