I work in the Distributed Information Retrieval Group. It is run by Jamie Callan. He is the person who gets to dictate how much stress there is in my life. Luckily, he is very reasonable. Within that group, I work on the Lemur toolkit project. This toolkit is for language modeling and information retrieval. One of its goals is to support LM and IR researchers and help foster a community. I do not have a lot of (or any) LM or IR background, but I am learning a lot as we go along.

In addition, I'm working on a distributed IR problem dealing with how and how much we can prune a collection selection database and still get reasonable performance.

Even though I have a masters in HCI, I enjoy working on IR. I used to work at a startup that did a lot of data mining, using neural networks. My main area of interest is in artificial intelligence and adaptive systems. When I was in Robotics, I worked for a software agents group that specialized in multi-agent systems. I mainly worked on information agents, which is basically a class of agents that does IR.


For my final project in the human-computer interaction masters program, my group designed and prototyped the software interface for a new handheld device aimed at high schoolers. It goes beyond Texas Instrument's current graphing calculators technology and hopes to become a tool in all subjects. I can't say too much more until the NDA's been lifted.


I added this section because I thought I had some interesting personal projects I could share. But I can't think of anything right now.

I bought a really old mechanical typewriter from the 40's and am trying to find ribbon for it. Maybe I will start a project after I get ink. Update: I did find ribbon. It didn't work very well. It is really, really loud when you try to type anything. I never did anything with it except waste a few sheets of paper.