Hi, I am writing to express interest in the GSoC 2008 mentorship offered by the One Laptop Per Child association. I am a first-year graduate student in computer science at the Illinois Institute of Technology's MSCS program. My disciplinary interests include general topics in the broad field of computational-linguistics, social issues in computer science, open-source software, and programming in general. I have closely followed the development of the OLPC's mission to make laptops available to children around the world. In fact, I have blogged on a few opportunities on issues related to the OLPC's work (see here<http://randomatom.blogspot.com/search?q=olpc&x=0&y=0>and here <http://randomatom.blogspot.com/search?q=one+laptop+child&x=0&y=0>, for posts on these topics at http://randomatom.blogspot.com).
In particular, I would be interested in helping further development in the areas of speech-synthesis/TTS, especially as concerns localization of languages and dialects, as well any general language-learning efforts at OLPC, including eSpeak (TalknType and Speech Server), among others. I completed numerous courses in Linguistics in my undergraduate studies in Anthropology and Latin-American studies at the University of Chicago, including a full year of introductory courses in semantics, phonetics, morphology, syntax, and other general topics in linguistics. I have also studied German, Russian, and Romani (a SE European language spoken by the Roma people), and am a native-speaker of Spanish, my mother tongue. In addition, I am versed in Java, and have programmed in C#, OCaml, C, C++, SQL, MySQL. I have used SVN on several projects, including as a collaborative version-control system. Moreover, I am currently enrolled in a course on programming languages and translators which covers topics in scanning, parsing, compiler design, and other topics of interest in language-related applications. In conclusion, I would welcome the opportunity to speak more about my interests in these areas, as well as to hear more about the OLPC's efforts in general linguistic and socio-cultural applications. Best, Alex Escalona vergueishon on IRC
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