What I'm investigating

My field is natural language processing, which is a subfield of artificial intelligence that deals with language. Technologies like ChatGPT take in text written by humans and respond to it, and you want those responses to sound like real English. My interest is what happens inside these models when they’re understanding and responding. How do they represent language? Right now, these large language models are mysterious. I want to know how they work and how these processes may be similar to humans.

Why I study the brain

I started in computer science. And you can’t work in natural language processing without thinking about human language a lot. I started doing linguistics, then moved into cognitive science. Now I’m increasingly interested in neuroscience. The mechanistic stuff is so interesting. I love learning how things actually work – and how much we still don’t know.  If you think about it, who isn’t interested in the brain? Isn’t it the ultimate mystery?

What I like about Carney

Carney seems like a healthy, happy place. People are genuinely interested in what their colleagues are doing. Not everyone is willing to make time to collaborate, but people at Carney make the time to work together. I work mainly with Michael Frank and Thomas Serre, but I’ve met so many other faculty. Carney is an intelligent, curious group of people. The more I work with them, the more I want to work with them.