Angela Aiello, UCSC alum (BA 2003, MA 2010), and soon to be a graduate of the Communicative Disorders and Sciences program at San Jose State, will give an informational talk about the program and her experiences on Tuesday, May 28th at 4pm in 249 Stevenson. Please come to hear her presentation and get your questions answered!

Nuance, the company behind Dragon speech recognition software and a bunch of other voice recognition technologies, is looking to fill NLU and NLP positions. Even though the positions aren’t listed in California, the work can be done locally. You can view a sampling of the open positions here.

After teaching college-level writing in the Bay Area for a number of years, Dan Roth (BA Linguistics 2004, MA Linguistics 2006) is pleased to announce that he has accepted a full-time, tenure-track position teaching English at Oakton Community College, near Chicago. This is a generalist position with a specialization in teaching developmental reading/writing, teaching which makes good use of Dan’s training in linguistics. Oakton is just a few miles from where Dan was born and grew up, so the move is a homecoming of sorts. Dan sends his best wishes to everyone in the department and wants people to know that he will be glad to talk with any students contemplating teaching careers at the community college level.

This year’s annual St. Petersburg – New York Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture (NYI) will take place July 15 to August 2, 2013. NYI is a phenomenal way for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students to have an eye-opening overseas experience, while continuing their focus on Linguistics and Cognitive Science. The school is a 3-week Institute, held in beautiful St. Petersburg, Russia, at which students choose 4 seminars in a range of fields, especially Linguistics. Faculty are from a wide range of US institutions, and this year’s Linguistics program features (among other people) John Bailyn (SUNY Stony Brook), Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst), Janet Dean Fodor (CUNY), Jerry Fodor (Rutgers), Caroline Heycock (Edinburgh), Sabine Iatridou (MIT), Jaye Padgett, and Roumyana Pancheva (USC). All classes are in English. Interested students can get more information from this flyer, from the web site linked to above, or by directly emailing John Bailyn at john.bailyn@stonybrook.edu.

From Gwen Christian, UCSC Class of 2008: My group at Intel Corporation is hiring linguists. We’re looking for enthusiastic people with excellent analytical and collaboration skills to work on challenging state of the art projects. There are several openings each for two positions: Linguist and Language Engineer. Both require a Linguistics minor or major, and Language Engineer additionally requires strong skills in Computer Science. Applicants may apply to both positions.

While these positions are great for recent graduates with a BA, we are also interested in more experienced candidates and can offer positions at a range of levels. About the jobs available: Linguists will participate in language technology research and development, particularly related to language data. Duties include developing and executing language data collection and annotation, hands on testing of language technology prototypes and applications, and development of linguistic resources such as grammars and lexica. Although start date is listed as ASAP, we encourage current BA students finishing this Spring/Summer to apply.

For some background about Intel, it’s a great place to work (there’s even a corporate team dedicated to making sure we stay on top of that). In fact, Intel Corporation was ranked 68 in Fortune’s annual Best Companies to Work in 2013. The compensation is competitive and the benefits are excellent, but I think where it stands out is that it has a ridiculously high density of smart, dedicated people. Obviously, I’m not the most objective, but both regarding the immediate team I am a part of, as well as our larger organization, these are the best people I have ever worked with. All of us are excited about getting to work on new technology, and we’re very committed to making our project the best. It’s an incredibly supportive environment that offers lots of learning opportunities.

I’ve said all that’s allowed with regards to what we’re up to, but I’ll repeat the recruiting talk I got when I applied: “You’ll have a lot of fun, and you’ll get to work on something that’s just incredibly cool.” We’re looking for great people to work with, and UC Santa Cruz turns out some of the best, so I hope you’ll apply.

The positions are open until filled, but for best consideration, applications should be received by April 9th. For more information, please refer to the job postings at http://www.intel.com/jobs/. Please search by job numbers: 707993 (Linguist), and 707147 (Language Engineer). If you have any questions, feel free to email gwen.christian@intel.com.

We are delighted to announce that Maziar Toosarvandani will join our department as of July 2013.

Dr. Toosarvandani received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor at UCLA in 2010-11. Since then he has been at MIT under the auspices of a prestigious ACLS New Faculty Fellowship.

Toosarvandani’s research investigates the relationship between syntactic and semantic principles. One strand of his currrent work explores the interaction of coordination and ellipsis with information structure, focusing mainly on English and Persian. Another strand investigates clause combination in Northern Paiute, a Native American language that Toosarvandani has done fieldwork on for some years.

Welcome to the department, Maziar!

The UCSC Committee on Research has awarded a Special Research Grant of $8,000 to support the continuation of a project using ultrasound to study the phonetics and phonology of Irish Gaelic consonantal palatalization. The principle investigators of the project, Ryan Bennett (Yale University, Ph.D. 2012), Grant McGuire, Máire Ní Chiosáin (University College Dublin), and Jaye Padgett, have already collected data from the three major dialect regions of Ireland. With the help of the COR grant, the project will enter a new phase next year.

MIT is hosting a Conference on Metrical Structure: Text-Setting and Stress this September 20-21, 2013. Invited speakers include our own Junko Ito and Armin Mester. The organizers are soliciting abstracts for two poster sessions: one on the role of metrical structure in stress and the other on the role of metrical structure in poetics. The deadline for abstract submission is April 30th, 2013. To learn more, click here.

The Dept of Linguistics at the University of Maryland is looking to fill up to five full-time positions for post-baccalaureate researchers. Starting date for all positions is Summer/Fall 2013. Salary is competitive, with benefits included. The positions would be ideal for individuals with a BA degree who are interested in gaining significant research experience in a very active lab as preparation for a research career. Applicants must be US or Canadian citizens or permanent residents, and should have completed a BA or BS degree by the time of appointment. The ability to interact comfortably with a wide variety of people (and machines) is a distinct advantage. Applicants may request to be considered for all five positions.

The positions are open until filled, but for best consideration, applications should be received by April 5th. To learn more about these positions, click here.