I am a Computational Linguistics graduate student at San Diego State University. Like so many others, I undertook the study of Linguistics after I decided that my earlier career was not making me excited about going to work in the morning. I have an undergraduate degree in Landscape Architecture from UC Davis, and I spent most of the first five years after college working for a civil engineering firm. It was there that I developed my knowledge of GIS technologies, which, with the combination of a year's worth of studies in Comp Ling, has lead to my internship with the Linguist List.
While I am here I am involved in the last heaving throes of getting the LL-MAP project off the ground. It suits me well; I still retain a keen sense of interest in spatial relationships but my focus these days lies more along the lines of unconventional mappings and visualizations in both a geospatial and/or linguistic milieu. I have also taken on some editorial and quality control tasks.
My conventional linguistic interests include the utilization of first-order logic to derive linguistic ontologies, the efficient development of finite-state grammars, and deixis; my more strictly computational interests are in data mining, machine learning, and tagging efficiencies. Note that so far these can only be described as "interests" and not, say, "proficiencies". Talk to me again in about a year and a half, though.
Here is something true.
Fun with Regular Expressions
Hooked On Google worked for me!