Where am I?

In many places (in Sydney, Australia). Email: james.haggerty [æt] gmail.com

Who am I? 

A dilettante, currently thinking of going back to university (well, I guess I will actually)... I've recently been working at Choice (latter half of 2007) and Appen (2008), after finishing six years of a BA/BSc with Computer Science honours. Apart from Computer Science my majors were in History and English (specialising in Old English). This page exists since my honours supervisor encouraged me to seem sensible before emailing people, but now that I've done it I may as well keep it.

What have I done?

 Besides straightforward coursework, interesting things I have done include:

  • My honours thesis was in the area of Computational Linguistics, developing a pronoun resolution system using maximum entropy modelling, and was supervised by James Curran. If you are one of the few people in the world who are interested in the field, here is some stuff.
  • Developing a GUI for the Clark/Curran CCG parser with Saritha Manickam and Joel Nothman in 2005 (for the SOFT3700 software development unit). Information about this was published in:
  • Evaluating and improving the Information Retrieval component of a Question Answering system in 2004/5 (Summer Scholarship)
  • Working as a tutor of various subjects at the University of Sydney from 2003, including SOFT1001, SOFT1002, SOFT1902, COMP2160, COMP2860, SOFT2004 (now SOFT2130), SOFT3301 and COMP3308
  • Processing star formation images from the SEST in 2003 (1st year Physics 'Talented Student Program' project)

Outside university, I've:

  • Done a (small) amount of volunteer work finding and fixing bugs in the commercial game Europa Universalis II (written in Visual C++)
  • Written a large number of silly little programs, such as Jetris
  • Defined a number of (computer) languages, but only implemented one properly