Dan Byrne is the technical founder and CEO of TalkToPlato, an online platform referred to as the “Duolingo” for parents of young children (public launch late Dec 2024). Previously, Dan worked as a Research Data Scientist for the University of Chicago specializing in using AI to model children’s language learning and language acquisition. His scientific research has been published in the United States National Academy of Sciences, the Association for Computational Linguistics, the Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society, the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, and the International Conference on Analogical Reasoning in Paris, France. His work has also been covered in popular press outlets such as Psychology Today, Neuroscience News, and Medical Xpress. Dan’s publications and research can be found on Google Scholar. His research project funders have included the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Meta (formerly Facebook), and the United States Department of Defense. Dan earned his BS Summa Cum Laude from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and attended graduate school at the University of Chicago.
Outside of research and academia, Dan served as a selection campaign advisor for Luke Charters MP for the July 2022 UK Labour Party Parliamentary Selection for York Outer. Luke later went on to the win the 2024 general election campaign with an over 9,000 vote majority and became the first Labour MP to represent York Outer.
Dan also acts as a consulting scientific advisor and producer on a series of animated children’s programs targeted towards 2–6-year-olds in Europe and North America. He is a strong proponent of high-quality children’s educational programming and believes that media and AI can be used ethically and responsibly to help promote children's language and literacy development across the globe. In fact, Dan entered this line of work after growing up as a child with significant language and literacy delays. Dan will be attending the February 2025 Kidscreen Summit in San Diego as a member of the British Delegation.
His time is now split between his homes in Southern California, Chicago, and London.
Please feel free to connect with and contact Dan via his personal email below.
Dan loves all kinds of art and has incorporated the Chicago Art Institute API into his personal site to share his passion. Enjoy the randomly selected art work + description. Refresh the page to see a new piece of art.
Stars before Dawn (Mimei boshi); A work made of color woodblock print; edition 10/50., 1970 - 1970; Fukita Fumiaki Japanese, born 1926
Leveraging both machine learning and NLP knowledge, Dan built a command-line tool to process unstructured audio and video files to remove personally identifiable information such as names, addresses, and phone numbers. Listen to the demo audio files below.
In addition to Dan's ML & NLP work, he has taken inspiration from the original computer scientist, Alan Turing, and has implemented various ways to encrypt text data. Here he uses a simple cipher to encrypt text data using a transposition encoding. Enter some text or message (at least two words!) below to encrypt it. The page will reload and you can then see your encrypted message! Afterwards, copy and paste the encrypted text exactly as it appears into the text box below the encrypted message to decode it! The page will reload automatically so scroll back down to see the encrypted message!
Copy and paste the encrypted text into the text box below and click submit. My custom decoder will output 10 possible ways to decrypt and interpret the data. Read each row to see if it was able to decode your message! The page will reload automatically so scroll back down to see!
Similar to his audio de-identification work and interest in cryptography, Dan has also trained custom named-entity-recognition (NER) models to remove and replace personally identifiable and sensitive information in-line. Go ahead and try it out by copying and pasting the example(s): Batman is Bruce Wayne?! Tony rolled his eyes. The page will reload automatically so scroll back down to see!
Linguistic alignment in parent-child verbal communication and gesture. Foushee, R., Byrne, D., Casillas, M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (September 2021). Computational Communication & Development Brownbag, Aix-Marseille University.
Frausel, R., Simms, N., Byrne, D., Richland, L. E. (2017, August). Analogical Reasoning in a Social Context. Poster session presented at the Fourth Annual International Analogy Conference, Paris, France.
2016 Charles Eriksen Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Research in Visual Cognition and Human Performance; University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign
Highest University Honors: Univeristy of Illinois Bronze Tablet Recipient
Edward W. Collins and Doris Strickland-Collins Award for Teaching Excellence; University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students with Outstanding Distinction (Top 1 Percent of Instructors); Univeristy of Illinois College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Cognitive Psychologist; Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow @ The Univeristy of Chicago
Linguist; Dr. Ruthe Foushee @ The New School For Social Research
Computational Linguist; Dr. Afra Alishahi @ Tilburg Univeristy
Computational Linguist; Dr. Raquel Alhama @ The Institute of Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam
Computational Linguist; Dr. Allyson Ettinger @ The Allen Institute For AI
Linguist; Dr. Marisa Casillas @ The University of Chicago
Computer Scientist; Dr. Blase Ur @ The University of Chicago
Psychologist; Dr. Lindsey Richland @ The Univeristy of California Irvine
Professor of Communication; Dr. Leanne Knobloch @ The University of Illinois
Cognitive Scientist; Dr. Alejandro Lleras @ The University of Illinois
Cognitive Scientist; Dr. Simona Lleras-Buetti @ The University of Illinois
© 2024 Daniel J. Byrne