More About My Work
The Finer Details
My research work focuses on the intersection of natural-language processing (NLP) and human-computer interaction (HCI). I seek to create NLP systems that are directly influenced by community input and participation, and, ideally, produce long-term, sustainable technologies/infrastructures which provide tangible benefits for communities. This means utilizing design paradigms such as participatory design and assets-based design and exploring NLP solutions which can function in low-resource settings.
My Skills & Research Interests
This means, while I mostly have experience in subjects like machine-learning and AI, I am a jack-of-all-trades. I am experienced in both quantitative qualitative research methods. Importantly, I believe in envisioning solutions which might stray away from NLP, depending on the research context and participant input. As such, I am quick to adapt, and always love learning something new, even if it is completely unrelated to NLP.
Currently, I am particularly interested in combining game design with NLP. This ties into my broader interest of utilizing educational games to convey important topics in technology ethics. I am also interested in understandin why and how people utilized recent NLP technologies such as LLMs, and how these systems impact all our lives.
My Motivation
The motivation which drives my research interests stems from my own personal experiences working within NLP. I love making things, and I love receiving input from potential users on how they feel about a system, and where it can improve. As such, I want my research to directly involve people who might use the end result. I also believe that this helps foster stronger relations and produces better technology.
More About Myself
Undergraduate Studies
I went to the Univeristy of Pittsburgh for a B.S. in computer science. During this time, I also pursued minors in linguistics and Spanish. I was also able to complete the Certificate in Latin American Studies offered by the Center for Latin American Studies. Finally, I was a member of TRIO SSS, and I am forever grateful to my advisor, Clarence J. Scott for his guidance and advocacy.
Some of my major roles include being a member of Pitt's Provost Academy, where I had the privilege of attending academic activities and learn about college life one week before other first year students arrived. It was an amazing opportunity, and the friends I found there were close to me even today. I then went on to serve as a Provost Academy Leader for the remainder of my undergraduate career.
I served as the Spanish Club @ Pitt's vice president my third year, and became the president of the club in my final year of undergraduate studies. Being a part of the club and helping run it in my time was a great opportunity to both enhance my Spanish language skills, and connect with other students who were interested in language learning.
Lastly, I was (and still am) a member of the Python Linguistics Club @ Pitt headed by Dr. Na-Rae Han. Her course, Introduction to Computational Linguistics, and her club are what originally inspired me to pursue NLP research.
Undergraduate Research
My first research experience was through Pitt's Linguistics Department under Drs. Na-Rae Han and Alan Juff, where I organized and cleaned an unreleased speech corpus. Here I learned the basics of data cleaning and management.
During the summer of 2022, I became an undergraduate researcher in the Fredrick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop hosted at Johns Hopkins Unversity. This workshop invited three research groups from around the world to spend seven weeks developing their NLP research. I worked under Drs. Anthony Larcher and Santosh Kesiraju developing a text-to-speech model for Tamashek. This program taught me a lot about machine-learning, data analysis, and NLP in general. Two papers were produced from the work done, both available on my publications page.
Immediately after the workshop, I joined Dr. Dan Villarreal for his on-going APLS project. I originally served as a transcriber, using tools like ELAN and Pratt. We quickly decided to pursue a new direction, creating a speech segmentation pipeline to help with transcription. For the final year of my undergraduate studies, I developed the project's first automatic transcription pipeline using a custom-trained pyannote model. I am very proud of this work as it directly benefitted the transcribers.
My final major undergraduate research project was with Dr. Diane Litman, where I explored classroom transcriptions. My task was to analyze in-class discussions to identify common trends of in-class reading discussions. This work was then presented at my school's Spring Undergraduate Research Symposium as a poster.
Hobbies & Interests
I love learning about computers. While I mostly stay within the realms of Python for my job, I enjoy using C and Go where possible. I also use Ubuntu and Linux Mint as my daily OS's, and love learning about how they work (and how to make things work on them). My biggest passion, however, are video games. I like making small games for myself (Unity and Godot) when I can, and I adore playing new games to understand what makes them so good (or bad).
My other hobbies include sewing, crochet, and general arts and crafts. I also like to draw on programs like Inkscape and create models using Blender. While I don't play the flute anymore, I occassionally write electronic music using LMMS (that software hasn't had an update in years, use a different DAW).
I think it is important for researchers to show their technical and creative capabilities, so I might have posted some stuff either here or in my portfolio. Or I didn't, in which case... sorry.