Professional

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.
I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
-- Woody Allen

	For a while I was contracting in the Visual Studio group in Microsoft, and now I'm working full-time for Localization Studio. Yes, I've gone from working at startups to the Evil Empire itself.
	When the .com boom was still booming, I worked as a general-purpose developer for Asta Networks. While it was not fun being laid off, you have to admire a company where the test pit has a disco ball and Nerf rockets are the preferred method of dealing with program managers.
	Before that, I worked for the Conversational Computing Corporation, now known as Conversay. I was originally hired to design and implement a language-independent text normalization engine for Conversay's speech engine, and was later promoted to Program Manager of the Core Technology Group.
	I graduated with a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington. My Master's thesis was on information extraction from airplane maintenance logs and was completed under the supervision of the late Dr. Alistair Holden. As a side project, I worked with Dr. Alan Borning on A Constraint-Based Specification for Box Layout in CSS2. I was also the editor-in-chief of Mossy Bits, the department's online literary magazine.
	After graduating from UMCP I stayed for eight months as a Faculty Research Assistant (!) to finish my work with Dr. John Maddocks and Dr. James Alexander on The Optimal Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots. The resulting research paper was published in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation.
	I spent my undergraduate education at the University of Maryland at College Park, where I double-majored in Mathematics and Computer Science and minored in English. While there, I founded the Sign Language Club and became editor-in-chief for the Catalyst Literary Magazine. I was first introduced to natural language processing and linguistics by Dr. Bonnie Dorr. While at UMCP I was blessed with the opportunity to have the late Dr. John Gannon as my professor, mentor, and friend. He will be sorely missed.