ALUMNA REPORT: ANNE STURGEON

Anne Sturgeon, who received her PhD in 2006, recently sent this report to WHASC:

I’ve worked in a few areas as an “industry linguist” since I graduated. First, I tackled information retrieval in large document sets at H5 (as have several other UCSC alums), then I moved into voice recognition technology for, mainly, 511 Traffic and Transit systems at LogicTree and Leidos. I’ve recently moved onto a team at my current company, Leidos, that is working in the field of “Big Data” to create a Data Analytics platform that will allow organizations to manage large corpora of web and social media data. We will be enabling search capabilities, as well as Machine Learning algorithms to better understand the data for our clients. This is a new area of linguistics for me and I am enjoying learning more about Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to do the analysis we need. Linguistics continues to be an extremely fascinating field of study for me, both inside and outside the academy. There is a never-ending supply of interesting research questions.