Hi there! I’m Kelly :)
I’m trying to figure out how I can help usher in humanity’s coolest era yet (all the while making sure that we don’t kill ourselves during the process). I’m currently physically based in London 75% of the time and Hong Kong 25% of the time (though I’m always spiritually in some alternate version of the Heian Imperial Court).
Here are some things that I’ve gotten up to in the last half a decade:
- ‘Jamming’ (i.e. improv dancing to trashy music). Anyone who has spent more than an hour with me knows that I can’t keep still when I hear my music. For context, I’ve once been called out for bopping to the sound of the London tube (eheheh). London’s also been a huge enabler in encouraging my dancing addiction. I normally go to Pineapple/Base for Commercial + Hip Hop (and the very occasional wild card class like Chinese dance). Did some Latin+Ballroom dancing for a year back in Uni as well.
- Finally got around to picking up some basic technical skills/knowledge (programming in Python, basic ML and stats –> I was literally spoon-fed frequentist stats but was thankfully taught on the side for a bit by a die-hard bayesian)
- Read a lot about Linguistics
- Areas that I found the most interesting: syntax (! !! !!!), semantics + pragmatics, language acquisition, cognitive neuroscience of language, language acquisition (first and second) → I spot a common theme - do you? Phonetics was super duper fun too, but I didn’t find it as gripping as the other sub-disciplines. My only regret was that I didn’t learn more about Linguistic typology.
- I’ve also spent a sizable amount of time doing Linguistics-related activities that don’t entail actual reading: drawing trees, making weird noises, analysing the speech peculiarities of others… I also gave some Linguistics tutoring lessons to high schoolers hoping to study the subject at uni.
- Constructed some NLP datasets
- Multi-SimLex - a “large-scale multilingual resource for lexical semantics”
- PoliteInContext: a contextualised politeness dataset inspired by Terkourafi’s frame-based approach to politeness → this was my undergrad thesis so you won’t be able to find this online :)
- Did a research project at the intersection of China and AI strategy for a longtermist think-tank in China
- Actually (sort of) picked up the basics on navigating Chinese cyberspace. Also managed to put my rusty Chinese reading skills to use. The auto-Google-Translate tool was useful for the first time - it saved me lots of time by translating Chinese texts from simplified to traditional (though I should really learn how to read simplified)
- Spent a summer working at an early-stage startup
- My primary tasks included 1) designing + conducting a user study → analysing and presenting my findings → translating these into concrete business decisions 2) designing + implementing the marketing strategy of an early-stage startup
- Helped organise two Hackathons - always had so much fun during the actual event!
- Learnt (a bit) about Learning Engineering + hosted an EdTech Careers Fair (w funding from Schmidt Futures)
In a previous life, I wrote a lot of fiction, tried learning a lot of languages and regularly jumped around on ice with very thin blades attached to my feet (with all due seriousness: blades on figure skates are only ~4mm thick which is actually insane).
Feel free to reach out to me at lkw33cam [at] gmail [dot] com - I love meeting new people! I’m absolutely abysmal at replying messages/emails so please expect a delay in my response (it’s nothing personal!).
Side note: if you’re looking for my institutional affiliations, you’ll find them on my LinkedIn Profile (I try to leave conventional signalling to LinkedIn)