From Recess to CS

My first computer was a Ti99 which I bought from Marc Gustafson for $20 (same pic, right). The Ti99 was one of those fancy jobs that had both a keyboard and a slot for console cames such as Parsec. You hooked it up to a TV, and the best part was that you could save your programs onto cassette tapes.

In Junior High, I continued to program as a hobby and also started and operated a Bulletin Board System called The Ice Age. In addition, my friends and I spent quite a few hours playing the earliest first person shooter games such as Doom. Later, in High School, I took AP Computer Science classes and begin to learn about data structures, algorithms, and memory management in C/C++/ASM. They were quite good classes for the High School level.

Keeping with the same theme, I next earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. While studying, I interned for about 25 hours a week at two telecom companies (not at the same time mind you). While College is probably the time that many nerds are really getting into computers, I was actually spending more time with other activities. I did however get a great deal of enjoyment out of a few independent studies, which focused on graphics programming and artificial intelligence (AI).

After graduation, I found the exact sort of job that I had hoped for but not thought I would find. Most CS students end up developing business end applications, but I desired a job that was more research oriented. I was hired at Language Computer Corporation (LCC), a company which researches Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP draws on many fields including Computer Science, AI, Statistics, Linguistics, and others, in order to process human language towards some useful end. Search engines, voice recognition systems, and optical character recognition are all common forms of NLP.

LCC has been a great experience because I've been able grow tremendously while working on challenging problems with really intelligent people. Currently I serve as the project manager over several groups, which focus on a number of problems including Information Extraction and Question Answering. While I don't do much programming anymore, the position is very rewarding because I get to work on solving the problems at a higher level. Moreover, I appreciate the fact that the research and systems that we produce can be used our government in order to improve our country's intelligence and security.

While it isn't clear what the future holds, I suppose that my dream job would be to find some profitable niche problem which could be solved using the most recent of developments in NLP or AI. I think that entrepreneurial blood must run through my veins, and I can remember from a young age seeing my father tinkering and inventing in his shop.