Final grades are in, so I can finally announce that on December 17, 2010, I graduated from Indiana University with dual degrees and honors in Cognitive Science and Computer Science after 7 semesters.

I’m extraordinarilly excited to finally be done with coursework so I can focus entirely on research. I’ll be continuing work with Prof. Colin Allen and the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO), completing our integration with the Stanford Encyclpedia of Philosophy (SEP) and working on further refinements of the dynamic ontology methodology, generalizing our methods for use in other disciplines. Starting in January, I’ll be working with Prof. David Michelson at the University of Alabama to redeploy the InPhO for the Syriac Reference Portal (SRP). This will hopefully lead to extended collaborations in the digital humanities.

Additionally, I’m planning to continue contributing to Prof. Larry Yaeger‘s Polyworld Project, which is an Artificial Life simulation that provides a framework for replicable studies in evolution, genetics, and neural networks. I’ve been working on methods of species identification, using information-theoretic measures of genetic distance. This has led to a series of complexity improvements to a popular clustering algorithm used in bio-informatics. I’ve also built a data-access library in Python to facilitate analysis and visualization of experimental data.

Sometime last year I started travelling all the time. My work was presented in Valencia, Evansville, and Chicago, and I further went to DC, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Louisville, Nashville, and Madrid. So far I’ve got three big trips planned for 2011: Santa Clara in January for the O’Reilly Strata Conference, DC and Philadelphia in February, and Atlanta in March for PyCon. Over the summer, I’ll hopefully be headed to conferences in Ireland and San Fransisco, but we’ll see how that goes.

Past that, my future plans are predicated on the results of my Fulbright proposal. If this comes through, I’ll head to Karlsruhe, Germany in July to spend a year as a research assistant, developing methods for ontology-driven machine translation and sentiment analysis in collaboratively-generated corpora. Either way, 2011 should be a great year!