Background
My name is Jason M. Adams and I have been married to Donna Adams since September of 2000. I have just graduated with my masters of science in Language Technologies from the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. My research has been with recommender systems and word sense disambiguation. The former I have written about here, and the latter is a part of the GWAP project led by Luis von Ahn.
Prior to coming to Carnegie Mellon in August 2006, I got my B.S. in Computer Science from the University of South Carolina (the real USC). Before that I went to Midlands Tech to take care of some basic classes. While there, I took an elective on Anthropology and learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. While I wasn’t sure (and am still not sure) how much I agree with it, I did find it fascinating. It certainly made me aware of the fact that linguistics is an exciting and worthwhile field, so I proceeded to take as many classes as I could while at USC. Since I worked full-time as well, I had to balance that interest against the fact that I also wanted to graduate sometime this decade. Deciding I wanted to pursue linguistics further, I thought finding a field that combined it with computer science would be ideal. Once I learned there was a field called computational linguistics, the rest is history.
The Mendicant Bug
As an obsessed owner of two dogs, Daedalus (beagle, left) and Willow (australian shepherd), it should come as no surprise that the name I have chosen for my blog has something to do with them. To my frequent dismay, I find that the old cliche about owner-pet similarity holds true for me and Daedalus. We are both short and stocky and will eat anything put in front of us. He’s also loyal — something I try to be. Donna and I started calling him Daedalbug early on, which got shortened to just “the bug”. ThenI took this picture of him with a scarf wrapped around his head (and a treat dangling near the camera so he would look straight at it), which I think looks very Oliver-Twisty. Daedal is definitely a mendicant at heart, probing the edges of the world, looking for whatever he might find.
