I like patterns, anomalies, and understanding how and why systems work. For personal enrichment this amounts to an affinity for polyrythms, vector graphics, and random rabbit holes of knowledge acquired via Google dorking, observation, and the like.
Ethics | Privacy & Security | Human-Computer Interaction | Dis/Misinformation | DevOps | QA Testing | Supply Chain Optimization | Classification & Recommender Systems | Cryptography | Quantum Technology
I studied Cognitive and Information Sciences as a graduate student and Eugene Cota Robles fellow at UC Merced. As an undergraduate student, I studied all sorts of things including linguistics at UC Berkeley. My undergraduate and graduate studies focused primarily on the formation of meaning via interactions between language, cognition, and ideology from a cognitive and functional perspective. I researched sociocultural identity as mediated by language using corpus-based and behavioral methods.
Bias, Language & Social Group Dynamics | Social & Political Ideology | Cognitive, Cultural & Linguistic Variation | Computational Linguistics | Neurolinguistics | Psycholinguistics | Evolutionary Anthropology
Classification | Clustering | Topic Modeling | Linear & Non-Linear Regression (GLMM; HLM; SEM) | Time-Series Analysis | Causal Inference | Behavioral Experimentation
This project uses both corpus-based and experimental methods to explore how metaphor and grammar can influence attitudes and reasoning about immigrants and immigration policy in the United States. Of interest is force dynamics in metaphoric framing, and understanding how shifts in the force-dynamic construal of a target concept (e.g., "immigrants are flooding over the border" vs. "immigrants are trickling over the border") lead to shifts in attitudes and reasoning about that target concept (e.g., sentiment towards immigrants and access to socio-economic resources).
This project uses EEG to measure ERPs related to the online processing of novel and conventional metaphor. We are interested in how different types of lexical priming (e.g., category-based mappings, comparison-based mappings) affect novel metaphor comprehension. We want to better understand the degree to which semantically congruent conventional, or primary, metaphors can facilitate processing of novel metaphors.
The MetaNet Project is a multi-year effort to systematize novel and conventional metaphor detection for large-scale analyses. The goal is to identify and analyze the metaphors people use to discuss and reason about a broad range of topics and domains (e.g., relationships, education, poverty, immigration), across multiple languages (e.g., US English, Mexican Spanish, Russian, Farsi).
The Karuk Language Project is a language documentation and revitalization effort in collaborative with the Karuk Tribe and the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at UC Berkeley. The effort includes digitization of field notes and learning about the Karuk language and culture through linguistic research and teaching.