linguist, coder, teacher
Greater Boston Area
- Current
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- PhD student, Kenan Sahin Presidential Fellow at MIT
- Freelance Web Developer at home
- Past
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- Researcher for Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity at Mozilla
- Online Game Engineer at Gameloft
- Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at Fulbright Taiwan
- Credit Teacher, Japanese village at Concordia Language Villages
- TeX Programmer at The Academic Approach
- Assistant Dean, Japanese village at Concordia Language Villages
- Education
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- University of Chicago
- University of Chicago
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Recommended
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4 people have recommended Michael Yoshitaka - Connections
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159
connections
- Industry
- Research
- Websites
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s Summary
Linguist, coder, and teacher, striving to excel in the intersections of those disciplines. A native English/Japanese bilingual and advanced Mandarin speaker. Currently a PhD student in Linguistics at MIT.
University of Chicago graduate with a Master's degree in Linguistics with a focus on syntax/semantics. Spent one year in Taiwan as a Fulbright scholar upon graduation. Most recently worked at Mozilla Labs on Ubiquity, an experimental multilingual natural language interface for the browser.
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Statement on recent technical direction:
Three largely independent factors in the past decade have made the application and serious consideration of natural language crucial to the future of the web. The expansion of the internet has removed the barriers of geography and economics between people, but in so doing has made language the primary divider of modern humanity. More and more human knowledge is being encoded digitally and online, almost all in our natural languages—a format proven time and time again to be challenging for semantically accurate machine analysis. All the while, only iterative improvements have been made to the usability of computers and the web, largely ignoring our most natural form of communication. These factors have conspired to make practical yet theoretically-inspired multilingual natural language processing a crucial field for the 21st century.
Much of my recent work and writings have been on this area of the multilingual web and natural interfaces.
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s Specialties:
Japanese (native), Mandarin Chinese (advanced), syntax-semantics, generative grammar, computational linguistics, practical NLP, advanced JavaScript, PHP, XHTML, mysql, perl, TeX
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s Experience
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PhD student, Kenan Sahin Presidential Fellow
MIT
(Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)
September 2009 — Present (3 months)
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Freelance Web Developer
home
(Internet industry)
January 2003 — Present (6 years 11 months)
Database-driven website design, development, and maintenance, with a focus on web standards, new technologies, and sustainable practices. Specialties include content management systems, data processing, and database logic. PHP, MySQL, perl, XHTML/CSS, JavaScript (AJAX).
I am also the developer of Yet Another Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, which recently crossed the 200,000 download mark on wordpress.org. -
Researcher for Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity
Mozilla
(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)
February 2009 — September 2009 (8 months)
Contributed to the development of Ubiquity, a multilingual natural language interface for the browser.
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Online Game Engineer
Gameloft
(Public Company; GFT; Computer Games industry)
August 2008 — February 2009 (7 months)
Managed and refined Japanese market web services infrastructure for the world's largest mobile game producer.
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Fulbright English Teaching Assistant
Fulbright Taiwan
(Primary/Secondary Education industry)
August 2007 — June 2008 (11 months)
Taught English to 200 students in rural Taiwanese elementary schools together with a local teacher. Grades 1-6.
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Credit Teacher, Japanese village
Concordia Language Villages
(Non-Profit; Primary/Secondary Education industry)
2007 — 2007 (less than a year)
Taught a unique one year (180 hour) high school Japanese course in an immersion camp setting. (seasonal position)
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TeX Programmer
The Academic Approach
(Educational Institution; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)
September 2006 — June 2007 (10 months)
Helping an educational firm typeset their tests in LaTeX, using advanced formatting and classes. Automating the transfer of academic materials written in TeX to their online course backend using perl and open-source tools.
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Assistant Dean, Japanese village
Concordia Language Villages
(Non-Profit; Education Management industry)
2005 — 2006 (1 year )
Assisted the Dean in the planning, preparation, and implementation of all aspects of the Village program and the general business operations of the Village. (seasonal position)
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s Education
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University of Chicago
MA , Linguistics , 2006 — 2007
Thesis titled "A New Syntax-Semantics for the Mandarin bi Comparative", 2007.
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University of Chicago
BA , Mathematics and Linguistics , 2003 — 2007
- Activities and Societies:
- Phi Beta Kappa
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PhD , Linguistics , 2009
Enrolling in PhD program in fall 2009.
Additional Information
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s Websites:
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s Groups:
University of Chicago, Mori no Ike
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University of Chicago Alumni -
Japanese Professionals -
Mozilla Project -
Semantic Web -
Twitter -
Tokyo 2.0 -
Japanese Bilingual Group -
Web Standards Design + Development -
jQuery -
Concordia Language Villages -
Wordpress Experts -
Linguistic semantics
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s Honors:
Best Paper Award, Taiwan National Conference on Linguistics 2008
J. William Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship, Taiwan, 2007-2008
Phi Beta Kappa, 2007
Sigma Xi, scientific research honor society, 2006
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
- consulting offers
- new ventures
- expertise requests
- reference requests
- getting back in touch
