WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
The program for the next SALT (Semantics and Linguistic Theory) meeting is live, and Pranav Anand and alumnus Chris Barker (now Professor and Chair of Linguistics at NYU) are among the four invited speakers for the meeting. SALT 27 is to be hosted by the Linguistics Department of the University of Maryland, College Park, and it will take place on May 12 through May 14, 2017. For more info, see the website here.
This past Thursday and Friday, several of our alumni came together as part of a general conference for Google linguists. And they took pictures! Herewith, evidence:
From left to right: Jonni Kanerva, Jesse Saba Kirchner, Noah Constant, Oliver Northrup, Karl DeVries, Brianna Kaufman, Jeremy O’Brien
As we noted in the past, one semantic generalization that almost perfectly characterizes this group is the property of having been Computer Czar(ina) for the department. Another one that the phonologically inclined (or, perhaps, onomastically inclined) of you will notice is this: they all have a name beginning with /k/, /d͡ʒ/, or /n/.
Alum Devin Tankersley (BA, 2011) provides this long-distance update about his MA-work in Taiwan:
I am in my 3rd and final year as MA student of the Institute of Linguistics at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, currently working on my thesis, a study of the overt pronoun constraint in L1 and L2 Taiwan Sign Language. The program has a strong emphasis on analysis and understanding formal theory, so I am grateful for my training at UCSC, which prepared me for independently seeking out research topics, writing clear and concise argumentation, and deep discussions on various topics. My research interests broadly include syntax-phonology interactions, formal approaches to tone sandhi and tone neutralization, and grammatical description of under-documented languages, including sign languages. I intend to continue on to a PhD in the future, with the goal of making linguistic study more accessible to speakers of endangered and minority languages, as well as making topics in sign language linguistics more mainstream and prominent in the field.
Pranav Anand and LRC visitor Dan Hardt traveled to Austin last week to deliver a paper on automatically detecting the antecedents of sluices at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2016. The conference was replete with UCSC alums: Chis Potts (PhD, 2003) delivered a keynote address on his ongoing work on pragmatic reasoning at scale and Aaron White (BA, 2009) and Kyle Rawlins (PhD, 2008) presented work from their group at JHU on building a large-scale dataset of protorole judgments in a dependency-bank.
The LSA Member spotlight for this month is Chris Kennedy (PhD, 1997). Read his interview to learn: a) what he’s currently cooking, researchwise, b) what papers continue to inspire him, c) his view on how the field is changing, and d) how he distills his research advice into a koan.
The Department’s ellipsis consortium continues to ride the waves of UCSC’s publicity. ‘Why don’t we say what we mean?‘, the article highlighted on the cover of the Fall 2016 issue of UC Santa Cruz Magazine, focuses on Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey‘s research on sluicing as well as the strong presence of our alumni in Silicon Valley. Among the alums mentioned: Rachelle Boyson, Brianna Kaufman, Jesse Saba Kirchner, and Clara Sherley-Appel.
Recent alumna Anna Greenwood has just started work at Google, and has this report of her first week at the ‘plex:
On Monday (10/24), I started my new job at Google (Mountain View) as a Program Manager for the Speech team. I’m working on the same team as alums Jeremy O’Brien and Eileen O’Neill, and I’m on the same campus as Clara Sherley-Appel and Jesse Saba Kirchner (and more UCSC linguists I don’t know yet). The first week has been both unbelievably exciting and stressful with information overload, but I’m psyched to be working there with awesome, dedicated, intelligent, supportive people.
In related news, we have this report from alumna Brianna Kaufman about our alums in Google Venice (where Karl DeVries decamped to at the beginning of this month) and another synergy:
We’re continuing the Slug Linguist tradition of living close to the beach, drinking way too much coffee, and taking any excuse to procrastinate and go watch an indie movie, and we’re continuing the czar(ina) tradition of filling the LA office printers with paper when needed. Come visit us down in LA where the rent is relatively cheap compared to other large cities and where the cold-pressed juice is plentiful!
After some discussion, we realized that all three of the computer czar(ina)s from 2011-2013 are now Analytical Linguists in the LA office together. (Note: there should be some kind of study done, because if I recall correctly Jeremy O’Brien and Jesse Saba-Kirchner were also computer czars.)