I did my undergraduate work in Linguistics at the University of California at San Diego. After receiving my BA in 1981, I went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do graduate work in Linguistics. I received my PhD from MIT in 1985.
After getting my degree I joined AT&T Bell Labs as a Postdoc, and then became a regular member of the technical staff in 1986. While at AT&T Bell Labs I worked mostly on natural language processing and text-to-speech synthesis.
In 1996 AT&T underwent the second of its long fragmentations (the first had been back in 1983 with the breakup of the Bell System). I decided to stay at Bell Labs, which became part of Lucent Technologies. At Bell Labs, I continued to work on text-to-speech synthesis, and was one of the main people responsible for the Bell Labs Multilingual TTS System. In 1997 I was made a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs.
In 1999 I decided to leave Bell Labs and move to AT&T Labs --- Research. There I continued to work on TTS for a while, but soon moved onto other things, such as the WordsEye automatic text-to-scene conversion system, and my most recent work, which was on speech data mining.
In 2003 I left AT&T to join the faculties of Linguistics, and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In January 2009 I left Illinois to join the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon Health & Science University.
I have always been interested in languages, and have studied a few of them over the years, resulting in varying degrees of familiarity. These include modern languages like Spanish, French, German, Russian, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Dutch and Welsh; "dead" languages such as Old English, Old Icelandic, Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Classical Chinese; and "resurrected" languages such as Manx Gaelic. Unfortunately I have also forgotten quite a few of the ones I have studied. Probably I have forgotten more languages than most people ever knew 😃.
I am interested in history, in particular the cultural history of China, and the history of the Arabs. I also have a special interest in Easter Island, which has an as yet largely undeciphered script called rongorongo. (This is related to my more general interest in writing systems: see my publications page.) Though there have been recently some rather strong claims to the effect that rongorongo is a full writing system (as opposed to a mnemonic system as proposed by Alfred Métraux), I find the evidence presented so far to be equivocal. Given time, I intend to write something on this topic. Recently I've been doing some work on discovering parallel texts using approximate string matching techniques.
Moving further afield I have in the past been an amateur musician (recorder), and an amateur mycologist: I still have a rather nice specimen of Battarrea phalloides, which I collected at Torrey Pines State Reserve in San Diego in 1976; I also have a specimen of the even rarer Battarrea digueti, collected about the same time in the Anza Borrego Desert.
I love to travel. Some of the more interesting places I've been are
Easter Island, Madagascar,
Orchid Island
è˜å¶¼ (off the south east coast of Taiwan), Malacca (Peninsular
Malaysia), Isle of Man (Irish Sea), and Dorrigo National Park (NSW,
Australia). See my December 2004 note
on an interesting experience I had in Uttar Pradesh, India.
Finally: I love cooking.