I am conducting social and technological experiments in the future evolution of the world's languages. Together with my students and colleagues, I am developing scalable methods for preserving disappearing words and world views for future generations of speakers and scholars. I am collaborating with speech communities in diasporas and ancestral homelands to design new approaches to language maintenance and revitalisation. I'm particularly interested in the question of how to learn an unwritten language without reducing it to writing in the process.

I studied computer science at the University of Melbourne before completing a PhD in computational linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. I have conducted fieldwork on endangered languages in West Africa, Central Asia, Amazonia, Melanesia, and Australia. I've held academic positions at the Universities of Edinburgh, Pennsylvania, Melbourne, and UC Berkeley. I am currently based in Australia's "Top End", working on the Bininj Kunwok language. I serve on the board of Melaleuca Refugee Centre.

I am recruiting PhD students and a postdoctoral fellow for research in technology and design for language revitalization (more).
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Karakoram Highway, Xinjiang, China

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