I'm currently a Ph.D. student at Johns
Hopkins University's Dept. of Computer
Science in Baltimore, Maryland.
I got my Master's in CS at Stanford
University, and I still miss the climate and culture. But
not
the housing/rental prices.
I was born and raised in a small town in Kansas, and I have a huge family. I got a couple bachelor's degrees from Michigan State University, and have worked as a software engineer for various medical device companies, most recently for GE Medical Systems Invasive Cardiology. I'm studying and researching Natural Language Processing (NLP) here at Hopkins, after doing an Artificial Intelligence specialization at Stanford.
This term I'm TAing Intro to NLP for Prof. Jason Eisner, as well as learning Java (finally), topics in Linguistics/Cognitive Science, and beginning Mandarin. Back at Stanford, I've done some work with Prof. Chris Manning, And I've TAed CS 221--Artificial Intelligence: Principles and Techniques with Prof. Daphne Koller. Some reports I've written for class research projects are Unsupervised Web Page Clustering, a team project for CS 224N--Natural Language Processing, and Web-Based Cognition and Unlearning Experiment, my project for Psych 224/CS 329--Learning and Inference in Humans and Machines.
Besides the techie stuff, I'm into playing piano, mostly
classical or for musical theater. I sing, if cornered, although my
range is too low for most songs I like. And I've worked on several
community theater musicals as a Music Director. Sondheim rocks!
I'm a Quaker (Friend), and I do a lot of volunteer committee/governance work with FCNL, a Friend's lobbying and education organization based in Washington, DC.
You can reach me at paul.ruhlenSPAM@SUXbigfoot.com (replace SPAM@SUX with "@").
That's enough for now. I make no promises whether this page is currently "under construction," or lying fallow.
Peace.
