| Andrea Ceolin |
 |
Hi, my name is Andrea Ceolin and I'm a second year PhD student in Linguistics. I come from a town called Prata di Pordenone, very close to Venice, in Italy. I spent six wonderful years at the University of Trieste for my bachelor and my master. I wrote my thesis on computational methods applied to historical linguistics, in particular to syntactic data. Right after my graduation, I moved to the University of York for an appointment on the Langelin project, where I devised some new algorithms to formalize lexical and syntactic diversity among languages. Then, when I was offered a fellowship both at MIT and at Penn, I decided to join the best linguistic department on earth to explore new areas such as Historical Syntax, Computational Linguistics and Language Acquisition. I do all sort of activities in my free time, and you'll know about them if you come to recitations. |
| Kajsa Djärv |
 |
I'm a 3rd year PhD student in Linguistics. My research is about how different kinds of meanings determine the choice of word order in a sentence, for sentences where there are "more than one way to say the same thing". I got hooked on linguistics in my first year at University (in Edinburgh, Scotland) after taking a Philosophy of Language course and reading Steve Pinker's The Language Instinct. Outside of my work, I love travelling, hiking, food, and fitness, among (many) other things. I look forward to seeing you in class! |
| Jordan Kodner |
 |
Hello. My name is Jordan. I'm a second year PhD student. I did my undergraduate work in linguistics and computer science at Penn (I took this course in 2009). Before coming back to Penn for graduate school, I worked in industry in a natural language processing research group for a couple years. My primary research interests are in computational linguistics, especially in cognitively plausible models of language acquisition and language change, but also bleeding into NLP. Lately I've been collaborating on a project to develop a fully unsupervised model for morphological segmentation. I'm also interested in historical linguistics and writing systems. My favorite languages to work on are English, Shona, Latin, Hebrew, and whatever the government thinks is fun. I do other things in my free time. |
| Hong Zhang |
 |
Hi, I'm Hong. I'm a second year graduate student in linguistics. Broadly speaking, my research interests lie in the realm of phonetics and (less so) in phonology. In particular, I have been engaged in projects investigating the acoustics of vowel nasality and voice quality, and aspects of the fundamental frequency (F0) of natural speech. My current work is geared more toward establishing the connection between the acoustics and articulation of nasalization, with the help of modern statistical learning tools and artificial neural networks. That being said, I'm dealing with both the signals of speech sound and machine learning stuff most of my time, which I enjoy a lot! Outside of linguistics, I'm also a fan of trains, cars, aircrafts or anything that can transport humans. In my free time, I love driving around to explore "unknown" places. |