posted by wtanaka at
8/22/2003 12:44:00 AM
Thursday, August 21, 2003
I have a phone conversation scheduled with a Microsoft recuiter for some kind of software development job in their natural language group. I'm not sure if the job will provide the kinds of opportunities that I am looking for, in particular I'm looking for the time to work on and the ability to publish papers about new and interesting natural language processing topics that come up while I am working there.
So I'll have to ask about that.
From their point of view, it looks like they are looking for someone technical (knowledge of C++) with lots of API design skills, so I'll have to focus on the C++ work that I've done (work at microsoft, large projects for school) and the fact that C++ and Java are so very similar.
Some questions might presumably come up:
Why are you so interested in natural language processing?
While I was travelling, I realized that being able to communicate with others makes a huge difference in how much you like them. It was a lot easier for me to come away from a place like Malaysia with great memories because almost everybody there speaks great English, and so I was able to actually get to know them. It gave me dreams about computers helping to break down language barriers one day, and I'd like to contribute to that.
I realize that my background might not look like it would make for a good natural langauge researcher (no PhD, no experience in AI field), so I decided to fix that.
Why did you leave your old job?
Well, I was laid off. The people that were laid off were mostly senior developers, myself, the QA director, all of the product management group, leaving the VP, one senior hands-on guy, and the hands on developers that had maintained the
The layoff was motivated by taking on more venture funding. The CEO didn't think that it made sense to lay anyone off at that time, but it came as one of the terms.
Although I had stuck with the job because of my sense of loyalty to the company, I realized that as the company matured, it had grown away from my interests.
Why did you travel?
There were a bunch of friends that I really wanted to visit, and I figured if I was going to do a lot of travelling, I should do it while I'm young -- I can still walk around, I didn't have a girlfriend, kids, a house to worry about. It turned out to be the most mind-opening experience that I've ever had. There's a lot to learn about how to coexist with people when the fundamental rules and beliefs about how society works are different. You get that to some extent in the U.S., because of the diversity here, but it's a whole different magnitude. You also get a much less american-centric view of the world than you get when you live here. It's like the people in China that dream about moving to Beijing or Shanghai -- they never think about moving outside of China.
so overall questions:
Does MS allow developers to publish papers in journals or conferences?
What career advancement opportunities do you see this position leading toward?
Are there opportunities to move from this group to doing NLP research? How long?
How much day to day work is there? 40 hours? 60 hours? 80 hours?
What does the organization of the group look like and where would I fit in? (to get some idea of what kinds of day to day activities would be involved in the job)
Cognitive linguists from where, working on what part of linguistics?
What interesting linguistics problems would you say the group solves?
what are named entities (smart tags)? this is part of natural language group because you need to disambiguate senses?
cutting edge technology for natural language commands and document "understanding."
statistical, linguistically motivated, or hybrid approach?
are you using recent developments like bayes nets?
how does morphology help? is speech work included in the work done by the group?
Things that I want to understand:
Career advancement
Day to day work
Who I would be working with
posted by wtanaka at
8/21/2003 02:46:00 PM
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
I just noticed that I get spam from Taiwan and from Korea, but almost never from Japan.
posted by wtanaka at
8/20/2003 11:40:00 AM
Monday, August 18, 2003
Cynthia (one of the coaches at oakland ice center) told me that i have a pretty good butterfly going. I'm so tickled. Of course I still need to land it cleanly.
posted by wtanaka at
8/18/2003 10:58:00 PM
I wonder if Iraq is going to have the same long term instability that Israel has had.
