An EconoTimes perspective

Steven Bird

Associate Professor in Computer Science, University of Melbourne I study computational methods for analysing human language, in both written and spoken varieties. This involves scalable techniques for collecting and annotating large amounts of data from many languages. The long-term goal is to preserve hundreds of endangered languages. I have a special interest in undescribed "tone languages" in Africa and Papua New Guinea. I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in algorithms, databases, informatics, philosophy of language, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, data mining, web technologies, and machine translation. Programming is an almost daily activity, and I recently published a book titled Natural Language Processing with Python. I am co-developer of the new "Algorithmics" curriculum in the Victorian Certificate of Education, introducing university-level computer science into high school.