Welcome

Welcome to my research portfolio and project page, where I rant about my research!

Linguistics

In high school I was a huge linguistics nerd, partly because of my desire to establish a unique identity for myself and partly because I wanted my interests to slot into a defined niche. This dichotomy of conformism and individualism probably says something about who I am. Anyways, my first exposure to formal Linguistics came from attending Ohio State's Summer Linguistics for Youth Institute (SLIYS, pronounced "slies") in the summer before my sophomore year. Before then, I'd always been passionate about language, but I had no idea that language could be studied as a science. At SLIYS, I discovered the field of computational linguistics: "If a machine has to do X in order to perform this linguistic task, do humans have to do X as well?" This really fascinated me because it helped me realize that machines can inform our understanding of human language and help diagnose the human condition. Even though computers "understand" language very differently from us, there was so much we could learn from them!

After I learned what Linguistics was, I began looking for linguistics opportunities and competitions. I started off with NACLO, qualifying for the Invitational Round by sheer luck before branching out to competitive programming. I loved any competitive programming problems that involved strings or manipulating language in some way.

That summer, I took a class called AI, Natural Language Processing, and Semantics with Professor Mohammed Taher Pilehvar at Cambridge University. One of the readings we had for the class left a long-lasting impact on me. Man - Woman = Computer Programmer - Homemaker? was how I discovered gender bias in AI and what happened when a language model was trained on a biased dataset. The real-world consequences shocked me: I couldn't help but wonder whether this effect would be more pronounced for languages with grammatical gender, like French or German. AI wasn't just perpetuating our pre-existing biases; it was making them worse.

Research!

Cognitive Science

Physics

Math

What I'm Currently Working On

I'm interested in how complex phenomena emerge from simple rules, in part because it's so counterintuitive. You'd think that complex rules produce complicated systems, but in reality, the more rules and specifications you have, the more constraints you place on the system. Take the Mandelbrot set, for example:

I'm also interested in how people have innate value just by existing. Through the lens of cognition, when we think we are doing nothing, we actually think and perceive and feel so much more than we acknowledge.