New Job!

As if it has not been said before, GOD IS GOOD! After months of searching for a full-time job, I have finally been hired. In addition to finally having an income, I have been blessed with a job related to the biomedical field and which enables me to telecommute (thus, saving on rent and/or substantial gas money). Through the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, I work doing biomedical text annotations for a much larger project being conducted at the University of Wisconsin.

My primary functions consist of reading through biomedical research articles from various sources and dissecting them word by word, clause by clause. The main focus of my position is syntax. In doing so, I note explicit relationships and infer implicit relationships between words and clauses, thoughts and concepts. As an annotator, I have mastery of graduate level English and grammatical structure, as well as an understanding of biomedical terminology, concepts in immunology, cell biology, and other advanced biological studies.

The purpose of the work we are doing is to further progress stores of knowledge that will make artificial intelligence, now called natural language processing (NLP), a reality. We are in the process of creating a database of information about the syntax of words, in the hopes that in the future, it will be possible to have a conversation with a computer operated machine. As of now, automated services exist by a series of prompts. We hope that our efforts will push computer interaction towards conversation mimicking real conversations; based on the words strung together in your sentences, the computer can use our syntax database to construct a probabilistic model to determine what you are saying and how best to respond.
Sounds fun, right? Today was Day One, and I absolutely loved it! It is such a random, nerdy job and I love it! Apparently, it takes 3, 8-hour days of work to fully analyze an article. I think I am going to use this blog to help me keep track of what I am learning in each article, and to help me better prepare for future interview questions pertaining to my work.

What are we studying today? Article title: Resistance to IL-10 inhibition of interferon gamma production and expression of suppressor of cytokine signaling 1 in CD4+ T cells from patients with rheumatoid arthritis. So far, I know that CD4+ cells play an integral role in the development of RA in humans. I will update as we get further through the article.

I could not have dreamt of a better, more perfectly suited one-year job for me. I am just praying that the health insurance dilemma gets worked out. Once again, God is Good.