I am a computer scientist, musician, cyclist, and world politics aficionado. I’ve had the good fortune to wander, most recently settling in New York. A constant drive for me is to make the communities we’re a part of healthier, effective, and welcoming. I’m convinced that the impossible, the improbable, and the inevitable are separated by your grit, and I hope to bridge the new digital divide through understanding humans and their languages.
I connect speakers of non-English languages to the world’s knowledge as a research scientist at Google DeepMind, expanding Gemini’s multilingual abilities for billions of users. My Erdős number is 4. I invite you to explore my publications (i.e., 42 peer-reviewed research papers and a book).
Music
I’ve played the bagpipe for over a decade. These days, it’s a great way to social-distance. I also typeset original bagpipe compositions in LaTeX, which is criminally underestimated as a tool for bringing beauty into the world.
Academic
I completed my Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, designing structure-grounded machine translation that uses panlingual weak supervision with David Yarowsky. In that time, I interned and published at Google, Duolingo, and Facebook.
In my master’s, I worked with David Matula on convex optimization, graph theory, and number theory. My NLP life began in undergrad as a visiting researcher at Harvard, working with Stuart Shieber. Along the way, I studied at Stanford University and the University of Edinburgh.
Selected publications:
- On the uncomputability of partition functions in energy-based sequence models with Chu-Cheng Lin. ICLR 2022 Spotlight.
- Addressing posterior collapse with mutual information for improved variational neural machine translation with Xian Li, Jiatao Gu, and Ning Dong. ACL 2020.
- Modeling color terminology across thousands of languages with Winston Wu, Aaron Mueller, William Watson, and David Yarowsky. EMNLP 2019.
Beauty
I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. Friends and strangers on trains have shared their tenderness with me. Clinging to scaffolding in bell towers. Sloshing for miles through stormwater drains. Bridge-jumping into the cold night Charles River. Mountainside sunrises in New Mexico. Jumping over filched restaurant candles for Charshanbe Suri. The world keeps rekindling things you didn’t know had gone out.