Congratulations to Ben LeBrun and Olivia Oppong, who both successfully defended their MA theses this summer!
Ben’s thesis was titled “Grounding Language in Vision using Modular Probabilistic Representations” supervised by Tim O’Donnell. He will be starting a PhD in EECS at MIT in Fall 2025.
Olivia’s thesis is “An experimental investigation of focus prosody in Akan and Ghanaian English”. The thesis addresses inconsistencies in previous literature regarding whether Akan, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Ghana, exhibits prosodic focus by comparing it with Ghanaian English, a variety of English spoken in Ghana. Olivia was supervised by Michael Wagner, and her committee also included Heather Goad.