"The secretive, top-down, us-versus-them culture that is pervasive in government security circles must give way to more inclusive processes ... Rather than working assiduously to keep the details of terrorism and our vulnerabilities out of the public domain, the federal government should adopt a new imperative that recognizes that Americans have to be far better informed about the dangers that they face ... How much security is enough? We have done enough when the American people can conclude that a future attack on US soil will be an exceptional event that does not require wholesale changes to how we go about our lives ... We must continue to remind the world that it is not our military might that is the source of our strength but our belief that mankind can govern itself in such a way as to secure the blessings of liberty." [Stephen Flynn, America the Vulnerable. HarperCollins, 2004. Quoted in Jonathan Raban, "The Truth about Terrorism", New York Review of Books, 13 January 2005]
This is me comparing apples and oranges at Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, where I lived for many years:
Pointers to some of my recent papers can be found here.
Pointers to some of my favorite quotes can be found here,
At Edinburgh, I work on discourse phenomena, collaborating with the DLTAG group at the University of Pennsylvania on the development of the Penn Discourse TreeBank. I also supervise a growing group of PhD students doing advanced work on Question Answering and other PhD students working on applications of text processing in Bioinformatics.
Recent PhD students include:
For information about Language at Edinburgh:
For information about applying to study for a PhD in Informatics at Edinburgh, look here.
Bonnie Webber / bonnie at inf.ed.ac.uk / revised October 2006