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I'm Trevor Cohen. I'm faculty here
And you might be wondering where my accent comes from
It's a South African accent. I trained originally as a physician and practiced in South Africa
and my intention was to become a psychiatrist, but
one of the things that became apparent to me working in psychiatry
where a lot of the patients are psychotic and not able to give
a good account of their history,
so we had to look this up, was that I seldom had the information I needed at the time I needed it
So this, as well as a long standing interest in computers and
computation was what drew me into informatics
So, I ended up pursuing a doctoral studies at Columbia University in New York
And, ultimately ended up here
With respect to my research interests, my main interest is
in a field called distributional semantics, which tries to
find ways for computers to learn how things are related to one another
from electronic text and I'm also interested in
cognitive methods and ways in which cognitive methods that study human thinking
can be applied to reduce medical error
At the moment I am teaching two classes
One is a foundations class, Foundations 3 which is sort of a
general class that covers methods that are important to the field
And the other is a class on distributional semantics
which tries to help people teach machines how to understand things
based on the way in which they are represented in electronic text