Present
I am a fourth-year graduate student in the Computational Cognitive Science Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. I study natural language and human cognition; In particular, I look at how children infer complex aspects of language structure, and (relatedly) why languages have many of the properties they do. My advisor is Dr. Tom Griffiths and my funding is through an NSF graduate research fellowship. I also have ongoing projects with Dr. Mike Frank at Stanford. Dr. Mahesh Srinivasan at Berkeley, and Dr. Roger Levy at UC San Diego.
Three questions I'm working on right now are:
- How much do children know about syntactic categories in the language they are learning? What can we infer from their early use of articles ("a", "an" & "the")?
- How can children infer that there are multiple senses for a given word? How do they determine how senses relate to one another, and can new words can be used in similar ways?
- How might children benefit from being able to simultaneously learn co-occurrence statistics for 1) words with other words and 2) words with things in their environment?
In my research I use (usually Bayesian) computational models of concept learning, distributional models of semantics, large-scale web experiments, and methods from natural language processing and corpus linguistics.
Three questions I'm working on right now are:
- How much do children know about syntactic categories in the language they are learning? What can we infer from their early use of articles ("a", "an" & "the")?
- How can children infer that there are multiple senses for a given word? How do they determine how senses relate to one another, and can new words can be used in similar ways?
- How might children benefit from being able to simultaneously learn co-occurrence statistics for 1) words with other words and 2) words with things in their environment?
In my research I use (usually Bayesian) computational models of concept learning, distributional models of semantics, large-scale web experiments, and methods from natural language processing and corpus linguistics.
Past (CV)
Education
- B.A. magna cum laude, Linguistics, Brown University, 2010
- Studied abroad at Casa de Las Americas in Havana, Cuba in Fall 2008
Employment
» NSF Graduate Research Fellow at UC Berkeley Computational Cognitive Science Lab (2012-present)
» Research Assistant at the Stanford Language and Cognition Lab (2010-2012)
» Platform Statistician at Crowdflower (2011-2012)
» Research Assistant at the U.S. Geological Survey (2004-2011)
» Teaching Assistant at Brown University (Fall 2009)
Languages and Skills
- Embarassingly familiar with R and decent with Python (esp. NLTK, Numpy, Pandas); enough knowledge of Javascript, MySQL, and PostgreSQL to get things done. Capable of serious yak shaving in Unix.
- Experienced with cluster schedulers and parallelization techniques
- In a former life, I have extensive experience with ESRI ArcGIS; now I use an open-source web-based stack around PostGIS and Mapbox Tilestream and Wax for personal projects
- Once upon a time I was a proficient Spanish speaker
My CV, with more details, is available here.
- B.A. magna cum laude, Linguistics, Brown University, 2010
- Studied abroad at Casa de Las Americas in Havana, Cuba in Fall 2008
Employment
» NSF Graduate Research Fellow at UC Berkeley Computational Cognitive Science Lab (2012-present)
» Research Assistant at the Stanford Language and Cognition Lab (2010-2012)
» Platform Statistician at Crowdflower (2011-2012)
» Research Assistant at the U.S. Geological Survey (2004-2011)
» Teaching Assistant at Brown University (Fall 2009)
Languages and Skills
- Embarassingly familiar with R and decent with Python (esp. NLTK, Numpy, Pandas); enough knowledge of Javascript, MySQL, and PostgreSQL to get things done. Capable of serious yak shaving in Unix.
- Experienced with cluster schedulers and parallelization techniques
- In a former life, I have extensive experience with ESRI ArcGIS; now I use an open-source web-based stack around PostGIS and Mapbox Tilestream and Wax for personal projects
- Once upon a time I was a proficient Spanish speaker
My CV, with more details, is available here.
Future
I am fond of ideas that make the world a better or more beautiful place. If you find yourself with such an idea, hit me up.