Where I work

ChatterLab

University of Chicago · May 2026 — present

WithDr. Marisa Casillas and Subin Kim (2nd-year PhD)

How does a child break into a conversation that is already underway? I work on detecting the moment a child enters multiparty talk in naturalistic home recordings, using linguistic alignment as the diagnostic: when speakers are engaged in the same interaction, their language converges, so a drop in alignment can mark the boundary where a child joins or leaves. The measurement builds on ALIGN 2.0, a toolkit for quantifying alignment across conversational speech, applied here to daylong caregiver-child audio.

Much of my work is the pipeline that makes this analysis possible: carrying ELAN-annotated recordings into the format the tools expect, preserving the messy realities of child speech such as sung and wordless vocalisations, and running alignment measures over the result. I will present this research in a talk at the ICIS Founding Generation Symposium in September 2026, on identifying multiparty conversation in naturalistic environments through both temporal and alignment-based measures.

Learning and Language Lab

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Aug 2025 — present

WithDr. Anastasia Stoops, Dr. Jessica Montag, and Dr. Volodymyr Kindratenko (NCSA)

Working on a project titled Understanding Reading Development through Visual and Linguistic Factors using Deep Learning Transformers. We're examining whether deep learning architectures (LSTMs, transformer-based models like BERT) can model and predict the eye movements of teens and adults from visual and linguistic features of text.