Ph.D. Student
Department of Linguistics
University of Washington
email: sfd at u dot washington dot edu

I received a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1992. After graduation I worked in the computer industry for several years as a software engineer, eventually working on the Microsoft FrontPage editor. In 2001, I began taking linguistics classes at the University of Washington, then applied and was accepted to the Master's degree program in Linguistics in 2002. I completed my Master's Degree in Fall quarter, 2004, and am currently continuing on towards a Ph.D. in linguistics.  My dissertation research involves adding case, person, number, gender, and agreement to the Grammar Matrix customization system.

I served as the GPSS Senator from the Linguistics department in 2002-2003. In 2004-2005, I was the Social Chair for the LSUW (Linguistics Society at the University of Washington). I also manage the UW Computational Linguistics Wiki. I worked as a research assistant for several quarters in 2004 (and occasionally afterwards) on the Vocal Joystick project. In 2005, I implemented a coordination module for the LinGO Grammar Matrix (see below for a paper about it), on which work continues. In autumn of 2005, I was a TA in Linguistics 100. I spent autumn of 2006 as a Visiting Scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where I studied the typology of case, number, person, and agreement.

My interests include computational linguistics, various syntaces, typology, corpus linguistics, and everything else having to do with human language. I am a native speaker of English, a stilted and largely illiterate speaker of Japanese, and I can puzzle my way through French, German, and Latin if I have to. I also have the barest smattering of self-taught Western Armenian. (Expect more languages in the future.)