I successfully defended my Doctoral thesis about using a statistical model of semantics to improve the accuracy of a speech recognizer, in the Department of Computer Science at University of Colorado in 2004. Dan Jurafsky, now at Stanford, was my thesis advisor.
I am now a software engineer at a Silicon Valley search engine company whose name starts with the letter that comes after F.
Photographs
Personal Web Page
My Family Includes some family history, and family tree. Mostly information of the Coccaro and Porfido families from Valle Dell'Angelo, Italy.
Publications
Resume I am not currently seeking employment.
Research Interests:
My interests are primarily in the realm of natural language.
Language Models for Speech Recognition: I'm interested in how
statistical models of semantic understanding and cues to topic shift
can aid automatic speech recognition. This is the topic of my PhD thesis.
Discourse Models
for Speech Recognition: Along with semantic models, I'm interested
in models of human discourse that are predictive of subsequent
speech. This was the subject of a 1997 CLSR Summer Workshop. See the
publications link for papers related to this.
Machine Translation: Though not a current line of research for
me, in the past I've worked on machine translation projects at
Universität Karlsruhe and Carnegie Mellon
Animal Communication and Language: I'm interested in questions
of how animals communicate with eachother and the richness of their semantic
structure. I'm also interested in their linguistic abilities as
demonstrated by their learning a human constructed language.
Modeling of Animal Behavior: Are seemingly complex behaviors
of animals as complex as they seem, or can they be modeled by
relatively simple statistical/connectionist models?