Jasmeen Kanwal

Hi all!

Here's a bit of background about me: I just finished my first year of the PhD program in linguistics at UCSD. Before that, I did 2 years of a philosophy PhD program there, where I was interested in general philosophy of science and also philosophy of physics, particularly issues of emergence (classical dynamics from quantum, and the thermodynamic arrow of time from time-symmetric stat mech), and before that I got my undergraduate degree in Physics and Philosophy from Oxford (where, among other things, I did a project on the evolution of matter in the universe under various models of dark energy (!)).

I won't go into the details of how I ended up shifting over to linguistics, but I'll just say a bit about my current interests. Broadly, I am interested in understanding why languages have the structures they do, both structure that is common to all languages (there is a lot less of this than one might think, but there are at least some very general commonalities) and those that seem to vary cross-linguistically. It seems to me that modeling language as a complex adaptive system is very apt, given the nature of language as an evolving system based in interactions between agents and constrained by many different factors (such as biology, cognitive abilities, information transmission pressures, and of course culture). Contrary to previous theories of language where most of the structure was thought to be due to some sort of innate language faculty, I want to explore to what extent it is possible to account for the structure and evolutionary behaviour of language by modelling it as a complex system, which depends on all the sorts of domain-general factors mentioned above, as well as domain-general learning mechanisms, such as statistical and analogical learning. I have a number of specific projects I'm just beginning to work on, but at the CSSS I'm mostly interested in gaining modelling tools that I can apply to building agent-based simulations of language learning and language evolution.

From various conversations with people today, I thought I'd mention a few other things I am interested in and would love to talk more about over coffee or somesuch during the next few weeks: information theory, category theory, social networks, logic and philosophy, cognition, neural networks, and of course anything physics related.

I am also deeply interested in art and music, and like to make a bit of both (as well as study patterns in them!). Other interests (passions?) include food and hiking, so if anyone wants to partake in any of these activities at any point, hit me up.

Finally, I would just like to say that I am extremely excited to be here - this is perhaps the first time in my life I've truly felt surrounded by like-minded people, and I can't wait to learn from you all (and of course make friends with you all too).