About
Welcome to my website! This is the centre of my digital presence.
On it, you can find what I wish to share with others: pictures, prose, projects, posts, and links out to the broader internet. There’s even a wiki, sometimes, though it’s a constant work in progress.
what i like, generally speaking
I’m interested in most things. The intersection of language and meaning is my forte: I am intimately familiar with broad swathes of the field of formal semantics: in both linguistics (as natural language semantics) and computer science (as type theory and denotational/operational semantics).
In linguistics, I’m particularly interested in quantifiers, event semantics, temporal and narrative ordering and tense/aspect/modality more broadly, mood / dynamic semantics, pragmatics, the syntax/semantics interface… all aspects of semantics are all so wonderfully interesting!
(I also do syntax, as is necessary. And some morphology.)
In computer science, I’m interested in programming languages, types systems, compiler design, type theory, denotational semantics and judgemental logic, and language design; particularly around effect handlers and effect provenance, continuations, dependent types, memory management, language interop, syntax-rewriting macros, and async/concurrency/parallelism. Also WebAssembly. WebAssembly is way cool. And typesetting (particularly HTML/CSS and Typst)… and databases and network systems/protocols… there is so much wonder in computers!
And there’s quite a bit outside my major fields of focus that I’m anxious to learn. I enjoy studying mathematics: particularly abstract algebra and category theory (my main textbook of focus right now is Aluffi’s Algebra: Chapter 0), but also some analysis (also am re-learning analysis through Tao’s Lean mechanization of Analysis I). Mathematics is lovely, and I find great joy in proof.
I’m also broadly interested in physics/biology/chemistry/economics, but don’t know much about them at the moment (can’t take everything in university). Electrodynamics in particular I am itching to learn – and somehow have escaped taking a proper treatment while in university!
I also love reading. As I’ve grown older, the sheer abundance of things to do and learn and see in life has cut into general bored-with-nothing-to-do time – and subsequently reading time. Nevertheless, though I do read less now than I did growing up, I try quite hard to make time to read as much and as widely as I can. I don’t have a favourite genre, particularly (though I’m not a huge fan of sci-fi) – most of what I read is on the recommendation of others. Sometimes I write and post reviews on my blog. Sometimes I write mini-reviews and post ratings on goodreads.com. As I’m writing this, I’ve been reading Orlando, and liking it very much. Moby Dick is next.
Outside of work and research and education, I enjoy living and breathing and spending time with friends in and around beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
mi toki pi toki pona. mi lawa e kulupu pi toki pona. mi olin e kulupu.
No me hablo español para nada pero leo español bien; quiero aprender español hablado mucho.
what i work on, generally speaking
I am lucky enough to have gained an interest in linguistics while attending the University of British Columbia as an undergraduate. British Columbia (and the Americas in general) is home to an almost-unthinkable amount of linguistic diversity in indigenous languages: many of which are in critical danger of not being passed onto the next generations of speakers.
The whole programme of research in the linguistics department here (and elsewhere in Vancouver) is fully centred around the documentation and facilitation of community language revival as an urgent task. I have been strongly affected by this urgency into pursuing linguistics as a career. Currently, I’m taking a break from university to build work skills, immigrate, and make money, but I plan to pursue language documentation through a linguistics masters’ in the near future.
I’m not what I would consider a “computational linguist”, despite being a linguist and being particularly into computers. I’m not a fan of some technology that has come out of that culture (notably generative AI), and I generally feel like an overly computational approach to language has strong incentives to miss some of the context (magic) of conversational language.
Nevertheless, I work on computational initives around linguistics; most recently, in my period of unemployment before my job starts this summer, I’ve been investing quite a bit of time into improving the Typst ecosystem for linguistics. I’ve been (substantially) contributing to a couple of packages for examples/glosses and trees in particular: to improve their user experience (i.e. in surfacing errors; or in other aspects of usability) and to bring their featureset up to par with the LaTeX linguistics ecosystem. I’m quite happy to say this is going well.
what i’ve done, generally speaking
I hold a Bachelors of Science in mathematics from the University of British Columbia, with a 30-credit minor in linguistics. (Enough for a double major, had I pursued a Bachelors of Arts! Oops.)
clubs
Back in high school, I ran the local robotics team; although my two-year stint as a captain was cut in half due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was a programming captain and taught high-schoolers Java, object-oriented programming, and the particularities of the library/framework we used to control our robots. (My old team won their worlds division recently! I’m very proud of them.)
In university, I joined Maple Bacon, the CTF (cybersecurity + challenges) club, in my first year. This turned out to be a rather excellent decision. I have met some of my closest friends through Maple Bacon, and met many online friends through shared interests in CTFs and security and computer fuckery. Solving CTFs for Maple Bacon taught me the majority of my programming skills; while it didn’t directly teach me programming, per say, the CTF team exposed me to such a flurry of topics and problems and concepts that I simply had to learn.
On Maple Bacon, I ended up getting involved in the leadership team and eventually co-led it for a couple of years during our peak (and the peak of CTFs in general), during which we won our first competitions, hosted our own local + global competitions, and first attended (+ won) DEF CON CTF, beginning a four-year streak as part of the Maple Mallard Magistrates (CMU + Theori + UBC). (No other experience has taught me as much as Maple Bacon has.)
I ran the Undergraduate Mathematics Society (UBC’s math club) for a little while; first as treasurer, then as president. During my tenure as treasurer I mostly facilitated getting a grant to purchase textbooks covering the entire undergraduate curriculum (& more); during my tenure as president I focused on opening the club up and making it a more accessible + inclusive space for the student body as a whole. I think this was a broadly successful effort, reflecting back on things.
I’m quite glad to have been engaged in such wonderful clubs with such wonderful people.
academics
I’ve also done quite a bit of academic research; I worked (unpaid :-/) for the Software Practices Lab over one summer, learning the basics of programming language implementation for the purpose of modelling a region-based memory system. The next summer, I interned at Rising Tide Research, exploring effective compilation/rendering strategies for signed-distance functions (lossless 3D models). This summer, I’m working on robust OCR for Kwakʼwala, a nearby Wakashan language currently undergoing language revitalization efforts.
I’ve also been involved with a number of other labs and reading groups: having run quite a few sessions in plu-311 (the SPL’s affiliated programming languages reading group), many on effect handlers… and having run a couple sessions of the linguistics department’s Semantics Reading Group, mostly on quantifiers. I’ve also been a regular member of the Questions Lab (QLab) and an occasional member of the Gitxsan Lab (Gitlab) and the Degrees and Measurement and Numerals Lab (DaMNLab), in which we present and give feedback on each other’s active research.
Most of my linguistics research has been through the eight-month Field Methods course here though: which was taught on Blackfoot my year. We learned the basics of fieldwork and how to work with speakers, and investigated various features of the Blackfoot language. I looked at one aspect of Blackfoot’s quantification system, the universal adverbial quantifier ohkan-. Some other research has come out of various seminar courses I’ve taken, too… a seminar I took on mood / dynamic semantics led to some introspection + an eventual paper on the function of English before.
what i’m up to, generally speaking
I have a large backlog of books and movies to get through.
I’m learning / learning about Guile Scheme, Guix, WebAssembly, Uiua, and logic programming.
I’ve got some math I’d really like to learn. I was studying category theory a while back: but felt like I hit a wall in not knowing enough algebra to properly understand the motivations behind some generalizations, so I’ve been reading through Algebra: Chapter 0 to correct this.
I’ve learnt a bunch of theory surrounding dependent types and similar such proof systems, and have been working through Terence Tao’s formalization of Analysis I to put it into practice.
I have a design for a programming language that has been bouncing around my head for a couple of years now, and I’ve been (slowly) working on a compiler for it. (This has been lots of fun.)
I’ve been putting a lot of effort into improving the Typst ecosystem for linguistics.
I’m employed for the summer and am currently looking for full-time employment for the fall. I’m playing competitive ultimate frisbee (club) and am heading on lots of hikes + bike rides + work hikes, mostly through the outdoor club. And I’m spending time with my lovely friends.
contact
If you’re interested in anything here and want to chat / say hi, please feel free to shoot me a message! I’m contactable over email or via xmpp (currently down) at jj [at] toki.la.
I’m also on Signal/WhatsApp (private, sorry) and Discord. Also Matrix, but I prefer to not use it.
website credits
This website’s design is based off of the websites of Cat Zeng, Leonora Tindall, Simon Højberg, Christoffer Stjernlöf, and Tony Zorman. The wiki is strongly inspired from Oleg Kiselyov’s site.
It is generated by Hakyll (source script). Hakyll is an extensible static site generator generator (yes) written in Haskell, integrating with Pandoc. It’s lovely and excellent software and I recommend it.