Computer Science, Math, & Cultural Anthropology
I went to Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour concert three times!
A Malay boy from the little red dot of Singapore, I've rarely heard myself on the television—realisation hit in waves, 1.2 terabytes of them. While building a Singlish (Singapore-English) text-to-speech app for the local deaf community at the Singapore Engineering Good Tech-ForGood Festival, I leaned on various speech corpora , data sets of local speech. Sifting through each ‘.wav’ file, reality hit: I could barely hear myself. Among the terabytes of Singaporean voices, the distinct cadence of my Javanese Malay heritage was eerily absent. More than a data gap - this was cultural silence.
As a Malay individual, Bahasa Melayu, my native language, is a ‘low-resource’ language, lacking linguistic data in just that language. Of 7000+ global languages, only 20 are high-resource with robust data sets, tools, and technological accessibility—highlighting stark disparities between technology and diverse cultures. For ethnicities like mine that rarely get mainstream media representation, this digital erasure isn't just technical oversight; it perpetuates erasure of our voices, stories, and identities in a digitized world.
Inclusivity, Representation and Humanity. These are the values I embrace studying Computer Science, Mathematics and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. I’m especially passionate about theoretical computer science! My current reading list ( as of October 2024! ) includes fields like complexity theory, formal language theory, and automata theory. These fields captivate me with their rigorous exploration of computation’s limits, the mathematical elegance of modeling linguistic structures, and the abstract computational models that bridge theory and practical applications like natural language processing. They shape my approach to research at the intersection of computer science, mathematics, and cultural representation. My life goal is to contribute to research in interdisciplinary fields to uplift marginalized folk like myself.
I hope to be able to bridge my technical expertise with my lived experiences, contributing to a deeper understanding of how diverse identities can be represented and respected in a globalized, digital world. Past Duke University, I hope to continue this journey in industry, graduate school or academia, driven to ensure no ‘.wav’ —however marginalized—fades into society’s digital sea.
SPIRE offers the kind of academic home and community I’m looking for—a place where I can find mentorship and support while contributing to a community that celebrates diversity in STEM. This morning, I read a paper on scaling human-centered machine translation, leverages sparsely gated mixture-of-experts models to optimize multilingual neural machine translation across 200 language pairs. The paper was coauthored by over 264 authors from 3 different institutions. That’s what STEM looks like in 2024: communal and collaborative.
I am a committed researcher. I believe the most fascinating discoveries often happen in the interstices of fields. Quantum computing, for example, slides seamlessly between computer science and physics, while formal language theory sits at the intersection of computer science and linguistics. At Duke, I’ve discovered unique interdisciplinary areas like computational journalism—something I had never encountered before. Just this past week, I had the privilege of nerding out over a quantum natural language processing paper I’d read with one of my talented SPIRE Fellow mates — a physics genius from Kenya — with no prior physics knowledge on my end whatsoever. This spontaneous exchange epitomizes the kind of vibrant, interdisciplinary and diverse environment that I love that comes with being a SPIRE Fellow.
