About
I am a computer programmer and computational linguist living in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
This year I am honored to be teaching at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
I’ve been at the Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University since 1997. This lab has been listed by Wired Magazine as one of the top machine translation research labs in the world. I’ve worked on projects related to natural language understanding.
Recently I have been working on collecting resources for lesser studied languages as well as developing statistical translation systems for these languages. I have also worked on multi-document summarization. I have taught courses in computer science, linguistics, and music.
My Erdõs number is 3. My research productivity h-index is 11 (I have 11 publications each of which are cited at least 11 times). My g-index is 35 (I have 35 publications whose combined citations exceed 35 squared (1225). One odd thing, is that my research is mentioned in the novel Starting From Scratch by Susan Gilbert-Collins, whom I never met.
I graduated from a non-academic trade high school, Boys’ Technical and Trade High School in Milwaukee. I received a B.F.A. in music from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and worked for about 10 years as a music therapist including a short stint with the New York Musicians’ Union. I received a PhD in computer science from the University of Minnesota. I was fortunate to have two great dissertation advisors: Maria Gini and Jeanette Gundel. If you know me from one of these past lives I would be happy to reconnect.
Family
My son, Adam, is working for Dell in Austin and also developed WhichFlicks. He was previously at Oracle and Sun. He graduated as a Turing Scholar from the University of Texas at Austin in Computer Science. He won the IBM Award for Excellence in Computer Science/Computer Engineering Research for his thesis “Xen and the Art of Distributed Virtual Machine Management.” Along with his advisor, Greg Lavender, he presented a workshop on this topic at the 2007 JavaOne conference and they presented a paper at the Intel Developers’ Forum in San Francisco.
My wife, Cheryl Clark, is a speech pathologist in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She provides both in-home services to children birth to three and services to inner city elementary school children. She is a member of the New Mexico State University Gospel Choir and a piano accompanist. She is also a licensed Religious Science Practitioner.
I am a practicing Buddhist. I’ve taken my Refuge Vow in the Soto Zen Lineage and my Bodhisattva Vow in the Shambhala Tibetan Buddhism Lineage.
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2010 Ron Zacharski