Research Topics

1. Foundations of computation
• The Church-Turing thesis (When is an algorithm effective? How does one measure its complexity?)
• “Effectiveness”
• Analogue computation (When is an evolving process algorithmic? How can we formalize this?)
• “Towards an Axiomatization of Simple Analog Algorithms”
2. Analysis of programs
• Program termination (How does one prove that a program halts? What are good orderings for the purpose? What about higher-order programs?)
• “Jumping and Escaping: Modular Termination and the Abstract Path Ordering”
3. Analysis of historical manuscripts (such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Genizah)
• Digital paleography (When and where was a document written? How can we find documents written by the same hand?)
• “Automatic Paleographic Exploration of Genizah Manuscripts”
• Shape and texture analysis (How can we learn to match shape of leaves of a manuscripts? What about texture?)
• Towards character recognition (Can we find letters or words in an image of a historical document? How can we align that with the text?)
• “OCR-Free Transcript Alignment”
4. Analysis of historical texts (such as Jewish literature and the Tibetan Buddhist writings)
• Authorship (How can we determine which parts of a text were written by the same person?)
• “Unsupervised Decomposition of a Document into Authorial Components”
• Alignment (How can we find similar passages in multiple texts? How should that alignment be presented?)
• “Finding Inexact Quotations Within a Tibetan Buddhist Corpus”
5. Processing of natural language
• Semantics (How can one try to understand what is being referred to in a text? How can we use that information?)
• “Using Semantics in Translation” (presentation)
• Arabic (How does one deal with languages, like Arabic, with a rich morphological structure?)
• “Semantics for Example-Based Arabic Machine Translation”