Luke Swartz's Home Page: About Me

About Me

All you ever wanted to know and more about Luke Hiro Swartz!

[High school graduation photo, 1998. Iddn' he cute?]
"Los Angeles? That's just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco."
John Lennon

The Obligatory Biographic Splatter

I'm [current year - 1979] years old; I was born and raised in the delightfully foggy San Francisco, CA. (Unless you want to be hurt, don't call it "Frisco.") I spent my grammar school years at Stuart Hall for Boys, an all-boys school run by the Religious of the Sacred Heart. The Schools of the Sacred Heart in San Francisco are in enormous mansions that you just don't appreciate until you've left. I then went to Saint Ignatius College Preparatory (SI for short), a co-ed Jesuit high school in the Sunset District (on the west side of San Francisco--hence the name "Sunset"). I graduated from Leland Stanford Junior University in sunny Palo Alto, CA, where I got a BS degree in Symbolic Systems, and a "co-term" (masters) degree in Computer Science. See below for why I'm doing these majors. I was commissioned as a Naval Officer from NROTC UC Berkeley, went to Navy Dive School in Panama City, FL as well as the Navy's Nuclear Power School in Charleston, SC, and am currently a student at the Nuclear Prototype Traing Unit in Ballston Spa, NY...ultimately headed to a submarine in early 2005.

The Major

Symbolic Systems is a melting pot of computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology; most schools call it "Cognitive Science" but Stanford thinks that implies a more limited field of study: in short, "symbolic systems" can be thought of in two ways: First, we study systems of symbols (like language and logic). Second, we study systems that use symbols (like humans and computers--specifically, how you use computers to understand the human brain, how you can model human behavior on computers, etc.). It has a bunch of different sub-fields (artificial intelligence, computer music, learning, human-computer interaction, neuroscience, etc.). One of the blessings and curses of being a "Sym Sys" major is that you get/have to explain what it is to everyone you meet (especially prospective employers). An easy way out (and a true one for me, I suppose) is to just say "I'm studying computers." It's a very cool major though, as it allows one to explore interesting questions from both a "fuzzy" (humanities/social science) and "techie" (engineering/physical science) perspective.

My own particular interest is Human-Computer Interaction, or "HCI," the study of how humans and computers interact (duh), and thus how to make computers easier to use; my concentration in sym sys was about "educational design"--or, roughly, how to apply HCI to education. I'm interested in HCI in general, too--not only are things continually designed in a poor way, but often people aren't even designing the right solution to the problem!

See my academic webpage to see various projects I've worked on in (and outside) of Sym Sys and CS.

The Family

Both my mom and dad were teachers...and the worse kind, too: math teachers. In fact, they met at the first meeting of the San Francisco Math Teachers' Association. Isn't that cute? My mom worked at Benjamin Franklin Middle School for a long time and finished up at Francisco Middle School, and my dad worked mostly at George Washington High School, both in the City. (Note my arrogant use of "the City" to refer to San Francisco, which tends to annoy New Yorkers. While I sympathize with their argument that the Big Apple is the only "City," everyone in the Bay Area refers to San Francisco as such, so when in Rome.... When I'm back East, then I call New York "the City.") They're both retired now, and spend their time traveling, becoming timeshare gurus, volunteering for the Academy of Sciences, doing Bikram Yoga, etc. My brother is a student at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (also doing NROTC), where I'm convinced that he is being chased after by countless hordes of women.

The Race

Some people wonder what race I am, asking, as one of the students I tutored a few summers ago asked, "what are you?" While I was tempted to answer "human," I knew what she meant. It's sad that race still matters so much in today's society. Many people think I am Jewish because of my last name, or Japanese because of my middle name, or Hispanic because of my complexion (as some Spanish Québecois thought when I visited Montréal a few summers ago). I'm actually all of the above--sort of. My mom is Japanese (sansei, which means that she's a third-generation American) and my dad is half Romanian Jewish and half German Catholic. My brother and I, however, were raised as Catholics; my mother isn't evangelically Buddhist and we didn't even know my dad was half Jewish until I was 12 or so. Together with a bunch of other Stanford people, I was one of the founding members of the Stanford Chapter of Hapa Issues Forum. "Don't worry--Be hapa!" There's a little blurb about this issue in my blog.

The Name

"Luke" comes from a Latin word meaning "light." My dad chose it because he wanted a Christian name that was easy to spell. It had nothing to do with Star Wars. The fact that the Star Wars spoof Spaceballs happened to involve "the Schwartz" is also a coincidence. I swear. Interestingly, however, our family name used to be "Schwartz" but when my grandfather immigrated to the US the spelling got changed. "Swartz" is German for "black" or "dark," so I have a contradictory name: "light-dark." "Hiro" comes from the Japanese "Hiroshima," which is where my other grandfather's family is from. "Hiroshima" literally means "wide rock," so my middle name means "wide." Since I'm relatively small, that's a contradiction too!

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