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Rob Speer
I'm Rob Speer, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As an undergrad at MIT, I majored in 6-3 (computer science) and 21M (music), and now I work in artificial intelligence at the Media Lab.
Research
I work in natural language processing (NLP), or enabling interaction with computers using human language.
My perspective on the field is that we don't currently have anything close to the computing power that a computer would need to understand language the way a human does. What we can do is use the AI techniques we know to narrow the gulf of understanding between a human and a computer.
See my research page for more.
Distractions
I compose music.
Canada/USA Mathcamp is the most amazing place on earth for a high-school geek to be. I went there from 2000 to 2002, and was a counselor there in the summer of 2006.
I contribute a lot to Wikipedia, a collaboratively-edited free encyclopedia. I'm now an admin there. See my Wikipedia user page.
Each January, I participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt on the "Manic Sages" team.
I play a fair amount of Scrabble and other word games. Online wordlists are often useful for practice. They're also useful in the Mystery Hunt.
I'm learning to speak Lojban, an artificial language based on predicate logic.
I like to design games. I've invented a two-player card game called Duality.
