Esteban Buz

Senior data scientist
SonderMind
esteban.buz@gmail.com
LinkedIn

Resume

Research interest

I work on understanding how and why speakers vary their speech. I am interested in what extent speech production variability is a result of the constraints speakers face in planning what to say while also achieving their communicative goals. My more recent work focuses on if and how speech variation is attributable to task-relevant learning and adaptation during communication.

Autobiography

I'm from Los Angeles, California. I graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 2008 with a BA in Cognitive Science and a minor in Computer Science. I worked on a fun project with Robert Frank on learning of multiple independent hierarchical transformations of linear sequences. After, I worked in the Cognitive Neurology/Neuropsychology lab with Kerry Ledoux on finding implicit measures of verbal comprehension in non-verbal autistic children/adults. I earned a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, working primarily with Florian Jaeger and Michael Tanenhaus. After, I was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Princeton University and Vanderbilt University where I continued my PhD work and taught an undergraduate course on conversation (Princeton) and collaborated with with Duane Watson and René Gifford (Vanderbilt). Currently, I am a data scientist at SonderMind (via its acquisition of Qntfy) where I build internal and external data tools and machine-learning based analytics to understand mental health needs in individuals and groups.

Education

• PhD, 2016, University of Rochester, Brain and Cognitive Sciences
• MA, 2013, University of Rochester, Brain and Cognitive Sciences
• BA, 2008, Johns Hopkins University, Cognitive Science (minor in Computer Science) with general and departmental honors

Honors, fellowships and funding

• 2015-2016 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Predoctoral Fellowship to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (F31HD083020)
• 2015 Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student
• 2014 27th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing Travel Award
• 2011, 2012 NSF Graduate Fellowship Honorable Mention
• 2010 Provost Fellowship, University of Rochester
• 2004-2008 Hodson Trust Scholarship, Johns Hopkins University
• 2004 Eagle Scout, Troop 188, Verdugo Hills Council

Various outputs

Pre-press Publications

• Buz, E. Under Review. Dynamic changes to pronunciation reflect potential causes of previous miscommunication.
• Buz, E. In prep. Understanding the distributional effects of speech exaggeration.
• Buz, E., Buchwald, A., Fuchs, T., & Keshet, J. In press. Assessing automatic phonetic annotation tools using unimpaired and impaired speech. The International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.

Publications

• Seyfarth, S., Buz, E., & Jaeger, T.F. 2016. Dynamic hyperarticulation of coda voicing contrasts. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. doi: 10.1121/1.4942544
• Buz, E., Tanenhaus, M.K., & Jaeger, T.F. 2016. Dynamically adapted context-specific hyper-articulation: Feedback from interlocutors affects speakers' subsequent pronunciations. Journal of Memory and Language. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2015.12.009
• Buz, E., & Jaeger, T.F. 2016. The (in)dependence of articulation and lexical planning during isolated word production. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2015.1105984
• Jaeger, T.F., & Buz, E. 2016. Signal reduction and linguistic encoding. To appear in E. M. Fernández & H. S. Cairns (Eds.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Wiley-Blackwell. accepted draft
• Ledoux, K., Coderre, E., Bosley, L., Buz, E., Gangopadhyay, I., & Gordon, B. 2015. The concurrent use of three implicit measures (eye movements, pupillometry, and event-related potentials) to assess receptive vocabulary knowledge in normal adults. Behavior Research Methods. doi: 10.3758/s13428-015-0571-6
• Buz, E., Jaeger, T.F., & Tanenhaus, M.K. 2014. Contextual confusability leads to targeted hyperarticulation. To the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. accepted draft pdf
• Buz, E. & Frank, R. 2008. Evaluating systematicity in neural networks through transformation combination. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. pdf

Conference abstracts/posters

• Buz, E. & Jaeger, T.F. 2014. Effects of contextual confusability and interlocutor feedback on speaker phonetic production and production ease in a simulated-communication task. Poster at the 8th International Workshop on Language Production, Geneva, SW. abstract
• Buz, E. & Jaeger, T.F. 2014. Effects of interlocutor feedback on speaker phonetic production in a simulated-communication task. Poster at the 27th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Columbus, OH. abstract poster
• Buz, E. & Jaeger, T.F. 2013. Comparing measure of word confusability and their effect on speech production. Poster at the 26th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Columbia, SC. abstract poster
• Buz, E., Farmer, T., & Jaeger, T.F. 2012. Speakers are sensitive to prediction mismatches between two cues to grammatical category in spontaneous speech. Poster at the 7th International Workshop on Language Production, New York, NY. abstract poster
• Buz, E., & Jaeger, T.F. 2012. Word confusability and word durations. Poster at the 7th International Workshop on Language Production, New York, NY. abstract poster
• Buz, E., & Jaeger, T.F. 2012. Effects of phonological confusability on speech duration. Poster at the 25th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY. abstract poster
• Van Droof L.V., Ledoux K., Pickett E.J., Buz E., Billings N.M., & Gordon B. 2010. Advancing the measurement of receptive language in nonverbal individuals with autism. Poster at the 2010 International Meeting for Autism Research, Philadelphia, PA, May 20-22, 2010.
• Ledoux K., Pickett E., Van Droof L.V., Buz E., Billings N.M., & Gordon B. 2010. Receptive vocabulary knowledge in individuals with autism as assessed by eye movements, pupillary dilation, and event-related potentials. Poster at the 2010 Neurobiology of Autism conference, San Diego, CA, November 12, 2010.
• Ledoux, K., Pickett, E., Van Droof, L.V., Buz, E., Billings, N.M., & Gordon, B. 2009. Receptive vocabulary knowledge in individuals with autism as assessed by eye movements, pupillary dilation, and event-related potentials. Poster at the 2009 meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, MA, November 21, 2009.

Code

These hold various coding projects, though most are currently private.

My bitbucket repos

My github repos

My gitlab repos

Teaching

Instruction

• Situated Language Usage (PU, LIN/PSY/CGS 408; Fall, 2016 & Spring, 2018)
• Language & Psycholinguistics (U of R, BCS 152; Fall, 2014 & 2015), co-taught by myself and Florian Jaeger
• Independent study reading group (U of R, BCS 391; Spring, 2012), co-lead with Jenny Roche. Direct readings and discussions on the topics of speech production, audience design, and speaker-listener interaction.

Teaching Assistantships

• Cognition (U of R, BCS 153; Spring, 2014), taught by Andrea Hinds
• Language & Psycholinguistics (U of R, BCS 152; Fall, 2011), taught by Florian Jaeger