Miscellany

I have a separate, personal website at burrsettles.com. (I'm sort of getting into blogging and tweeting, too.)

Upon moving to Pittsburgh, I joined the band Delicious Pastries. Listen to our latest album here:

In Madison before that, I fronted the Pine Box Orchestra.

I am a founder of FAWM.ORG, an online community for musicians of all stripes, and annual songwriting challenge (to write 14 new songs each February). I am an avid musician myself, proficient at several instruments and known to tour and perform internationally when time allows (infrequently, of late).

In the fall of 2009, I supported vector machines at the Pittsburgh G20 Protests. For this, my left arm appears briefly on the October 1, 2009 episode of The Daily Show (holding a "Bayesians Against Discrimination" sign at about 0:25).

I am also a big fan of wordplay, especially anagrams.
(Alas, adorable clownery as papal gag is iffy, mon ami!)

Word cloud: Since it seems all the rage, here is a summary of my research publications (courtesy of Wordle):

[wordle]

Teaching: I've been known to instruct from time to time.

Arbitrary Status Numbers: Because these things matter!

I have an Erdős Number of 4:

  1. Paul Erdős ⇒ Ronald J. Gould: S. Burr, P. Erdős, R.J. Faudree, C.C. Rousseau, R.H Schelp, R.J. Gould, and M.S. Jacobson. Goodness of trees for generalized books. Graphs and Combinatorics 3(1): 1-6. 1987.
  2. ⇒ Avrim Blum: A.L. Blum and R.J. Gould. Generalized degree sums and Hamiltonian graphs. ARS Combinatoria 35(A):35-54. 1993.
  3. ⇒ Tom Mitchell: A.L. Blum and T.M. Mitchell. Combining labeled and unlabeled data with co-training. Proceedings of the Conference on Computational Learning Theory (COLT), pages 92--100. ACM Press, 1998.
  4. ⇒ myself: A. Carlson, J. Betteridge, B. Kisiel, B. Settles, E.R. Hruschka Jr. and T.M. Mitchell. Toward an Architecture for Never-Ending Language Learning. In Proceedings of the Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pages 1306-1313. AAAI Press, 2010.

This is particularly cool for me since I am "Burr S." and the lead author of paper #1 in the chain is "S. Burr." What's more, link #3 is an important paper in the literature for semi-supervised learning, one of the research areas I'm fairly into.

I also have a Bacon Number of 3:

  1. Kevin Bacon ⇒ William Devane: Hollow Man (2000)
  2. ⇒ Leo Burmeister: Honky Tonk Freeway (1981)
  3. ⇒ myself: Locust Grove (1992)

I like that my name is embedded in Mr. Bur-meister's. Admittedly, Locust Grove is an obscure PBS documentary/drama about George Rogers Clark that isn't even listed in IMDb. Furthermore, Burmeister went by a pseudonym (it was a non-union job: he played a peddler, I played GRC's nephew), but I still think it counts. I stopped pursuing a childhood acting career after that. Interestingly, I do have an IMDb page, but for a silly film I scored.

So in short, I have a Erdős-Bacon Number of 4 + 3 = 7. Not as impressive as Natalie Portman (6), but closer than Fred Alan Wolf (8), and tied with the likes of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan.

Web Toys: Miscellaneous webapps over the years that use simple statistical NLP in fun ways.

Academic Genealogy: From American computer scientists to German theologians via Danish linguists!

Credit goes to Ray Mooney and Tim Wille for connecting the dots.