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ObituariesIn Remembrance: Michiko Takaki ’77PhD Died on December 5 2014Michiko Takaki died on December 5, 2014, in Boston. She had been a longtime faculty member at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her death was recorded in the Smithsonian Institution Virtual Archives. |
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She was my professor at UMass Boston in the early 80's. I majored in Computer Science.
For me, her course was the difference between a B.S. and a B.A. degree. I took Linguistics instead of computer hardware, and that has led to my job today, 34 years later. She gave me tools for thinking about language. In my job I make use of AI-generated audio-to-text transcriptions to do speech analytics. Thank you Michiko.
I remember her intensity in class, and her precision. She did not put up with students who did not take the subject seriously.
There was one obnoxious student who insisted that there was no way he could speak Japanese, even if he was born there. The subject of the class was Language Acquisition. He got into quite an argument with her in which she concluded that he was uneducable. She suggested that his time would not be well spent in her class. He did show up again. I believe the other students were grateful - I know I was. Michiko - uncompromising.