Institution/Organization: The MITRE Corporation
Department: Human Language Technology
Academic Status: Graduate Student
What conference theme areas are you interested in (check all that apply):
Data Analytics and Visualization
Data-Driven Modeling and Prediction
Scientific Software and High-Performance Computing
Interests:
Academic: I am currently working only my Ph.D. dissertation in Theoretical Linguistics concerning duration cues in diphthong vowels cross-linguistically. Data was collected in the Faroe Islands and at Georgetown University. The experiments test the production and perception of dipthong vowels in three different languages under different speech rate conditions. The analysis will provide insight into how to incorporate diphthongs into theories of vowel dispersion and explain trends in diphthong membership in vowel inventories cross-linguistically.
Professional: I currently work as a Computational Linguist for the MITRE Corporation in a team that focuses on providing new technologies to the US Courts. We have several projects including text extraction, speech technologies, and other natural language processing. I’d like to be more involved with more signal processing (speech-related), more back-end coding/NLP capabilities, and machine learning. We are also starting to develop some deep learning projects on Court documents. I am a self-taught programmer.
Non-Work Related Activities:
In the little time that I have outside of my professional job and academic pursuit, I fill much of my time with creating artwork. I make quilts on my sewing machine and I also am proficient in ink/watercolor, which I often do with my friends. For fun I’m also trying to work my way through watching all the movies on the IMDB top 250 movies list (hint: it takes much longer than you would expect!). I also attend the DC Natural Language Processing meetup group to network with other computational linguist professionals/students in my area.