Quick Links: COMP60372 (teaser), COMP60462 (teaser), Blog
Bijan Parsia
Research
My academic specialties are philosophy and computer science.
My graduate training is in philosophy (at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, though my doctorate (Aug 2009) is from UMCP (in
philosophy, though I was employed there in CS)), but I've only held
research and academic positions in CS. I'm an autodidact
in CS. I'm not sure why I find that important to mention.
If you are interested in collaborating or studying with me,
drop
me a line!
Computer Science
[Semantic Web, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, AI,
Programming languages, Software and Ontology Engineering,
HCI,
Visualization, Belief Revision, Web services, Planning]
I
have worked on Swoop
and Pellet.
A lot.
Among other things. With complete sentences in the mix. On
occasion.
Philosophy
My master's thesis was on the epistemology of "essentially"
computer
based proofs of mathematical theorems, specifically of the four-color
theorem.
My dissertation killed me. My diploma reanimated me. The nicest thing I want to say about my thesis is that it is done!
[Epistemology,
Oppression Theory, Feminisms, Early Moderns,
Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Logic|Mathematics|Mind|Language,
History of Analytic Philosophy]
Publications,
Service, & Teaching
DLDB
has a reasonable, if incomplete, list
of my publications. I scraped their BibTeX to make an (experimental) Exhibt.
(I'll note that "service" has a
special meaning in academia, roughly, "all that which is expected as
part of your job but is neither teaching nor research". Refereeing
papers, editing journals, or organizing workshops all fall into this
category. I tend to place participation in standardization there too.)
In
addition to a plethora of reviewing, I am currently
My most recent course was on (mostly logic based) Knowledge
Representation (COMP30411) and was co-taught by Sean Bechhofer. We are reprising this class in Fall 2007.
I shall be teaching my first MSc course at Manchetser with Uli Sattler (Semi-structured data
and the Web, COMP60370). See the school course page or our overview slides.
I am spending a fair bit of time trying to start a W3C working
group to standardize OWL
1.1.
Colleagues,
collaborators, et al
Students
I
am looking for bright, motivated students. If you look at my
publications you'll get some idea of the eclectic mix of topics I've
worked on. I am a bit of an intellectual magpie and can get quite
enthused by new and wacky things. Drop
me a line
if you think you'd be interested in working with me. I especially
encourage non-traditional students of every sort (having been something
of a non-traditional student myself). In particular, I would like to increase
the number of woman
in our group. Computer science, as an academic discipline, has been
very welcoming to me; I hope it is or becomes so to ever wider groups
of people.
Supervising
Advising
Worked with
Graduated
I didn't work in a supervisor capacity
with these folks, but I was there when they were suffering through
their theses and I like to think I helped out:
Personal
I
was born in
Philadelphia, PA, USA and grew up in a
suburb of
it (note, Google maps is pointing at where our mailbox would
be; the house I grew up in is the second on the right of White Pine
Lane; it's no longer in the family and there's really no reason for it
to be).
My spousetype is the fabulous Zoe
Mulford. For many years, we were marriage resisters, but the
lure of tax advantages, medical insurance, and, of course, our staying
together when I came to the UK wore us down. Good thing we're
madly in love. We met in high school.
She is a professional, full time musician. She has three albums
out: "Traveling
Moon," "Roadside
Saints," and, in 2009, Bonfires. (There was a prior "homegrown" CD, "As Soon As I'm
On Top Of Things", which was "published" through MP3.com. Lotta good
songs on it which are slowly migrating to the more produced albums.)
Read her blog. Thank you. And you'll thank me.
She plays guitar, banjo, piano, and, most recently, the melodica.
She sings, arranges, and composes as well as writing lyrics.
I've managed to sneak a vocal cameo onto both albums. I am
the voice of the drunken frat boy in Party Cows
and part of the chorus of The
American Wake.
I have three "active" weblogs: Thinking Clearly,
Mitigated
Frenzy, and Philosophical
Explications. In a prior life, I wrote stuff for
(the now defunct) Monkeyfist
(there, I collaborated with Zoe on some cartoons).
I am the king of writer's block (or rather writer's block is the king
of me), so everything is updated very erratically. Though I've been
involved with weblogs from the early days, I'm not sure it's a good
medium for me.
I'm fond of several of the Monkeyfist essays: e.g., Against sedentary
habits and silent harms, Frisbee interlude,
Small
Economies, Austenian
interlude, The
ambiguities of honor, memory, and love, To Philly:
Remember MLK, A
simple, prima facie argument in favor of the Semantic Web, Masters and Tools:
Thoughts Inspired by Audre Lourde, and Voter
Disobedience: Solidarity and Disloyalty.
Trivia
My name, "Bijan Parsia," is Iranian (my middle name, "John,"
isn't,
but I don't generally use it except in signatures as an initial and in
initials). "Bijan" is the name of an
Iranian epic
hero, who, as far as I can tell, was mainly heroically
imprisoned (note the telling typo "Bijan
was the son Giw, a great worrier...";
my father was, indeed,
an annoyingly great worrier). My last name, so the story goes, was a
contraction (by my father) of a really long (and pretentious)
name coined by my grandfather.
For a long time, there were no photos of me on the Web. I
actively resisted photos going up, which is not as easy as you might
think. I "officially" gave up upon coming to Manchester, as they wanted
a photo of me for
my bit of the IMG
people page.
