Joshua Johanson can speak four languages—Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and English—not something you would expect from a computer science major. Johanson says he has always been interested in both computer science and linguistics, which is what drew him to the University of Washington's Professional Master's in Computational Linguistics. "I loved the program and this field. It is very fascinating."

Joshua Johanson

Johanson likes the program's unique focus on both computer science and linguistics, which allows him to take classes in a variety of subjects. He also enjoys the one-year format and the smaller class size. Johanson believes the smaller classes are one of the reasons why the professors are able to bond so closely with the students. "The professors really care about their students; and even though I am now in California, I still keep in touch with them."

Now in California participating in an internship at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Johanson is applying what he learned in the classroom to his real life. He is currently working on a computer program that resolves pronouns to their entities.

After completing the program, Johanson will be working for InXight, a computational linguistics company that focuses on information extraction from natural language. He will be working on extracting entities like companies, places and people, and discovering the relations between the entities.

Johanson is excited about working in this dynamic and growing field, and believes that voice recognition and machine translation will only become more common in the future. He says the field challenges him. "Every day is something new, and I get to use both sides of my brain, which is something I really enjoy."

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