About the Author

I am a reluctant diarist who currently lives on a beautiful hilltop overlooking a portion of the Clearwater River in Idaho County, Idaho.  Idaho County is about the size of Connecticut with a population under 15,000 souls.  The county offers one stop light, one book store, and (to the best of my knowledge) one computational linguist.

My academic work was in Physics and Math (MSU), Linguistics (Stanford), and Computer Science (Indiana).  In academe I have worked on the special function theory of non-standard logics, average-time analysis of algorithms for SAT, and I have designed a protein structure prediction pipeline.

My time in industry has been mostly spent in R&D and new product development for startups.  I have been an officer and co-founder of five high-tech companies – some successful, some not.  My last project was to design the algorithms and write the software to run a 6-camera vision sensor that sat on the end of a robot effector.  The job was to produce a real-time, 3-D model of what the robot was doing.  The project’s charm was that the robot was depositing a black material onto a pitch-black substrate – the signal strength was so far down into the noise that we called it ‘black hole inspection’ (but not in front of the investors).

This blog is my way of getting up to speed on the state of the art in search engine technology.  I have been away from linguistics for a while, but I’ve been itching to hack the net for years.  Now, unfortunately, I’m a little behind the curve and I see that many of my favorite ideas have already been implemented by snot-nosed startups in Washington, California, or England.  Nonetheless, I am going to spend a year writing a search engine my way.  I don’t know what will come of it: perhaps my next job, perhaps a book, perhaps a few papers, perhaps a good search engine, perhaps nothing.

G.N.H.a.v.e.n.

Email at Reach.com.

“Specialization is for insects.”
- Robert A. Heinlein