 My name is Brendan Bolt. I'm from the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I'm from the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science. So the funniest thing with prepping for this year's three-minute thesis competition happened right at the beginning. The last year, I competed in the three-minute thesis competition, and so I thought I'd start this year by reading my script from last year and seeing what I could change. I read through it and thought, this is great. I don't really have anything to change. But I didn't make it past the prelims last year. So that told me I really got to take a new approach. I got to start from scratch and rewrite my whole script. But I really think that coming at my thesis from a new perspective is what three-minute thesis is about. So it was definitely a good thing. Well, what definitely takes the cake for obscure facts related to my research is that in 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned research into the origin of language because there's far more speculation going on than useful research. And so AI-invented language, observing how AI-invents language, is one way to actually get more into the data, one way to kind of look back at how humans might have invented language. And so even 150 years ago, the problems I'm working on today were motivated. Doing research at CMU has been special to me because it's allowed me to find my niche. I've always wanted to work on AI-invented language. And this is difficult because it requires expertise in machine learning, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, linguistics, and even the philosophy of science. And I found that in my advisor, David Mortensen, as well as support from the diverse disciplines in my department, but also in the whole school of computer science. And I think that's something that you would really struggle to find at any other place.