Odd Stuff about Me

I love my work, and I'm excited to come to work every day, but that's not all there is to me.

I grew up in California, and I love chocolate, turkey with avocado sandwiches, fine art museums, book stores, and the scent of spicy candles and eucalyptus trees. I'm proud to be 51!

This June my husband and I will be celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary! I met my husband Eric in a Data Structures class when I was a sophomore at UC Irvine . He's a web programmer, sculptor, photographer, kayaker extrodinaire, and does an amazing job clearing snow! When we got married, his mom made us a bed cover with a design appliqued onto it from part of a digital design project we did together for one of our courses. You can't get much more nerdy than that! He was my best nerdy friend in our undergrad years, and he's still my best friend today. We like to think of ourselves as the world's most boring couple.

I took my first graduate machine learning course when I was a third year undergraduate, and my husband and I (although he was not my husband yet!) worked together doing machine learning research under Richard Granger , who was at UCI at the time, the summer after that year, which was the same summer when Terminator II came out, and we thought we were cool since the "bad guys" in that movie were neural network researchers. Neural nets were not cool for a long time, but now it turns out once again they are cool under a different name -- deep learning!

My husband like to work together in the evenings, we try to take a break from our work for 30 minutes each evening to just hang out together, which we refer to as a "study break" since it's a tradition left over from our undergrad days. We also still have jokes we've been laughing together about for over a quarter of a century now. Our favorite quote from Radford's Transformational Grammar is "Some people say linguists are kinky."

We got married the day after our undergrad graduation, and spent that summer traveling around the US and Israel before we started grad school. And all the while I was reading linguistics books! Years later I passed on one of the books I had been reading to a student whose committee I served on, and while he was reading it, he got engaged. So we think there must be something very romantic about linguistics books. You know what they say about linguists...

We have an 23 year old daughter named Rachel who a Mycologist, artist, and excellent cook!

In my spare time I enjoy playing piano, Israeli folk dancing, cooking, going to museums, and weaving.