I am a graduate student in computational linguistics at the University of Washington. My specific areas of interest are speech recognition, phonetics and phonology, with a narrow focus on Mandarin lexical tone for my thesis.

I spent more than 25 years in high tech, primarily at Microsoft in roles including test manager, software development engineer, and technical program manager on product including Visual Studio, Azure, and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

I initially entered the CLMS program to update my technical skills after a long stint in management. Ageism is a big problem in high tech, but supposedly keeping current will help. The program has been both fun and challenging — it had been literally 30 years since I took Calculus! As a “non-traditional” graduate student, it was a bit difficult to get back into the learning mindset, but I found I was a much better student than I was as an undergraduate. I would recommend never stop using your brain!

I have long been empathic to the international and non-English speaking customer due to my undergraduate background in linguistics and time spent living in Japan and Sweden and have had considerable success in helping team ensure their products are ready for a global audience, are able to be localized, tested post-translation for functional and language issues, and are release simultaneously with the base English software.

Finally, I have a lot, I mean a lot, of interests, so I expect my blog will be eclectic and not overly professional.