Max Copperman

Home Undergraduate Program Life After the Department Max Copperman

BA in History and Computer Science, 1984
Director of Advanced Technology, Kanisa, Inc.

My undergraduate degree is in History and Computer Science (a double major). I got that degree at UCSC in 1984, then came back to graduate school at UCSC in 1987, in Computer Science. In 1993 I got my Ph.D. in an area that has nothing to do with linguistics.

However, linguistics has had a considerable impact on me and on my working life. During graduate school, I took a number of linguistics courses, some undergraduate and some at the graduate level. I was interested in natural language processing (NLP---computer processing of human language), and to a lesser extent in knowledge representation and artificial intelligence in general. In the early 90s it was clear to me that a boom was coming in NLP, although there weren't many jobs---this was before the Internet boom.

When I finished my dissertation, I wanted two things---I wanted interesting work in NLP, and I wanted that work to be in Europe. Beyond that, I wanted to live in a place that has good food. At that time, there was a fairly new research lab in Grenoble, France that had a big effort in NLP. A couple of people from Xerox PARC's natural language group (one of the best in the world) had started that lab, and they worked closely with PARC. I figured the food would be good enough in France, and the lab needed someone who could write software and to whom linguistics wasn't a complete mystery. There's no way that I could have gotten the job without the linguistics courses and the references from Linguistics professors.

So my family and I picked up and moved to France for three and a half years. I worked on a parser/generator that could parse or generate any language you gave it a grammar for. We did a French grammar at our lab, people at the University of Stuttgart did a German grammar, and the natural language group at Xerox PARC did an English grammar. I worked on machine translation, and a little bit on information retrieval. I worked with world-class researchers, and though I wasn't one myself, some of the intellectual habits and a lot of knowledge rubbed off on me.

Eventually it was time to come home. We came back to Santa Cruz in 1998, at the height of the craziness in Silicon Valley. I took a job at a start-up called Kanisa, Inc. that was developing retrieval capabilities that required some core natural language technology. What I learned at Xerox enabled me to lead the development of that technology, and what I learned in the Linguistics department of UCSC enabled me to learn what I learned at Xerox. I'm now the Director of Advanced Technology of Kanisa.

Leaving linguistics itself aside for the moment, there are two things that distinguish the UCSC Linguistics Department: 1) UCSC Linguistics professors have absolutely superb classroom teaching skills; 2) The critical analysis that is part of the discipline that they teach can be used in any domain.

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