I am a Research Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute located on the University of Chicago campus.

My research program lies at the intersection of Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence. I am primarily interested in characterizing the statistical mechanisms that underlie the acquisition and generalization of complex linguistic phenomena and conceptual meaning. To this end, I: (1) develop methods to evaluate and analyze AI models from the perspective of semantic cognition; and (2) use AI models as simulated learners to test and generate novel hypotheses about language acquisition and generalization.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Linguistics department at UT Austin, working with Dr. Kyle Mahowald. Before that, I was a PhD student at Purdue University, where I worked on Natural Language Understanding with Dr. Julia Taylor Rayz at the AKRaNLU Lab. I also worked closely with Dr. Allyson Ettinger and her lab at UChicago.

My email is kanishka [at] ttic [dot] edu.^{[why is it like that?]}

Other things:

• I am the author of minicons, a python package that facilitates large scale behavioral analyses of transformer language models.

• I spent Fall 2022 as a Research Intern at Google AI working on multi-hop reasoning and language models.

• In summer of 2022, I hosted a two part discussion group on Neural Nets for Cognition @ CogSci 2022