I am a PhD candidate in the MIT EECS department and a research assistant to Dr James Glass in the Spoken Language Systems group at MIT CSAIL. Prior to joining MIT, I was pursuing MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, where I completed my MSc thesis on Vector Space Modeling of Natural Language under the supervision of Dr Shay Cohen.

My current research interests include unsupervised speech processing, automatic speech recognition and language identification.

Infants learn to segment fluent speech into discrete units such as words at the early stages of native language acquisition without much supervision. I am interested in building machines that can acquire language in a completely unsupervised manner. To that end, i draw inspiration from psycholinguistics, cognitive science and machine learning research to build practical probabilistic models of language acquisition.

I also collaborate with Ahmed Ali and Dr Stephan Vogel from Qatar Computing Research Institute on developing large scale ASR and dialect identification systems for Arabic language.