People

My name is Huteng Dai (xu˨˩tʰəŋ˧˥ tai˥˨ 戴虎腾; meaning). I am an assistant professor of computational linguistics and phonology at the University of Michigan.

My research focuses on understanding how humans learn sound patterns from noisy, real-world data. I build interpretable models of phonological learning that are not only mathematically well-defined but also succeed on real-world corpora.

Find out more about my recent work at: hutengdai.com. You can also contact me at huteng@umich.edu.

My name is Ashna (ɑʃnə) Mulchandani. I am an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, graduating in May of 2025.

I study Linguistics, Computer Science, and French, and am pursuing topics in natural language processing and computational linguistics. I am particularly interested in the intersection of language and technology, as well as its potential for new artificial intelligence and machine learning applications.

You can contact me at mashna@umich.edu.

My name is Pratik Patil, an Aerospace Systems Engineer from the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan, specializing in cross-domain modeling and computational mathematics.

I’m experienced in developing high-performance simulations for complex aerospace, multiphysics simulation, and NLP challenges.

I’m particularly interested in building sentiment analysis models tailored to the unique context of space missions, potentially integrating data from wearable sensors for a multi-modal approach.

You can contact me at ppratik@umich.edu.