Hi, Salut, Hallo, ဟိုင်း!
Having lived in 8 countries by 21, Where are you from? is a much harder question for me to answer than Where are you living? For the easier question, the current answer is: Oakland, California. For the harder question, a simplified answer is: Australia (I do hold an Australian passport after all).
Similarly, Where do you work? is an easy one. Currently, I’m a Staff Engineer at rime, where I help build conversational voice AI systems. Before that I was a grad student in Linguistics at Stanford (advised by Dan Jurafsky), working on improving access to untranscribed speech corpora using AI.
What do you work on? is a harder question. A simplified answer is: speech and language data (I did get some Linguistics degrees after all). A longer but somewhat abstract answer is that I enjoy working on projects that are simply impossible to tackle alone and without technological assistance, thinking through all the moving parts and many participants, and architecting the systems and refining the processes that glue everything and everyone together. For more concrete answers, have a gander at some of the projects below.