Dr Kevin Knight is one of those guys that I think of when I ponder the word 'Brilliant' (he's not alone, ISI is chockablock with people I place in this category). It's inspirational to be working in the same department as someone who builds computer systems that do wacky things with language: automatically translate mysterious languages only spoken by a handful of people into English, translate rhyming poetry well, or by cracking famously unsolved codes. 

Last Friday, I realized the sort of place I work in: an academic Computer Science institute that bears more than a passing resemblence to the ficticious TV town of 'Eureka'. We don't have flying cars, or intelligent, rebellious, precocious attack bots, but we do have some cool stuff. Take the 128-QuBit Quantum Computer housed the ground floor of parking lot where a sandwich shop used to be, for example. This is the next generation of computers, using the superposition effects of quantum mechanics to process vastly many more states than our current 'classical' computers can accomplish. This is the sort of stuff that really good sci-fi writers incorporate into their novels, it's hardcore-science-at-the-bleeding edge and it's chugging away, downstairs from me right now.