I am an Associate Professor in E&E Engineering at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Before moving (back) to South Africa, I did a postdoc at TTI-Chicago with Karen Livescu and Greg Shakhnarovich on multi-modal machine learning models combining speech and vision. I obtained my PhD in 2016 from the University of Edinburgh, where I was supervised by Sharon Goldwater, Aren Jansen and Simon King; I worked on unsupervised speech processing, and played around with unsupervised Bayesian and neural models.

I am a researcher in machine learning with a specific focus on speech processing. My goal is to develop methods that would allow machines to acquire speech and language processing capabilities with as little supervision as possible. This would enable language technology in low-resource settings, and could tell us something about how humans acquire language.