Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 15:19:46 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 01:16:48 GMT Content-length: 1705
Blurb (for the Graduate Program booklet)
Martin Dickey, Lecturer, joined the faculty in 1996. After receiving an M.S. in Mathematics in 1972 from the University of Kentucky, he had a career with Honeywell's computer division which took him from Washington, D.C. to Phoenix, Arizona. In Phoenix he worked on GCOS-8, a much under-appreciated mainframe which featured symmetric multiprocessing and a bewilderingly complex segmented memory architecture long before such things were trendy. Suspecting that what he and his fellow practitioners were daily inventing might already have been studied, he began graduate work in computer science at Arizona State University. This eventually led to a PhD dissertation (1992) on neural network speech recognition, a then-trendy topic which also provided a convenient excuse for taking courses in languages and linguistics. Computational linguistics remains a major interest.
Several years in the intensive teaching/learning environment of Illinois College (Jacksonville) awoke him to the possibility of teaching as a vocation rather than a side-effect of an academic career. Applying the lessons learned at a small liberal arts college to classes of 200 at UW is a skepticism-engendering but welcome challenge. Outside of work he intends to patronize fringe theater and post-trendy coffee houses.