Tom Emerson

t...@dreamersrealm.net

I am a Software Architect at Gerson Lehrman Group, working out the Boston office, concentrating on search and knowledge-discovery applications. Before joining GLG I was a software architect and computational linguist in Basis Technology's Products R&D group.

Some of my publications and presentations are available online.

I'm a member of the ACM and the ACL.

Some of my interests include, in no particular order:

Spending time with my wife, kids, and dog
Reading (history, foreign fiction, biography, sci-fi, fantasy)
Studying (human) languages, living and dead (Old Norse and Middle Egyptian right now.)
- Currently I am proofreading the scanned and OCRed text of Cleasby and Vigfusson's An Icelandic-English Dictionary.
  I have written a set of Emacs functions to help with the editing, and a Python script to convert the markup to LaTeX.
Photography (primarily medium format, but am dabling in large format and still use 35mm.) I have not jumped on the digital bandwagon, though once in a while I'll use my wife's digital camera.
Listening to music in a variety of styles, from beboop to hip-hop, death metal to jpop.
Programming language design and implementation. After spending almost six years professionally working on programming languages at Symantec and Thinking Machines, I've recovered enough to dabble again.
Playing World of Warcraft. Here's a case where game meets reality. My primary character is a resto Druid in the guild Amicitia on The Scarlet Crusade (note that I recently moved to there from Kael'thas, and in the process had to change her name, which used to be Mathilde.).

Here are some links to things of no interest to anyone:

Some projects I'm working on in my spare time:

Playing with Clojure, a Lisp-1 targeting the Java Virtual Machine. This has replaced Python as my primary prototyping language.
A Mac OS X native (as opposed to X Windows) version of Berkeley Logo.

If you want to communicate with me securely, here is my GPG public key. The finger print is:

5819 1940 26C1 C384 F7E6  478E 611E B7AD 0030 3DBF

Some random quotes that tickle my fancy:

Really, if Common Lisp wants to be “serious”, it can sit in the corner looking all conservative and shit while Clojure gets all the pussy. Blue Phil, in a comment on Common Lisp, Clojure, and seriousness.
Perl is the Ron Jeremy of programming languages. A poster on Reddit.

Oh yeah, I'm a Vermonter, and proud of it.

Here's what I'm listening to: