I was born in Chicago, but moved to the suburb of Libertyville in time to start school. As you might guess from the all-American name of my hometown, I had a Leave It to Beaver childhood there (my father commuted to his job with an insurance company, my mother stayed home, one set of grandparents lived on a farm, the other set lived over the river and through the woods, we had 2.3 children and a dog, etc., etc.).
After graduating from Michigan State University, I went to the University of Chicago to get my PhD in mathematics. Halfway through, I discovered I was not cut out to be a specialist. I got my degree anyway, and eventually discovered that there was a specialty for nonspecialists -- cognitive science. My interests have progressed (or regressed) from math to theoretical computer science to artificial intelligence to computational linguistics. In the last few years I have been part of the LinGO research group at Stanford University.
The links from my home page probably give a better summary of my other interests than I can do here.
Return to Jeff Smith's home page