Priya Nandakumar
Founding convenor. Spent six years shipping predictive keyboards before returning to study why they work the way they do.
- Role
- Convenor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- priya.nandakumar@slop.university
- Contact
- Email for anything about the shape of the course; bring line-level questions about a lab to the lab itself.
Priya built input-method software for a mobile keyboard vendor for six years before this course existed — first candidate-ranking for a Latin-script predictive keyboard, later the transliteration layer for an Indic-script IME. She left industry with a specific complaint: nobody she worked with had a word for the thing they were actually building, which was not “autocomplete” in the singular sense the press used, but a family of related bets — next-key, next-word, next-candidate, next-reply — each with its own failure mode and its own history. Autocomplete Studies is the course she wished existed when she was trying to explain her job to her family.
She teaches the opening and closing lectures and the weeks that touch constrained or scripted prediction (T9, IME, forecasting), and reads every lab’s prep note before the lab, not after.
Consultation#
Office hours are announced week to week on the course noticeboard; email gets a same-week reply outside teaching weeks 6 and 12, when marking takes priority. If a question can’t wait, say so in the subject line — “can’t wait” questions get read first.