What’s in the news?
Work/life updates
2023:
October 20: I am volunteering as a Curriculum Working Group Member for the Climatematch Academy’s 2024 program. This is going to be a remarkable experience contributing to next year’s study materials. What aspects should we focus on or correct based on the experience from 2023? Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
October 03: Our team of enthusiastic researchers, who initially met at the CMA 2023 course (see below), applied for the Climatematch Impact Scholars Program (CISP) and were granted scholarships. Over the next two months, we will be studying the “Impact of Deforestation and Multi-year Cyclical Processes on Precipitation Patterns and Cereal Production in Congo River Basin” Our goal is to produce at least one paper and a presentation.
August 13: I participated in the “Computational Tools in Climate Science” course organized by Climatematch Academy from July 17 to 28. The coursework was intense. It was a great opportunity to learn about climate science and computational modelling and meet wonderful people. We worked on a project analysing the relationship between vegetation and the change in precipitation across the Congo River Basin over the past 40+ years.
February 21: I gave a short talk on the topic “What does my post-defence hingsight of 20/20 say? If I were to advise myself…” to an audience of PhD students on the PhD day organized by the Collaborative Research Center, Saarland University on 09.02.2022. The slides are available here. The talk was based on this blog post.
2022:
December 19: I successfully defended my thesis on December 7, and passed magna cum laude. Now I am in the job market! Get in touch: work@pratikb.com.
November 10: I submitted my dissertation to the 5-member thesis committee a few weeks ago. The defense will very likely be held on 7 December.
July 24: I will present two posters at the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) conference. It’ll take place in York, England, September 7-9. One poster is about the recent publication on attention-prediction interplay. The second one is about the role of speech rate in the interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes in degraded speech comprehension.
July 22: Our paper on the role of attention to context in understanding degraded speech is published in Language and Cognition. Cheers!
June 14: Earlier this month, I attended the IMPRS conference at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen in the Netherlands. I presented a poster discussing the results of the experiments in which we found that a decrease in the speech rate does not amplify the predictability effect in degraded speech comprehension.
April 14: Our work on the effect of speech rate on degraded speech comprehension has been accepted for poster presentation at the IMPRS Conference 2022 to be held at MPI Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, Netherlands) in June 01-03. A manuscript is cooking as well ;)
March 09: Our work on the role of attention on degraded speech comprehension has been accepted for poster presentation at the APS Annual Convention 2022 in Chicago in May 26-29.