what makes me a renaissance scholar?

8/14/2019 What makes me a Renaissance Scholar?

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Pamela Fox

Computer science has the potential to be an amazing base

knowledge for a wannabe-Renaissance scholar, at least of the

engineering sort. It gives you the usual general education, plus some

science, some math, some logic, and of course, programming skills.

Once youve got that foundation, there are two distinct options: 1)

become a code monkey, 2) realize there are approximately three

gazillion fields that could be enhanced by a cleverly designed program.

No offense to the monkeys out there, but Ive personally opted

for the latter. We computer scientists know how to take advantage of a

processors incredibly fast calculations to solve problems, and as it

turns out, there are unresolved problems in every academic field of

study. So I often find myself in non-programming classes figuring out

how I can use computer science to solve the problems or answer the

questions Ive encountered in that particular class. After becoming

frustrated with the seemingly formulaic nature of the essays assigned

for the upper division writing class, I chose to code a Childrens Book

Generator for our creative assignment. I wanted to answer the

question of whether actual human thought was required to create

literature, and well, by coding the generator, I discovered that yes, it

probably was which is why I can now guarantee that this essay was

not written by a program. In a class studying Asian American literature

this semester, we often discuss the idea of the stereotypical Asian

face, and whether it does exist. So Im currently coding a program that

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will randomly create faces from Asian and non-Asian parts, and quiz

users on the perceived race. This program should help me discover

exactly what makes us identify an Asian vs. non-Asian, and if we can

actually do that accurately.

When I began the Linguistics minor, I didnt know that I would

later combine it with computer science. I was always intrigued by

language, always looking to learn new languages, always searching for

the etymological connection between languages. The introductory

classes confirmed my sneaking suspicion that there was a deep

universal structure common to all languages. I set the curve high in my

intro classes I didnt mean to, but everything just seemed to

intuitively make sense to me. I blame my computer science classes for

my unfair advantage. In the same semester that I took the first class

for the minor, I also took a required computer science class on

Algorithms. There was literally one week when I got the exact same

lecture in both classes, a discussion of the Barbers Paradox and self

reference. Its as if someone up there had been subtly trying to point

out the interconnectedness of these fields for a while, and finally just

decided to kick me in the face with their point. Well, fine, I got it!

The following summer, I was granted an NSF fellowship to

participate in a well-known computational linguistics workshop at John

Hopkins. There were three teams, and each had to tackle a problem

judged to be one of the most urgent and interesting in the

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Computational Linguistics world. Our team worked on statistical

machine translation by parsing using the hierarchical nature of a

sentence structure to teach a computer the patterns of a language. For

two weeks before the workshop, we were given a crash course in

computational linguistics, sampling lectures and labs from the most

researched areas. I hated most of it. I wanted to scream at the

researchers, NO! Stop it! Respect the beauty of language! Most of

the research was simply using brute force to solve problems. Google

gloated at a conference that summer that their translation results were

the best after running 10,000 computers for 40 hours. Thats the first

time Google has not impressed me. Thats why I was thankful to have

been placed in a group that was were actually teaching the computer

about linguistic structure - we could get meaningful results after

running for just 20 minutes. My personal contribution to the team was

creating a Multi-Tree Viewer that would view the simultaneous parses

of equivalent sentences in multiple languages, showing the

relationship between both their lexical equivalence and structural

equivalence. It was a great moment when the MTV showed a sentence

where USA and the United States of America were linked as

equivalent phrases, because of their location in the sentence

hierarchies and not because of any preset vocabulary knowledge.

During lectures at the workshops, I daydreamed about the

research that I would pursue. By the end of the workshop, I had several

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project ideas that I had thought about for so long (we had a lot of

lectures) that I absolutely had to pursue implementing them. This

semester, Im creating a computer baby that is given sentences

describing a 3-d scene, and then examines the scenes to deduce the

relationship between the scene and the sentence. By the end of the

project, I hope that my baby will understand sentences with

prepositional relations, and I aim to prove that it is possible to teach a

computer a language the same way that a baby learns language. Its

my personal attack on Googles brute-force philosophy. Another project

I dreamed up was an online site that would illustrate, on a map of the

world, the etymological connections between words over the course of

time. I wanted to share my love of etymology linguistics with the world

I wanted everyone to realize the beauty of the interconnectedness of

languages. Unfortunately, I didnt receive the grant to pursue that

project, so in the meanwhile, I instituted a Word of the Week last

semester. Every week, wed post flyers on campus about a word,

focusing on its etymology.

It feels natural that at this point in the narrative Id begin

discussing my other minor 3-d animation. Id talk about learning how

to draw, put life into a character, set up lights, tell a story, compose a

scene, and Id probably tell you how I started a club for students

interested in the spectrum between computer science and art. But

according to the Renaissance board, all of that is too similar to

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Computer Science. I was pretty mad when the board only certified my

Computer Science and Linguistics combination, refusing to

acknowledge my 3-d animation minor as a widely separate field. I

understand why, of course. The 3-d animation minor is in the same

school as my major, and therefore most likely doesnt stretch my

mind intellectually. But it really does, especially in the contrast

between right-brained and left-brained skills. While computer science

is logic-based problem solving and linguistics is the study of an

incredibly structured system, 3-d animation is the use of an artistic eye

coupled with technical skills to create something that will entertain

others. But thats when I had a realization- being a renaissance scholar

means realizing that two fields that are officially widely disparate

may actually be strung together by the same intellectual threads, while

two fields within the same department can actually call on entirely

different parts of the brain. So I guess that now Im thankful that my 3-

d animation minor was dismissed by the board, as it caused me to

realize that theres more than one way to be a vastly different field of

study.

And well, now I dont have to write so much.

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what makes me a renaissance scholar?

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