Software engineer in Bay area ©

I’m a Ph.D. student at the Concordia Center for Cognitive Science & Linguistics, interested in the computational architecture and biological implementation of phonology. Here I am supervised by Prof. Charles Reiss (Chair), Prof. Alan Bale and Prof. Mark Hale. My research is primarily built around the idea that cognition IS computation, and summarily rejects the convoluted dogma of embodied cognition. I defend the nativist, computational-representational approach to the study of the mind as a property of the computational brain, which I argue (in the spirit of Fodor and Pylyshyn) has been nothing short of an umitigated success. Before joining the Cognitive Science center, I was a post-graduate researcher at the MARCS Institute of Brain, Behavior and Development in Sydney, Australia, and a Teaching Fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. At MARCS I worked with Anne Cutler on exploring the hemispheric integration of information during dichotic listening tasks, and did some work on articulatory mechanisms using electromagnetic articulometry. It was useful experience in that it taught me the futility of trying to answer questions about phonological competence using sensory-motor and performance data. My present research argues that phonological computations are arbitrary symbol-manipulating set-theoretic operations that are opaque to the partial veridicality that holds between phonological primes and their neuro-phonetic correlates. The input to and output of phonology are both described using the same algebraic variables-based alphabet, with a pair of sets of transducers converting between neurological states and representational formats. The focus is on (1) emphasizing interface-driven computations, (2) a principle of minimal search and efficient computation, and (3) deriving cross-linguistic variation from the structure of the inventory rather than from violable constraints. Ultimately, I try to argue, that the Strong Minimalist Thesis can, indeed, hold for phonology, provided we make use of Chomsky’s insightful advice – simple representations, powerful computations. In my free time, I talk about political economy, Anarcho-Syndicalism and Jewish socialism, and the genocide being committed by the apartheid state of Israel against the valiant people of Palestine. I am a staunch advocate for EULA-abolition and the right to pirate unethically licensed proprietary software. ©