I am a 33-year-old American who shares his time between Kagawa, Hiroshima, and Osaka (in Japan), Toronto (Canada) and New Hampshire (United States). I grew up in New Hampshire and studied computer science at the University of Rochester in New York. I went to graduate school at the University of Toronto in Canada. My primary interests are photography, Japanese language and culture, computational linguistics, and the acquisition of English as a scondary language. My primary vices are not exercising enough and reading too much from the Internet and not enough from books. I live in Kagawa on the Japanese island of Shikoku with my computer, coffee maker, and several house plants that have seen better days.
I mostly refer to myself as Bob or as Robert Swier. Never Bob Swier, or Rob or Rob Swier. Sometimes other people refer to me with those names. For formal occasions, I call myself Robert S. Swier. My middle name is Stanley.
In a previous life, I was a Ph.D. student in the Computational Linguistics group of the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto. Seeking a change, I accepted a second Master's Degree and left the program in 2008. Soon afterwards, I moved to Japan.
You can still see my old PhD student page here.
I am an only-child, I may wish to stay in Japan for most or all of the rest of my life, and I am slowly going bald (or not so slowly). My achievable dream: cross the United States on a motorcycle. I am also studying kanji. I probably should study kanji a lot, but it is more accurate to say that I study kanji sometimes.
