News

  • I have accepted an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream position at University of Toronto, Mississauga, starting in July 2024! The appointment will be 55% in the Department of Language Studies and 45% in the Department of Mathematics and Computational Sciences.
  • Our manuscript titled "Linguistically inspired roadmap for building biologically reliable protein language models" (preprint), has been published in Nature Machine Intelligence! Check out the published article here.
  • Our second Immunolingo manuscript titled "ImmunoLingo: Linguistics-based formalization of the antibody language", a perspective on defining antibody specificity as a language is available now on arxiv.

About

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of Oslo. I am involved with the Immunolingo Environment, an exciting interdisciplinary collaboration between immunology, machine learning, statistics, and linguistics. My PI is Dag Haug.

My main interests lie in the intersection of Theoretical Linguistics, Computational/Mathematical Linguistics, and Typology. I use computational methods, most notably tools from formal language theory, in order to gain a better understanding of possible human language patterns. I believe in studying language as a computed output of the human cognitive faculty, and that typological data provides a key for measuring the computational capacity of human cognition.

More recently, I have also become interested in studying currently popular deep neural network-based models of language, particularly in applying a linguistic perspective to better understand their inner workings both for modelling linguistic and non-linguistic data, and to build improved models that are appropriate for even non-linguistic, sequential data.

My work is interdisciplinary at its core, and I have been involved with a very diverse set of research topics, ranging from all subfields of theoretical linguistics and using a variety of computational and mathematical tools. You can see more details about my research projects under Projects.

In my free time, I love tinkering with my website and my LaTeX files, and I am happy to help anyone who has LaTeX questions. See LaTeX for some useful links. To learn about other non-academic related interests, my favorite links should give you some idea.

My name

In short: Call me Mai Ha. Pronounce it as: [maɪ ha].

Extra info: I have a Vietnamese name. Vu is my surname (the name I inherited from my father). Mai Ha are my two given names. In Vietnam, people would call me either Mai Ha or Ha, but I prefer Mai Ha. If you are curious, this is the full Vietnamese version of my name, with tones: Vũ Mai Hà.

Education

Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Delaware. (2020)
M.A. in Linguistics, University of Delaware. (2014)
B.A. in Psychology and concentration in Linguistics, Grinnell College. (2013)