A news post by the National Science Foundation features the strong performance by U.S. high school students at the International Olympiad in Linguistics in Wroclaw Poland, including incoming UW CSE freshman Daryl Hansen. Daryl writes: “I heard about the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad from one of my teachers, and went with one of my friends to go compete in it in March, since it sounded interesting. In the second round, I ended up 4th in the country, which put me in the top 8 that the organizers would then take to Poland for the ILO. We had a few months of weekly practice sessions over Skype, and then we got a free weeklong vacation in Europe that involved us taking some linguistics tests. So, yes, it was amazing to be there at all. I didn’t have much prior experience with linguistics or computational linguistics, but this and the NACLO made me a lot more interested in them both.”
Read the NSF post here.