Huteng Dai

Huteng Dai is an Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics and Phonology at the University of Michigan. He is affiliated with the U-M AI Lab, the Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics, and the Weinberg Institute of Cognitive Science. Previously, he completed his PhD at Rutgers University with a Cognitive Science Certificate and was part of the Rutgers Computational Linguistics Lab and UCI Language Processing Group.

• Education: Ph.D., Rutgers University (2024)

His research focuses on building interpretable computational models of phonological learning to understand how humans and machines acquire sound patterns from noisy real-world data. This work bridges formal language theory, machine learning, and cognitive science.

Recent activities include launching the Computation, Acquisition, and Processing (CAP) Lab in Fall 2024, teaching courses on speech recognition and Python programming, and serving as Area Chair for CoNLL 2024. His work has been presented at MIT, UC Irvine, and conferences like AMP, SCiL, and SIGMORPHON.

The CAP Lab utilizes advanced research computing infrastructure including GPU hours on the Great Lakes HPC cluster. The lab focuses on computational modeling at the intersection of language acquisition and theoretical phonology, with plans to recruit undergraduate and graduate research assistants and postdoctoral researchers.