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2012 Fellows

Jason T. Herrmann

Mentors: Deborah Nichols, Anthropology; Jonathan Chipman, Earth Sciences and Geography

Jason T. Herrmann is an archaeologist who specializes in the use of aerial and ground-based remote sensing methods to investigate settlement patterns, ancient built and natural environments, and the complex interactions between ancient societies and their environments. In his dissertation research, Jason examines the relationships between settlement systems and environmental change in prehistoric southeast Arabia (ca. 8,000 - 300 BC) in what are now the desert reaches of the United Arab Emirates. Jason also contributes to long-term research at the ancient royal capital of Sam'al, modern Zincirli Höyük, Turkey. While Herrmann's regional focus is on the archaeology of the Middle East, he has also contributed to archaeological research in Mesoamerica, the Andean Altiplano, Egypt, and the United States. Herrmann teaches archaeological remote sensing to students in two field schools: the Tell el-Amarna Field Program in Archaeological Geophysics and the Arizona State University Field Program at the Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois.

Teaching

  • Spring 2013 - ANTH 12.2 Archaeology of the Ancient Near East
  • Summer 2013 - Archaeological Geomatics. Arizona State Archaeology Field Program at the Center for American Archaeology, Kampsville, Illinois
  • Spring 2014 - ANTH 50.5 Environmental Archaeology

Publications & Press

Jason Herrmann is now at the Eberhard Karls University, in Tübingen, Germany, where he is a research associate in the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies.

Sravana Reddy

Mentors: Ioana Chitoran, Linguistics; Lorenzo Torresani, Computer Science

Sravana Reddy is a computational linguist, working on algorithms to discover linguistic structure from raw data. Her research projects include learning pronunciations from speech, converting between written and phonetic representations of words, uncovering rhyming and metrical patterns in poetry, and decipherment of encoded texts. At Dartmouth, she looks forward to devising computational models to understand various phenomena in phonetics, phonology, and language acquisition and variation, through conversations with researchers in linguistics as well as machine learning. She will graduate with a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Chicago this summer.

Press

Teaching

  • Winter 2013 - COSC 009/LING 050 Computational Linguistics
  • Fall 2014 - COSC 73/LING 50  Computational Linguistics

2015 Neukom CompX collaboration with Jim Stanford: DARLA: Dartmouth Linguistic Automation

Sravana is the working at the intersection of human language and computation: machine learning systems to extract patterns from text and speech data, communicate through language, and shed light on linguistics, cognition, and society as the Hass Fellow in Computer Science at Wellesley College.

Gwen Spencer

Mentors: Richard Howarth, Environmental Sciences; Lisa Fleischer, Computer Science

Gwen Spencer will obtain her Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University in May 2012. Spencer's research focuses on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for stochastic combinatorial optimization concentrating on planning problems in the sustainable management of ecological systems. Applications in limiting the spread of wildfire and invasive species containment suggest natural questions about how well spatial decisions can be made when most information available is probabilistic (rather than deterministic). Decision-making about natural systems differs in significant ways from traditional optimization settings and motivates novel directions for algorithm design. Through conversations with foresters and ecologists, Spencer hopes to expand the stochastic optimization literature: to harness scientific and economic understanding of natural systems and the challenges involved in devising good and implementable strategies for their management.

Teaching

Gwen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Smith College.