Author Judy Hochberg lived in Los Alamos from 1989 to 2000 and recently published a book about Spanish with Bloomsbury Academic Press. Hochberg has a Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University and teaches Spanish at Fordham University, New York.

Although she has not been back to Los Alamos since she moved, the delicious breakfast burritos from Chili Works have not been forgotten. 

Hochberg worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a research staff member with CCS-3 Information Sciences, working mostly on projects having to do with computers and language. The project she was hired for involved training a neural net, which is a computer model loosely based on the workings of the brain, to make an association between the acoustics of speech and the movement of the lips and tongue.

Hochberg explained, “The idea was that this would sort of make speech visible and people who had hearing problems would be able to use this as a way to teach them how to articulate.” Another project at LANL that utilized her linguistic skills was developing a program that would automatically identify the writing system used in a document, whether it was printed or hand written. “Of all the papers I published at the lab, those are the ones that get most cited,” she recalled.

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