Ron Zacharski

Open Education Database

raz — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 02:33:58 +0000

I am a fan of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). These courses allow people everywhere (well, at least those with access to the Internet) to have access to courses taught by the top people in the field. For example, Peter Norvig, head of research at Google and the author of the top textbook on artificial intelligence, and Sebastian Thrun, a research professor at Stanford who lead the development of a robotic vehicle that won the DARPA challenge race to drive a 150 mile mountainous course, taught an free online course on artificial intelligence. 160,000 people in 190 countries enrolled in the course. This is a phenomenal shift in education. Students no longer need to be accepted to elite universities to have access to the highest quality instruction. I’ve used MOOCs in several of my courses ranging from introduction to computer science courses to upper level courses.

In these classes I do not lecture, instead students watch the videos provided by the online course. Class time is spent working on projects. I am also supervising students who are doing individual studies mainly using a MOOC (currently one on cryptography and one on robotics). This enables them to gain credit at the University of Mary Washington for an online course in an topic that we do not offer in a traditional format. If you currently are a student at UMW and are interested in doing this please talk to me.

Two big players in this field include Udacity, which offers a “start a courses anytime at your convenience” approach, and Coursera, where courses start on specified dates. Several sites, including the Open Education Database and Class Central have created course lists aggregated from top online universities.

The question I ponder is what does this mean for traditional universities.

Book to be Published

raz — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 21:06:25 +0000

My book, A Programmer’s Guide to Data Mining: The Ancient Art of the Numerati, is to be translated into Chinese and published by Posts and Telecommunications Press, the largest publisher of computer books in China. This Chinese version will be available in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. I am super excited about this opportunity to help more people learn about data mining. As always, the English version of the book is available for free at guidetodatamining.com. Also forthcoming is an English paperback edition for under $20. Now I just need to finish the revisions.

Creating an Enlightened Society

admin — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 19:47:31 +0000

I am a Buddhist practitioner. On 15 July I presented the Sunday talk ‘My poodle and creating an enlightened society’ at the Religious Science church Center for Spiritual Living in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The talk was about bodhisattvas– beings who work tirelessly for the benefit of others.

For more information please see compassionatepath.org. I am always interested in talking with anyone about Buddhism and in practicing meditation with anyone. Feel free to contact me.

Underspecification of Cognitive Status

raz — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:47:53 +0000

Jeanette Gundel presented a talk “Underspecification of cognitive status in reference production: the grammar-pragmatics interface” at the Workshop on Bridging the Gap between Computational, Empirical, and Theoretical Approaches to Reference at the Annual Cognitive Science Meeting in Boston. The talk was about our work on the Givenness Hierarchy.

Within the Givenness Hierarchy (GH) framework of Gundel, Hedberg, & Zacharski (1993), referring expressions are assumed to conventionally encode two kinds of information: conceptual information about the speaker’s intended referent and procedural information about the assumed cognitive status of that referent in the mind of the addressee, the latter encoded by various determiners/pronouns. The current work focuses on effects of underspecification of cognitive status, showing that the GH and its predictions, interacting with independently motivated pragmatic/processing factors, makes possible a principled explanation of the distribution and interpretation of different referring forms in spontaneous discourse as well a number of recent experimental results in the psycholinguistic literature. (PDF)

Scientific Productivity Rating

raz — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:32:52 +0000

There are two common indices for scientific productivity: the h-index and the g-index. I have gone up in both these ratings. My h-index is now 13. This means that I have 13 articles each of which has been cited at least 13 times. The Wikipedia entry for the g-index says “ a value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure (associate professor) at major research universities.” To put that number in perspective, Sebastian Thrun, a robotics professor at Stanford and developer of the Google Self-Driving Car, has an h-index of 95. So while I am very happy with my 13, it isn’t that great in the scheme of things. My g-index is now 39– I have 39 publications whose combined citations exceed 39 squared. My Erdõs number is 3.

Cluster by Night

raz — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 02:32:15 +0000

If you are a student looking for a cool individual study project or are just interested in a project for its own sake, you might consider updating the existing resource, Cluster by Night. Cluster by Night (CnB) is a live CD approach to setting up an HPC (High Performance Computing) cluster for MPI work. (MPI is a programming library that allows you to write programs for computing clusters.) We’ve used CnB for the last several years in our operating systems class. What distinguishes CbN from other approaches (for example, the popular PelicanHPC) is that it can work with an existing network. With other approaches the master node on the cluster hands out IP addresses; with CbN the cluster nodes receive their IP addresses from the existing DHCP server. I think Cluster by Night is an awesome resource.

How can you help?

Here’s the thing. The last time CbN was updated was several years ago. It doesn’t work on computers that have new network cards. So, for example, it doesn’t work on the desktops in our computer lab. Bummer. Getting this updated is not rocket science. Right now, CbN uses Tiny Core Linux v2.2. We would need to update that to the current version, 4.2. CnB also uses an outdated version of the openMPI library. If would be nice if we could update that. There are several other enhancements we could make. The work is incremental. So there are nice defined independent tasks. And there is yet another reason you might consider this …

You will be doing something that will be used by a community of people.

Another cool thing about this project is that there is a high probability that it will be used by a fair number of people. Often undergrad projects once completed are put on the shelf and ignored. Here’s a chance to make a difference! If you are interested contact me.

topiCS paper – Accepted!

raz — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:02:46 +0000

Jeanette Gundel, Nancy Hedberg, and I finally got our paper, Underspecification of Cognitive Status in Reference Production: Some Empirical Predictions accepted to the journal, Topics In Cognitive Science, a journal of the Cognitive Science Society. It will be appearing in the special issue on “Production of Referring Expressions: Bridging the Gap between Computational and Empirical Approaches to Reference.” Within the Givenness Hierarchy framework we outlined in our 1993 paper, lexical items included in referring forms are assumed to conventionally encode two kinds of information: conceptual information about the speaker’s intended referent and procedural information about the assumed cognitive status of that referent in the mind of the addressee. In this current paper we explore the role of underspecification of cognitive status in reference processing.We show how this framework accounts for a number of experimental results in the literature.

Presented Workshop in Kansas

raz — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 01:40:19 +0000

I just presented a half-day session on data and text mining at the Digital Jumpstart Workshop at the University of Kansas. I am grateful to the co-directors of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities for inviting me to this event, which was open to KU faculty, staff, and graduate students. Links to the resources I covered at the workshop are available at Resources for the Digital Jumpstart Workshop.

Kansas Corpus Linguistics Talk

raz — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 14:32:06 +0000

I just presented an invited paper “Don’t throw the analysis out with the bath water: Lessons learned from Modern Standard Arabic geographical classification” at the University of Kansas. The talk was sponsored by the departments of Linguistics and Slavic Languages. The abstract is as follows:

In corpus linguistics we throw out information. For example, in collecting corpora we necessarily omit some information about the extralinguistic context and only record that which we consider relevant for the purpose of our current research. In the analysis stage, we often remove data without thinking. One clear example of this is the routine practice of removing frequent words (commonly referred to as ‘stop words’) in a pre-processing step before analysis. In this talk I describe my work in Modern Standard Arabic geographical classification to illustrate the importance of being more mindful when we make these decisions about what to keep and what to discard. For example, I will show that it is possible to geographically classify text solely using words that some researchers have described as being fluff, superfluous, and non-significant. I will also describe how the paucity of metadata of commonly available Arabic corpora hampers research such as this

API Workshop

raz — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 14:23:39 +0000

I just attended, as an invited participant, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities’ API Workshop, which was held on February 25th and 26th. The workshop alternated between presentations, lightning talks, and what the organizers called ‘unconferencing’. The highlights for me were the talks given by Mano Marks on Google’s MAP API, Google’s Fusion Table, and Google Refine. I’ve spent more time than I care to remember cleaning up language data. For example, I spent weeks cleaning up a Guarani lexicon. Google Refine is a tool that helps automate that process. If I used that for the Guarani lexicon I would have been done in a day! Google Fusion Table is an amazingly easy way to create map mashups just using a spreadsheet. The maps you create can be embedded on your web page. Even though I am gushing about Mano Marks’ talks, the other presentations were equally valuable.