After receiving his undergraduate degree in 1990 from the Warsaw University, Greg Kondrak worked as a software engineer for several years, eventually obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2002. He is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His research is focused on natural language processing at the sub-word level, including grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, transliteration, and phonetic similarity. He has served as a co-chair of SIGMORPHON workshops in 2006 and 2007, a member of the executive committee of SIGMORPHON since 2008, an area chair for ACL-IJCNLP 2009 and ACL-HLT 2011, and a faculty advisor for the student research workshop at ACL 2012.
I have attended nearly all NAACL meetings since the beginning in 2000, so I am familiar with the organization and the conference. In order to maintain the high quality of NAACL, it needs to adapt and evolve with the times. With respect to financial considerations, I am against introducing separate conference fees for each paper presentation, which is becoming standard at some conferences. Instead, we should implement other ways of increasing the funding. NAACL is a competitive conference, which is one of the reasons why it is always worthwhile to attend it. On the other hand, the tradition of allowing simultaneous submissions to other conferences facilitates rapid dissemination of research results. An issue that requires careful attention are overlapping deadlines with other NLP conferences, as well as the interaction with TACL. If elected, I would investigate streamlining the reviewing process by cross-referencing the records from other conferences. I would also work towards holding one of the NAACL meetings in Latin America.