Hey all,
For those of you who have visited my site before, you can see that yet again it is radically different. Yes, I am a Linux hack and I do mean hack in the literal term. I enjoy wasting many hours playing around with computers, particularly my own personal victim boxes and servers. In my mind, they are the muscle cars of the 21st century. Computer hobbist like me spend hours on their personal servers trying to improve performance, make modifications, and add "enhancements". So that is a polite warning that this site is in a constant state of flux.
I am finishing up a PhD student at Dalhousie in Computer Science. I have been doing research on information retrieval, natural language processing, and the Web. You can check out my research through my publications. I will be posting new ones from time to time and I do have pdf copies of most. Just email me should you ever need access to one. If you need a quick cure for insomnia, just check out my Master's thesis. I am quite proud of it actually; a condense version can be found in my JCDL 2006 paper. I will throw up my PhD thesis once I defend it in the fall.
I might almost have a PhD but I do not think of myself as one of those stiff academic types. I enjoy hacking away at new technologies and spinning off prototypes and projects. As for my hellish bend on information retrieval and natural language processing, it is my firm belief that most of the worlds problems digress to issues with communication. Often times, we have enough information to make informed decisions but we just can not access or understand it fast enough. I also believe that computers should be used for what they were designed for and that is automating different processes in our lives. Hence, where I like to focus my energies in my research is in automating different processes that will accelerate that access to and understanding of information that we need to make effective decisions.
Anyhow, stay tuned for updates to the site.