12/2020 - Present

RL Researcher @ Language, Logic, & Cognition Lab

  • Applying reinforcement learning for cognitively faithful syntax parsing
  • Optimizing linguistic RL library under Prof. Adrian Brasoveanu
  • Computationally verifying models of human language learning
  • Submission currently in review at NeurIPS 2021
1/2021 - 7/2021

NLP Researcher @ Natural Language & Dialogue Systems Lab

  • Developing conversational language flows and user behavior models
  • Training sequence classification models under Prof. Marilyn Walker
  • Official co-author and team member for Amazon Alexa Prize 2021
8/2020 - 11/2020

ML Consultant @ Bunch

  • Implemented TensorFlow.js computer vision models in the browser
  • Built React web app to calculate force exertion of humans on video
  • Product to be deployed in gyms to replace >$20k in equipment
6/2020 - Present

BCI Researcher @ Intheon

  • Developing deep learning models for NLP + BCI
  • Due to research confidentiality, further details upon request
6/2020 - 9/2020

NLP Engineer @ SapientX

  • Fine-tuned PyTorch NLP models for extractive question answering (F1 >0.9)
  • Implemented neural and classical information retrieval approaches
  • Productionized with Flask REST API for core company product
3/2020 - 6/2021

President @ NeuroTechSC

  • Leading over 20 project members in building Brain-Computer Interface
  • Project utilizes subvocal recognition for synthetic telepathy
  • Organized neurotech curriculum for students
  • Held weekly paper readings of cutting-edge neurotech research
1/2020 - 5/2020

NLP Researcher @ Applied ML Lab

  • Architected high-dimensional recurrent document regression model
  • Collected and cleaned >7 million textual data points from Internet
  • Benchmarked our model on a mental health sentiment analysis task
  • Examined relevant academic literature and wrote preprint
7/2018 - 5/2019

Fullstack Web Dev Consultant @ Gofor

  • Built React app that dynamically loads thousands of database objects
  • Coordinated migration from Google Realtime Database to Cloud Firestore
  • Integrated Google Firebase authentication
Projects

fbIRL

Won 1st @ Facebook SF Dev Hackathon 2019

Tomorrow's AR social network

Celery

Won 2nd & FinTech @ LA Hacks 2019

Big data forecasting for sustainable businesses

StopLess

Won 3rd @ SB Hacks 2019

AR+CV for traffic control

sWEep

Won 1st @ SRC Code 2018

Cleaning neighborhoods with CV

Boolepathy

Won 1st in US @ NeuroTechX 2020

Non-invasive synthetic telepathy

We & You

Won Google Cloud @ BASEHacks 2018

Peer-to-peer mental health services for teens

Latent Space

Won 3rd @ HackMIT 2020

Domain-specific neural audio compression for virtual bands

Phil

Won Amazon & Blockchain @ CruzHacks 2019

Facilitating blockchain donations with Alexa skill art

Research

I'm interested in questions like...

How do humans perform semantic composition and how can we build systems that analyze language compositionally? Transformers have outpaced virtually all other architectures in NLP; is this just due to higher generalizability or is something about the self-attention mechanism inherently effective at expressing semantic composition?
How do humans ground language in their environment and how can we build systems that understand language in relation to the real world? The current approach of learning word representations from a large text corpus has gone a long way, but it falls into a trap that can only be avoided by grounding language. Could linguistic RL agents be a solution?
What is the underlying relationship between symbolic and statistical approaches? Why do some parts of nature seem so perfectly described by symbolic relations while others don't? Is reality fundamentally symbolic or are symbols a formalism that humans apply to our environment?
And a few miscellaneous ones: What makes specifically human brains so good at manipulating symbols, genetically, structurally, and culturally? How does the brain represent non-linguistic thoughts and is all perception symbolic at some level? How can classical theories from linguistics and philosophy of language aid modern research in NLP? Is internality an inherent property of matter?
Fun Facts