I am a scientist researching the diversity and evolution of languages. I want to understand where the ~7,500 languages extant today come from (with a special emphasis in the last 12,000 years, the Holocene), how they will change in the advent of the human-machine era, and what is that languages have done to our species, our cognitions, behaviors, and cultures. I fully embrace a transdisciplinary and question-guided approach, drawing from data science, human biology, cognitive sciences, comparative linguistics, evolutionary anthropology, computational social sciences, natural language processing, and cultural evolution. A substantial proportion of my work involves inferences with small, sparse, incomplete, imbalanced, noisy and non-independent observational data (or s2i2n2 for short).
My published research covers topics ranging from the emergence of new languages, pervasive form-meaning associations, the adaptability of speech sound systems, patterns of information packing , and the prehistory of worldwide linguistic diversity. All my articles are available in my Google Scholar profile (see below).
In addition to my strictly scientific interests, I apply insights from language diversity to concrete issues involving AI, medicine, education, technology, access to information, and other facets of human wellbeing.