I have two scientific projects I’m involved in at present, I’m going to describe them briefly just for you to get the idea what the other posts in this category will be about, etc. Click to read more!

I’m a doctoral student in Clinical Neuroscience at the Medical University of Vienna and my thesis is about the computational modelling of visual attention in autism spectrum disorders (and hopefully eventual clinical applications, e.g., for diagnosis, etc.). The focus is on the modelling aspect – my advisor, Georg Dorffner, is a mathematician – but I wanted to gather some empirical data, and hence I have recently started looking into low-cost eye tracking. The reasoning was that since most of the thesis would be about the model ling work anyway, it might not make sense to buy a top-of-the-line eye tracker just to gather a bit of data. Also, I like building things, so why not?

Unfortunately many of the claims are quite exaggerated when it comes to algorithm performance. Building an eye tracker (even a two-camera head-mounted setup with IR) is quite easy – much easier than most of the online tutorials would make you think -, but there are serious problems with software stability, reliability, or just accuracy in general. (Stability would be easier to fix…)

I still think it is possible to gather data on the cheap, but you have to be tricky about it. One of the main reasons I set up this new website, and do so using a blog format, is that I want to rant about various aspects of building a cheap eye tracker ;]  I’m on the 5th PhD conference of the MUV today, I have a poster about building an eye tracker and choosing algorithms etc., but there are so many things that don’t fit on a poster, and generally the internet is a good place for, well duh, online tutorials. And I’m also interested in the exchange of ideas, etc., the comments section is there for a reason! (Yes, I’m looking at you!)

I’m also a masters student in Theoretical Linguistics at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. I started this degree when I realized I was running out of available courses my psychology masters and I wanted to study something else while I was at it. (It was a scary snap decision. I wanted to do something else related to cognitive science because psychology just didn’t seem substantial enough by itself. At the time I was working part-time in a lab and I saw this from up close.) I’m now ABD and have been so for a year – I haven’t even been in Budapest since January! -, so I should really really finish my thesis and defend it ASAP, and then publish. I’ve already put a lot of effort into it so I don’t want to abandon it altogether, even though I’m now a doctoral student somewhere else.

It is about a Construction Grammar model of Hungarian (not all of Hungarian, obviously…. but I aimed for a reasonably broad coverage) which has already been tested on psycholinguistic data for my psychology thesis and it worked fine. Now for my other thesis I’m making software which will allow everyone to use my model and build on it (add constructions, etc.). It will have a GUI (I’ve already made that part) and the only prerequisite for using it will be the ability to use XML. XML is easy! I’ve also written a lot of documentation… quite an amount of the thesis is essentially documentation so far.

Basically you have a set of constructions in an XML file, and the software parses Hungarian sentences using these constructions and provides a Construction Grammar (-ish) representation. I’m saying “-ish” because no one really agrees on what Construction Grammar really is and how it should work in practice. The parser and construction matching algorithm is written in Python and I’m not a great programmer so this has taken up most of the time so far. But Python is useful and versatile, so any experience I gain with it is worthwhile I’d say. Besides, the video game I’m developing in my spare time also uses Python (and pygame and renpy) so the experience I gain in one should transfer to the other… in an ideal situation… well I don’t need to parse XML with Python for a video game!

Anyway, the “meat” of it is in the construction declaration framework and the Python code that makes use of it, and the actual set of constructions. So far a lot of work went into defining the constructions the way I want them to be.

I really want to finish my thesis this summer and defend it this winter. If I post here, that will hopefully help me with that, because then I will have this urge of “must-post-something” and if I haven’t made any advances I could post about, well, too bad. And there are very few linguists reading my personal blog which, when it is not about my thesis projects, is all about my little emo life. (Dear readers, you will be spared all that, this website is for my public projects. If you want to read about my daily aggravations, you will have to find a way to read my friends-only blog somewhere else, it’s not public and for good reason! My personal life just isn’t that interesting.) So anyway this seems a good place for myself to urge myself on, and hopefully get other people interested in the process.