A little more

I grew up in South Africa, a country with twelve official languages, where linguistic diversity was part of daily life. When I was a kid and someone asked what superpower I'd choose, my answer was a no-brainer: the power to know every language.

That conviction was tested early. I was thrown headfirst into a French school not knowing a word of the language, and I still remember wondering how long it would take until I could finally talk to all of my classmates, not just the ones who already knew English. That experience of being on the wrong side of a language barrier is part of what pulled me toward studying language in the first place.

I'm an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying statistics, linguistics, and actuarial science with a computer science minor (yes, that's a lot, and yes, I'm tired). My research lives in NLP and computational linguistics, but I'm equally interested in machine learning, AI engineering, and quant trading. I think a good experiment is a kind of love letter to a question.

I'm affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Women in AI, and I'm currently working at the University of Chicago's ChatterLab on naturalistic conversational speech.

There's another thread that runs through everything I do. I think a lot about the gap between the African continent and the rest of the world in AI and language technology. The talent is there. The people are there. What's missing is the infrastructure and the accessibility, and that's what I want to help build. Generative AI is one of the most powerful resources of our time, and every person should have the ability to use it and understand it!

A piece of this I'm particularly drawn to: most of today's AI is trained on Western data, which means it doesn't really understand African realities. I want to work on models that actually do. Closer to home, I'm also looking at ways to improve life for people in South Africa through initiatives focused on the youth.