The First Workshop on Unnatural Language Processing (2005).

Karen and I got married on January 15, 2006, in Baltimore.

For Valentine's Day (2006), I got Karen a kitten, and we named him after the silent film star Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926). Our other cat is Dr. Sacada (IPA: /sɑkɑːdɑ/, rhymes with empanada), who is named after a tango move.

In a fit of thesis procrastination, I present my academic genealogy.

Powerpoint slides from a presentation I gave at the HLT-NAACL doctoral consortium panel on the research job market.

Our house in Pittsburgh.

(March 2007) It seems a novel by Iris Johansen called Long After Midnight (1997, Bantam, amazon.com sales rank #27,056) features a scientist named Dr. Noah Smith. To quote the amazon.com review: "... Noah Smith, the prize-winning scientist to whom Kate's research is essential, won't give up easily. Any chance of stability vanishes, however, when someone blows up Noah's lab, killing most of his employees, and tries to kill Kate." I guess the grad students were the really dangerous ones; Dr. Smith survived and went into hiding but (alas!) didn't get the girl.

Hey kids! Participate in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad!

As of 2007, my Erdös number is the same as Alan Turing's.

Other Noah Smiths: the rapper/model, the failed child actor, the self-styled humorist and playwright, the quadriplegia advocate, the liberal blogger, the Berkeley football player, the photographer, the fictional geneticist, and, yes, another computer scientist or two.

Writing a crime novel? Improve it by consulting a real-life crime scene investigator, Karen Smith, who happens to be my cousin.

Probably the most famous people I know I'm related to are my late great-uncle Barney Stein, the photographer of the Brooklyn Dodgers and many others, and my great-uncle Alex Steinweiss, who invented the idea of putting art on record album covers, and designed thousands of them.