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Jason Eisner was born in Ithaca, New York and grew up in suburban New Jersey. His undergraduate major at Harvard University (summa cum laude, junior-year Phi Beta Kappa) was in the Cognitive Science track of the Psychology Department.
After a politically absorbed year in South Africa, on a Fulbright Scholarship in Creative Writing, he spent two years at Cambridge University on a Herchel C. Smith Scholarship, where he earned a second undergraduate degree, this time in Mathematics (first-class honors).
His Ph.D. in Computer Science (on an NSF fellowship) was at the University of Pennsylvania, under Mitch Marcus. He also spent a good deal of time in Penn's Linguistics Department. He joined the University of Rochester as an assistant professor, then moved to Johns Hopkins University (JHU) soon afterward.
At JHU, he is a (tenured) Associate Professor of Computer Science, with a joint appointment in Cognitive Science. He is also a core member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing, and an affiliate of the national Center of Excellence in Human Language Technology. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award as well as other funding from NSF and DoD. In 2005, he received JHU's Robert B. Pond, Sr. Excellence in Teaching Award.
Dr. Eisner has authored papers and software tools in several areas of computational linguistics, including parsing, machine learning (including grammar induction), machine translation, weighted finite-state methods, and computational phonology. He is the lead designer of the Dyna programming language and the Dynasty hypergraph browser. His voice can be heard as the top hit for the admittedly rare query parsing song, and he's had some other work-related fun, such as investing in Lernout & Hauspie a week before they crashed in a scandal. His hobbies include playing violin and squash (not at the same time), singing show tunes to his kids Talia and Lev, biking to work ('tain't far), reading, and sometimes rock climbing with his wife, Debbie Steinig. He serves as president of the ACL's special interest group on computational morphology and phonology (SIGMORPHON).
For a "biography" of his work, see his research summary and earlier research narrative. His many professional activities and papers are listed on his full CV (HTML and PDF).
