About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I lead the Boulder Language and Social Technologies research group. I am also a Faculty Fellow at CU’s Institute of Cognitive Science.

Before joining CU, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research NYC. I completed my PhD in Computer Science at Purdue University, and my BSc. in Computer Science and Engineering at the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela, where I was born and raised.

I am not recruiting PhD students for Fall 2025.

My Work

I primarily work on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Computational Social Science. I am mostly interested in the integration of structured knowledge and statistical models, and in the relationship between language and social systems. I am a strong believer in interdisciplinary, collaborative work. I actively collaborate with researchers in linguistics, human-computer interaction, formal methods, security, bioinformatics, and the behavioral and social sciences. For my most recent work, see my lab webpage. For my full list of publications, including work prior to joining CU, go here.

Recent Talks and Tutorials

• From Topic Models to Concept Models: Facilitating Expert-in-the-Loop Interaction with Neuro-Symbolic Representations, Invited talk at the UMass Amherst NLP Seminar
• An Overview of Neuro-Symbolic Strategies for NLP and Computational Social Science, Invited talk at the 1st EU-UK HYBRIDS Meeting at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
• Natural Language Processing in the Era of Chat-GPT, Guest lecture at the CELEHS and Harvard Medical School 2023 Data Science Summer Program
• NS4NLP: Neuro-Symbolic Methods for NLP, COLING 2022 Tutorial, IJCAI 2021 Tutorial
• Neuro-Symbolic Discourse Processing, Invited talk at the Universidad de Puerto Rico Mayaguez
• Neuro-Symbolic Modeling for NLP, Keynote at the 1st LatinX in NLP Workshop at NAACL 2022
• Automated Attack Synthesis by Extracting FSMs from Textual Specs, Invited talk at Microsoft Research, MIT CSAIL, and Trail of Bits.
• Reasoning About Entities and Events with Narrative Graphs, Guest lecture at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Recent Academic Service

• Area Chair for the ACL Rolling Review
• DEI Chair for NAACL 2024
• Senior Program Committee for AAAI 2024
• Organizing Committee for Queer in AI Workshop @ ACL 2023
• Area Chair for ACL 2023, NLP Applications
• Senior Program Committee for AAAI 2023
• Student Chair for NAACL 2022 Student Research Workshop
• Organizing Committee for Queer in AI Workshop @ NAACL 2022
• Organizing Committee for LatinX in AI Workshop @ NAACL 2022

Interested in working with me?

• If you are a student at CU come talk to me about your research interests and ideas!
• If you are prospective PhD student please apply to CU and mention my name in your application. I will carefully consider all applications of prospective students interested in working with me. However, I might not be able to reply to all prospective students email. For more thoughts on this, I recommend Prof. Yonatan Bisk’s notes on cold emailing professors.
• I do not have positions available for students outside of CU.