omer baror · professional site · research interests

Research Interests

Note: float over any of the elements below to see more information about them.

· Computer Science · Computer science is in a unique position to help people throughout the world because some level of computing positively affects almost everybody's life, both a) as directly as personal computers, workstations and $100 laptops for children in developing countries, and b) indirectly, through scientific discoveries and other advances in human knowledge. Advances in computer science, therefore, are the most exciting kind, because they both make our lives better now and give us the tools to make them better in the future.

• Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence works to create machines that sense their environment, process it, and react to it in a way that humans consider to be intelligent. The ambitiousness of this task both gives artificial intelligence an air of mystique in popular culture and requires it to address problems of vast complexity. I am fascinated both by the difficulty of the problems this field tackles and by the often unexpected pragmatic benefits of solving these problems.

  • Natural Language Understanding Natural Language Understanding attempts to understand language as humans do, where "understand" is a vague term usually meaning that a machine can respond to novel utterances in a way that a human would expect it to. The problem is vast, both because languages are large and complex, and because human understanding of them (in the field of linguistics) is far from complete. But, advances in this field have similarly vast repercussions both in what computers can do and in how easy it is for people to interact with them.
  • Logical Inference Logical inference systems work by assuming their universe functions based on the rules of formal logic. They store logical truths to repersent the world, and then use inference techniques to acquire new truths. Although logical inference alone is much more limited than probabilistic inference, probabilistic inference still uses logical tools like SAT Solvers in order to optimize otherwise intractable problems.
  • Adversarial Games Although developing machines that play games does not directly benefit the world, games provide a controlled environment in which to test algorithms and ideas. Bridge provides an environment in which probabilistic reasoning must be used. The search space for chess is so large that it requires both efficient search and approximation heuristics. But, the rules of both games are relatively simple. So, novel ideas in probabilistic reasoning and in search can be tested with relative ease by implementing them (or variations of them) in these games.

• Database Systems Work in databases has a positive impact for scientific researchers who need quick access to large sets of data, web developers who want to create any sort of complex dynamic website, and members of industry who want to store and analyze as much information as they can to provide the best Quality of Service they can (or, perhaps, to make their business as lucrative as they can). Through these three avenues, work on databases eventually floods down to people themselves, working behind the scenes to positively benefit their lives in ways that they cannot predict.

  • Schema matching In order to be effective, schema matching systems creatively apply human knowledge of language with algorithms that determine matches based on attributes and table relationships. It is therefore an area of research in computer science that also draws on work in the humanities, effectively combining two of my chief passions (and skill sets) and doing so in a way that could theoretically make collaboration in areas that draw heavily on large amounts of data at least slightly more feasible.
  • Creating a semantic web A semantic web is a web that computers can understand even though it is written in human-readible languages. Projects in this field deal with huge datasets and require an appreciation for complex linguistic pattern matching to handle almost unpredictable structures along with the very real possibility of human error. The web is, in short, the ultimate loosely-structured database.
  • Data mining Like my above two interests, data mining requires an appreciation for pattern-matching. Work in data mining seeks to gather as much information as possible from a given dataset by using as many tools on the data as possible. The idea of analyzing something from many different perspecives appeals to me because it is one of the main functions of any good comparative literist, who has a limited text and attempts to draw as much meaning out of it as she can.

· Comparative Literature · Comparative literature is one of the most poorly defined fields in academia, according even to its scholars. The term "literature" has grown to include many kinds of texts, including films, treatises, and even (to an extent) street signs, websites, and anything with some sort of sensory quality: so, basically, everything. What makes this field interesting, then, is that it draws meaning from every possible source and, moreover, implies that there are underlying properties common to all empirical objects in our world (because we can apply the same tools to them and create a meaningful result). Finally, because the practice of comparative literature involves analyzing a text, discussing it, and then writing it, working in this field makes people more thorough thinkers, clearer speakers, and more effective writers.

• Practical Applications of Comparative Literature While most analysis on literature, especially in non-comparative fields, treats understanding a text as the ultimate goal of study, comparative literature acknowledges that philosophical, sociological and political writings are texts as well and can thus broaden its scope by analyzing scholarly texts that talk about literature. Scholars can therefore write about the purpose of literature, its effect, the benefits and potential problems of writing about something in a particular way, and so forth.

  • Literature and morality One interesting aspect of practical literary studies is the moral obligation of literature and of its authors. In this area, scholars compare different moral obligations put forth by moral philosophers or the moral implications drawn from analysis of more traditional literary texts. Its conclusions are interesting not only in their own scholarly right, but also because they provide a moral framework that authors can keep in mind when creating morally ambiguous art.
  • Holocaust studies Holocaust studies, at least as I am interested in them, are a specific form of analysis on literature and morality (above). Studies on literature about the Holocaust asks questions about who should write about the Holocaust, in what contexts, and most often how they can do so without doing injustice to the atrocity or to the people who died in it. This field is especially interesting because every aspect of Holocaust literature has been brought into question, including the very term "Holocaust."
  • Political analysis Although comparative literature does not often analyze political texts, the analysis of politics in terms of its rhetoric, if it were to become mainstream, would prevent politicians from creating speeches entirely void of meaningful content. This field, in short, attempts to use the literary techniques for a practical purpose largely outside of literature.

• Literary Theory Literary Theory explores the questions that have broadened comparative literature into what it is today. Theorists investigate what can count as literature, what can count as comparison, and what successful analysis looks like. Because every type of analysis is based on some theory, whether explicit or implicit, literary theory makes us more aware of what we are doing, so that we are also aware of what our analysis cannot do (for example tell us what the author of a text actually thought).

  • Post-structuralism Post-structuralism is a response to the structuralist movement that attempts to find an underlying structure to all literary texts. Post-structalism attempts, instead, to show instead that no definite structure exists and, moreover, that it is in the nature of language itself to defy fitting perfectly into any structure. Post-structuralists are notoriously confusing, but their claims have repricussions for how we think about every part of our world.
  • Post-colonialism Post-colonialism addresses issues specific to authors who respond to the effects of colonialism, especially authors who emigrated from a colonized region to a free one. Texts from these authors not only attempt to combine two cultural contexts, but they also reveal the tensions of attempting to preserve the traditions of a vanishing home culture (that is being overwritten by the colonizing culture) while also trying to acclimate to the new culture. I am most interested in post-colonialism as it applies to the Middle East, where cultures can be go from being colonizers to those colonized in a short time period.

· Philosophy · Philosophy, like comparative literature, is hard to define, and the definition itself is one of the things that philsophers analyze. Philosophy is interesting because it methodically explores some of the issues about which we as human beings care, like ethics (what should we do?) and epistemology (about what are we sure?). It also, in the past century, underwent a linguistic turn, which has brought it closer to comparative literature.

• Analytic Philosophy Analytic philosophy concentrates on the work of authors like Frege, Russel, and Wittgenstein, all of whom attempt to solve philsophical problems from a linguistic perspective. The main problem that these philosophers attempted to address was a mathematically precise, all-encompassing definition of language, until Wittgenstein's (and others') conclusion that such a definition is impossible. Analytic philosophers, therefore, combine an interest in language with the rigor of logic.

  • Ludwig Wittgenstein His first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the inspiration for the philosophy of the Vienna Circle and combined an attempt to define language with a structure that resembles an outline and can thus be analyzed in literary terms. His later works attempt to understand language in terms of games and suggest that language cannot fit into definite terms. These texts can also be analyzed using literary tools, and the meanings that scholars have drawn from them have a direct bearing on how we understand and work in our world.
  • Logic Although logic is not actually a subfield of analytic philosophy, its use in the field of analytic philosophy, where scholars combine it with the philosophy of language, is the area that I find most interesting. As a subfield of analytic philosophy, philosophers attempt to create logical schematics that can handle the complexities of language, and though they have been ultimately unsuccessful, the logics that they have created are still powerful tools for understanding language.

• Moral Philosophy Moral philosophy is the most obviously practical area of philosophy. Though most philosophers from almost every area will argue that their philosophy has important practical implications when understood properly, moral philosophy deals directly with personal choices (e.g., in what ways should I treat my family differently than other people?) and judicial decisions (e.g., is abortion morally reprehensible in all cases? in some cases?). Everyone has some sort of moral code, whether implicit or explicit; the study of moral philosophy makes it explicit, thus making it more difficult for us to justify something that we would (if it involved someone else) abhor.

  • Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche is interesting because he turns morality on its head by analyzing the value of moral valuing. Though his style has come under heavy criticism and much of his philosophy has been historically ignored, the continental movement of the 20th century began taking seriously his conclusions, and the implications of the claim that morality in the Judeo-Christian tradition is in fact hurting us are staggering.
  • Moral and political philosophy One area in which moral philosophy is particularly interesting is its combination with political philosophy. This area is interesting because it moves questions about personal beliefs (e.g., should people get abortions?) into the public sphere, and thus creates debates about the issues that affect our daily lives.
  • Evil The term "evil" is thrown around relatively freely in contemporary society, especially to describe governments or people that do not adhere to Western society's regulations and to understand why atrocities like genocide happen. But, because it is used so much in so many different contexts, it often just means "bad" with a stronger negative connotation. Research in this area attempts to understand just what "evil" is, in a psychological sense, in a sociological sense, and in a linguistic sense.

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