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I have moved to Canisius College:
Email: burhans@canisius.edu
Web Page: http://www-cs.canisius.edu/~burhans
I have completed my PhD and am currently an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Canisius College. My web page at Canisius
I received my undergraduate degree in Mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1982, and my MS in Computer Science at SUNY Buffalo in 1995. The official conferral date for my PhD is February 1, 2002.
My dissertation work develops a theoretical foundation for question answering using the paradigm of theorem proving. Its title is A Question Answering Interpretation of Resolution Refutation.. A postscript copy of my dissertation is available.
The best thing I managed in elementary school was 5th place at Stony Brook Farms in Horse Shows. I had a drawer full of those pale pink ribbons. My sisters, on the other hand, collected the deeply hued reds and blues, much to my chagrin. Perhaps my desire to be as far away from horses as possible, as a general principle, can be traced to this experience. Note, however, that these horse shows were judged by Mrs. VonWald, the gym teacher at Burns Park Elementary School in the 1960s. You probably can't imagine just how bad I was at gym. Luckily this gene has been moderated by a fluke of DNA recombination: my children are both much better than I was. This is rather surprising when you consider that my husband and I began our romance on a softball team: we were relegated to the depths of the outfield because neither of us could catch a ball. Nor (most likely) anything else. I think I was ok with a beach ball in terms of catching. Once I won third place in a swimming race at the Beach Club Hotel in Naples, Florida. As you might have suspected, there were only three swimmers. I figured out that if I was going to win awards they would have to either be of the non-athletic or the uncontested variety.
Epilogue: Shows Improvement
When I came to UB I was awarded a 3-year Presidential Fellowship. Presidential Fellows are the top students in their incoming class. My office-mate and co-researcher at CEDAR, Rajiv Chopra, was also a Presidential Fellow. He finished his PhD and took off for Oracle five years ago. The two of us are the only students from our year to complete PhD degrees.
In my fourth year of graduate school I received an IRIS (Increased Representation In the Sciences) fellowship, funded by the Coca Cola Foundation. This award was given to two students working on PhDs under the auspices of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Its purpose is to increase the number women and minority students who attain PhDs in scientific fields by providing extra financial assistance to such students. The award is specifically targeted at students who are teachers: as teachers we serve as role models for other underrepresented students in our fields. Here's a link to an article about it that appeared in the UB Reporter, and a link to another article about the IRIS fellowships in the UB Today magazine
The Plesur award is a real honor, it's kind of like the People's Choice awards, your students have to nominate you, then the UGSA visits your class, etc. It is given to teachers who go above and beyond the call of duty and generally inspire students. It was named for Milton Plesur, a dedicated and much beloved teacher here at UB. It's tremendous to have such an outpouring of support from your students.
The Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching Award is more like the Academy Awards, you have to assemble a dossier of every course you've taught at UB, put in student evaluations, you need letters from students, faculty, etc. etc. There is no doubt that my dossier for this award was much longer than my dissertation: unlike the dissertation, assembling the dossier was 100% perspiration, 0% inspiration. The competition for these awards is very stiff, some excellent teachers I know have failed to get the award, and again, it's a real honor to be selected.
The ACM Research Competition was exciting. My toughest competitor was a student from Italy. I really didn't know whether I'd won until they called out his name for second place. It was sort of like the Miss America competition. Once he was called, there was only one place left and one competitor, and that was me. This competition is a success due to the terrific work done by Ann Sobel who is in charge of the competition. I encourage any students to participate, it's excellent experience giving a talk and a poster, and you meet a lot of people.
I serve on a university-wide committe called the Student Information Technology Literacy Committee. This committee is headed up by one of the most terrific people I know, Sandy Peters. Sandy is an Associate Director over at CIT, which is academic computing services here at UB. Sandy got an MS in computer science with my advisor. She did some excellent work on basic level categories, the theory developed by Eleanor Rosch. Our committee worked incredibly hard to set up training sessions, a web site, etc. to help students get on the "IT bandwagon", as it were. Now that we have a computer access requirement for all incoming students there is a lot to teach them. We gave lectures for students and parents on opening weekend, ordered things to give to students, organized a contest, etc. etc. etc. I think we really deserved this award!
Research Interests: question answering (dissertation topic), bioinformatics, force dynamics, language used to describe space, visual semantics, computer science education
Research Groups:
SNeRG,
Cognitive Science Center
Over the past nine and a half years I have worked on four different dissertations with three advisors. Please, do not take this as a sign of mental instability: sometimes these things just happen.
My first project involved working with Rohini Srihari on "visual semantics". I left that project because it was not theoretical enough. It's hard to develop principles working with language, sometimes it seems rather ad hoc. We had funding from several agencies for our projects, and the pressure to come up with monthly progress reports, semi-annual site visits, etc. (in my opinion) detracted from the work of true research. I realize that as a faculty member one must produce results. However, as a graduate student I felt my real chance to delve deep into theory ought not to be passed up. There would be plenty of time in the future to organize site visits and produce, produce, produce.
I then started working with Bill Rapaport, broadening my first topic to "spatial language" in general: ideas I had gleaned after taking several linguistics courses with Len Talmy. The project was, in retrospect, too ill-defined at that point for a dissertation. Bill is still a member of my dissertation committee and has helped tremendously with writing my dissertation.
Third time lucky, at least in terms of settling on an advisor. I started working with Stu Shapiro. Dissertation topic numero tres was negation. It remains a very interesting topic. I can't tell you how much I read and wrote about negation before we decided that the topic was proving too difficult to appropriately bound. I wrote several limericks about the sad death of the negation dissertation. After all, tragedy is the mother of art. One sample can be seen in the poetry section of this page.
Stu had been interested in question answering, in particular, in generic answers. Thus, my actual dissertation was born. I pursued the topic doggedly using the paradigm of resolution theorem proving. The topic proved to be quite difficult to get a hold of. I did a tremendous amount of reading/writing on many things that are not going to be in my dissertation. As soon as I finish I anticipate a large number of pent-up publications to emerge.
a postscript version of my dissertation proposal is still extant
Article about my pilot project I was interested in whether or not owning a computer was a factor in the computer literacy levels of students. It wasn't! Surprise...
A project funded by the Pew Learning and Technology Program, a grant on which I am a co-PI.
Home page of the Reusable Software Group at Ohio State. This is an great project with a principled approach to teaching CS 1 and 2. I attended two workshops with these people at OSU. It is really helpful to have other teachers to interact with about your ideas, you learn a lot.
CEDAR Research Projects
PICTION PROJECT, an article from the Buffalo News
My non-school-related interests include reading and writing poetry. I published a poem in one of the "Word Outa Buffalo" chapbooks, two in a chapbook called "Rawhide", and one in a chapbook called "Trouble is My Business". I've been stalled in poetry writing which is appropriate for a late-stage PhD student.
Here's a poem from "Rawhide":
"Schoolday Mornings"
Schoolday mornings were hated.
My mother's screams followed my sisters' slowness through the house
Until both, screams and slowness, struggled into our
2-door vinyl-seated powder blue Capri.
I had reached the age of embarassment in
The first British attempt at a no-iron shirt,
A red wool pleated skirt
And thickly-lensed brown plastic glasses.
A church on the High Street marked the point of relief:
The point at which the end of the sweaty car ride could be conceived.
England still had the 11-plus and cows.
As our headmistress, corgis underfoot, read the morning prayer,
Cows heedlessly ambled through purposeful morning traffic,
Sometimes sitting in the road as they swished their straggly tails,
Or wandering into gardens, eating carefully tended roses.
It was unexpected.
Here's the poem from "Trouble is My Business":
"Trouble in Flannel"
Her hard thin lips snapped tight around a cigarette,
I hot boxed KOOLs in faded hip huggers.
She spotted my flannel nightie anyway,
the one I wore to French class in my dreams.
I suckled embryonic badness from
her peroxide and falling grades,
hiding it under the nightgown
between soft scrubbed softness and skin.
Metamorphosis led me shimmering
in a sleeveless crushed red velvet shirt
to a bar, stale beer and the thud
of music that slid under velvet with rough hands
This was my grandmother's idea of hell, or war:
the one who said redemption lay in pink
and white stripes and Florence Nightingale.
I searched dutifully in dresser drawers for modesty.
At midnight I disappeared.
Those who dared to ask the peroxide blonde
heard her answer spit through clenched teeth:
Who the hell is Florence?
This was in "Word Outa Buffalo 5":
"man #4"
he crossed the Pacific ocean like a storm
finally coming ashore
in San Diego where you found him
still intact
at his center was an unchaste
infant surrounded concentric
by circles of needle sharp raindrops
in disordered existence
his fists clenched and clawed through the gray
as he dragged childhood memories
from tight-lipped containers
and threw them at fragile objects
he rearranged the hotel room furniture and
meticulously taped up posters
because the order of things
represented sanity
he started to wonder if you were one of them
so you bought him something expensive or
a bar of chocolate to erase the thought
before it became a violation
you were left
knowing the baby's screams and the tortured body
the poet's loss of some things and
the ordering of others
If you're scared of mice you're muriphobic
If small spaces scare, you're claustrophobic
If you're both then a mouse
In his very small house
Is a situation catastrophic
If you're into decalcomania
When you tell folks they say, please explania
Does it make you depressed
To be decal obsessed?
And they look at you like you're insania
I thought I would study negation
My advisor then had trepidation
That the negative quest
Might just not be the best
So now I've a new dissertation!
(and now, a meta-limerick :-)
Lines 1, 2 and 5 need to rhyme
Possessing 8 syllable time
While lines 3 and 4 each
Just 6 syllables reach
As a middle rhymed couplet - sublime!
Some favorite activities
High School: Earthy, Organic, Intense
All the STEMs except Fred went to a free school in Ann Arbor that is no longer in existence. It was called Earthworks, and occupied an old storage building on Maple Rd. called the Fritz Building. It was there that I honed my pun-making ability, got really into bicycle riding, and met the people who even today are my best buddies. The school name comes from Native American burial mounds in southern Ohio, in particular, the Serpent Mount, which was our logo. The school colors were clear and gray. Our flag was a piece of gray burlap with a hole in it. Our school motto was, "earthy, organic, intense". I guess you can tell that this predates the "me" generation of the Reagan 80s. I'm sure they would have tried to patch the flag. Some wonderful pictures of Earthworks on the Internet (courtesy of Jim Rees, an alum).
The pre-yuppified Ann Arbor
I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It has changed a lot since the days when we took up residence. When I was in elementary school I spent my free time riding my bike to either Food and Drug or the Blue Front (whose name never meant anything to me until I was an adult) to buy candy. Favorites were Maple Buns, Adams Sour Apple gum, that gold-nugget gum that came in the little white burlap bag, fake cigarettes, and Necco Wafers (but not the black ones - ick!) Back then there were still vacant lots between some of the city stores. I remember one on South Univ. near the Campus movie theater and another on Liberty near Division. The cool store we used to bike to was Middle Earth. It was upstairs by the end of a row of stores across from Marti Walker. We bought incense and wierd candles. The coolest place to hang out and read and eat was Drakes. There was seating upstairs at Drakes, not always open, called "The Martian Room". I spent many hours, generally downstairs in the institutional green wooden booths, reading while an undergrad and comsuming copious quantities of Constant Comment, grilled cinnamon rolls, and grilled ham and swiss cheese sandwiches on rye bread with mayonnaise. Their fresh limeade was a summer tradition.
Our first house in Ann Arbor cost $35,000 and it was located on Burns Park. Anyone who lives there now is probably laughing. If we had held onto that house I wouldn't be worrying about how to pay for my kids' college educations!