[ˈdæn.jəl ˈkʰw̥ɪ.ɡli]
I am a mathematical semanticist and postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University Bloomington and the Center for Possible Minds, where I study the formal structure of meaning and intelligence in natural and artificial systems. My work draws on linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, and computer science, with particular interests in semantics, semiotics and writing systems, meaning representation, grounding, reasoning, and abstraction.
I completed my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Department of Linguistics, where I was advised by Nicholas Fleisher. My doctoral work centered on mathematical linguistics and formal semantics, particularly their connections with natural language processing, logic, category theory, and distributional representations.
As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I worked across linguistics, anthropology, and astrophysics. With Monica Macaulay, I contributed to Menominee language documentation and elicitation, both on the Menominee Reservation and in the lab, as well as to the preparation and formatting of traditional stories for teaching aids. With J. Mark Kenoyer, I worked on the Indus Valley Script, studying writing preserved on pottery sherds and differences in sign frequencies relative to other written artifacts.
In physics, I worked with the late Stefan Westerhoff on the HAWC experiment through the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC). I contributed to hardware and data-acquisition projects, worked on IceCube-Gen2, and investigated discrepancies in gamma-ray observations across HAWC, MAGIC, VERITAS, and H.E.S.S..
Outside academia, I serve as a technical advisor to Obviate AI and as a contract machine learning scientist with Eruditis.
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