Welcome!
My name is Pontus Stenetorp, I am a third year Ph.D. student at the Aizawa Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. To the right is a not-so-pleasing picture of me and my dog (she looks better than me on this occasion).
I was raised in a land of snow and beautiful summers in a small town that most people have never heard of (and for good reasons), attended Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm and received the degree of Master in Science and Engineering in Computer Science in 2010. After my graduation I joined the Tsujii Laboratory at the University of Tokyo and was a member until the official closing of the lab in 2011.
The topic of my research is almost solely Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is the task of processing text from sources such as newspapers, blogs, etc. using computers. Carl Sagan once said that writing allows humans to transfer knowledge between individuals across time and space, a feat which is truly incredible. We humans describe our experiences in words, a form computers still have difficulties to grasp due to it’s frequently ambiguous nature, I thus see my line of research as an attempt to tap into this vast source of knowledge.
As with most researchers I have several topics of interests in my field such as Information Extraction (IE), computational lexical semantics and extrinsic/intrinsic evaluation of NLP systems. I am also active in the sub-field of Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP) which I find to be an interesting application of NLP techniques. On the side I dabble in and read a wide array of topics such as evolutionary linguistics, computer security. If you share any of my interests you may want to have a glance at my hopefully growing list of publications.
During what spare time I have left after, I enjoy tinkering with computers, producing code for fun, hacking on an operating system, biking, traveling and photography. My Erdős number is 5 (Me -> J. J. Li -> T. Kowalski -> P. Jipsen -> Z. Tuza -> P. Erdős).
Recent News
2012-02-21: Photo Gallery
I have added a photography page with a few photos in a gallery. I am using Galleria which works rather nicely, but I am not really happy with the JPG arctifacts it introduces when scaling. I probably need to look into the documentation further when/if I have the time.
2011-12-20: Winter Cleaning
I have just performed some well-needed cleaning of the website and it is beginning to look at least mildly respectable (especially when getting rid of some stupidity due to my incompetence when it comes to web design)
Given that after coming back to Japan after a lengthy conference I think I can justify taking it a little bit easier than usual and try to get those blogs rolling. Expect to see some updates in the coming hours/days.
2011-08-19: On Par
We now have a page that is on-par with the old homepage when it comes to contents and looks. Good grief CSS can be a hack, and now it contains tons of calculations as well… I really need to get on SASS as soon as possible.
2011-08-18: Test Run
I am trying out Jekyll and GitHub pages, let’s see if it makes me feel more comfortable than my old page. Maybe I can spend a fem minutes every day to improve it.
