(My last name is pronounced /upadʰje/ but /upaðje/ or oo-pa-the-ye is a good-enough approximation)
I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of Language Science at the University of California - Irvine, where I’m advised Dr. Richard Futrell and affiliated with the Language Processing Group and the meaning lab. Before starting my PhD, I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science with a concentration in Machine Learning and Neural Computation and a minor in Math from the University of California - San Diego.
Broadly speaking, I’m interested in understanding the computational and cognitive principles underlying language use in humans and language models (LMs). Presently, I’m fascinated by several questions at the heart of language production — a process that is often paradoxically described as being both easy and effortful. Much of my ongoing work uses computational approaches, corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and language modeling to characterize how cognitive resource constraints and communicative pressures shape choices in online production.