About Me

About me

Ever since I was young, I loved languages. The uniqueness of each one and the stories they told inspired me. My goal in life was to bridge the communication gap. In college, I studied the basic linguistics courses, but halfway through my journey, I took an elective class called Language and Computers, which sparked my already growing interest in computer science. Generative AI was booming, and my awe of how a machine could talk naturally encouraged me to start taking classes in the computer science department. By the time I graduated from undergraduate, I had several programming classes under my belt and a B.A in Linguistics.

My natural path led me to continue at the University of Arizona’s Human Language Technology program.

HLT and NLP Studies

My master’s adventure showed me all the many facets of technology. Classes like Computational Linguistics taught me the fundamentals of grammar and how computers process language, and Statistical NLP introduced me to concepts such as text analysis, information retrieval, and machine learning models for NLP. Other classes, such as Applied NLP and Neural Networks, gave me an in-depth understanding of state-of-the-art technologies used in tasks such as machine translation and text generation. Along the way, I took data classes, including Foundations of Data Science and Data Mining and Discovery, where I learned to analyze data in various ways and to build machine learning models that make data usable in the real world. My favorite topic to study was machine translation.

Internships and Work Experience

I’ve done countless internships in various fields all with the purpose of using technology to help innovate communication. Some of my most meaningful work included building a custom Optical Character Recognition model for an Indigenous tribe, researching and presenting on technologies to help the blind and the deaf experience cinema, adapting different machine translations models in various settings, along with building my own from scratch.