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Alison S. Alvarez

Biography

Alison Alvarez believes that speaking Japanese will help her discover a way to talk to computers. She wants to master Japanese because it is a language that relies heavily on context, and she is interested in a context-based learning mechanism for computers that could learn to respond to questions in an artificial language.

It might sound like science fiction, but Alison has dreamed of artificial intelligence since doctors permanently attached titanium springs and rods to her vertebrae to correct severe scoliosis when she was 17. “After becoming partially artificial myself, I have had a different way of looking at artificial life.” Her goal is to build a computer system capable of interacting with humans on a robust level.

At George Washington, Alison was a teaching assistant for two years and a research assistant for three. In addition, she spent a summer as a research assistant at the University of Kansas where she developed a better version of a diagnostic tool for melanoma that cut false diagnoses by 25 percent. She speculates that her findings may be adopted by dermatologists everywhere. Her experiences as a teacher and a researcher were so profound that she hopes to teach at a university where she can conduct cutting-edge research.

Alison’s accomplishments and awards include a Goldwater Scholarship, a Ford Motor Company Corporate Scholarship and a National Hispanic Scholarship. She was a soup kitchen volunteer and a member of the fencing team. She spent a semester in Japan becoming fluent in the language, and she also reads and writes classical Japanese. Alison has published a paper on her melanoma findings, but began her writing career in a totally different genre. “By the time I was five, I would write my own fairy tales and sell them to relatives,” she remembers.
 

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