To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” I believe that language is a gateway to actualizing strong AI, and since data is vital to this domain, the prospect of conducting research in Conversational AI at data-rich organizations excites me. My long-term academic goal is to overcome expert systems-like processing of language and to make the system generate ontologies on a cognitive level based on the rules of linguistics.
I think, therefore I am. Descartes' dictum of cogito, ergo sum has ignited in me a belief that if I could teach a system to understand language and its makers, a true existence of general artificial intelligence will not be far behind.
In a quest to integrate my adolescent passion for literature and psychology, and an aptitude for programming, I ventured into the field of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. In my sophomore year, I started developing a Chatbot for Suicide Prevention for curbing a prevalent social issue. Along the way, teaching the system to understand language and to emote empathy, I became attached to the system as a parent to the child. And that, I believe, is the fuel to my constant chase for improvement in myself as well as in the systems that I work on.