I am a professor in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Before moving (back) to South Africa, I did a postdoc at TTI-Chicago with Karen Livescu and Greg Shakhnarovich on multimodal machine learning models combining speech and vision. I obtained my PhD in 2017 from the University of Edinburgh, where I was supervised by Sharon Goldwater, Aren Jansen and Simon King. I worked on unsupervised speech processing using Bayesian and neural models.

I am a researcher in machine learning with a focus on speech processing. In my group we develop methods that allow machines to acquire language autonomously, using as little supervision as possible. The hope is that this will lead to new insights into machine and human learning.