Welcome to my website! Here, I post about my learning journey.

About Me

I am currently in my 3rd year studying Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) as a PhD candidate advised by Prof. Maja Matarić in the Interaction Lab. I am grateful to be supported by the NSF CSGrad4US Fellowship and the Viterbi Fellowship during my PhD. Prior to USC, I worked as a Research Analyst for projects related to automatic speech recognition for low-resource African languages with Prof. Ian Lane and Yinka Iyinolakan of CDIAL and analyzing dehumanization in social media (with Dr. Adwait Ratnaparkhi) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the Natural Language Processing department. I completed a B.S. in Computer Science and an M.S. in Natural Language Processing from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

I am fascinated with robots, and the interaction between humans and robots/technology for the purpose of fun and improving our connection with other people. I am working on computational problems relevant to human-robot interaction, with a specific focus on socially assistive robots. Some of my recent work involves linguistic and multimodal modeling of cognitive-affective states (e.g. engagement) for human-robot/computer interaction applications that focus on developing the social skills of children.