About Sergei

I am a graduate student in Computer Science and Communication Studies at the University of Northern Iowa. This web site and blog are about computer science, communication, the application of one to the other, as well as anything that I find interesting and worth sharing.

Why Computer Science?
Because I have found it to resemble the study of magic; which, in my opinion, is very cool (which explains the name of my blog: reflections of a wizard in training). For me, computer science is about discovering new ways to model the real world, and then watch those models come to life …if they compile, of course.

Over the past several years, my interests in computer science included automatic code generation, content management, web-based search, information extraction and machine learning. Today I am primarily interested in the application of computer science to research in other fields. However, I'd still like to explore natural language processing and human-computer interaction.

Why Communication Studies?
My previous degrees were in journalism and communication. In my communication studies thesis, I used a computer science approach to collecting, storing and analyzing empirical data. I wrote a focused crawler, which explored more than 30.000 web pages, discovering relevant data. I used that data to model and analyze a chronological network of a specific discussion in the blogosphere. According to my knowledge, nobody has done it before in communication studies. I believe computer science can be applied to research in communication studies in lots of ways; crawling the Web, modeling data networks and analyzing them with information retrieval methods is just the tip of the iceberg.

Why LordOfTheWebs.com?
No, it has nothing to do with taking over the Internet. The name comes from The Lord of The Rings; I enjoy the books (as well as the movies), I like being reminded of Middle-earth – and to me, my web site is one such reminder.

The picture of Bagend in the menu is by John Howe.