Rhea Kapur is a researcher, engineer, artist, and urban archivist with a B.A. in Linguistics and a B.S. in Computer Science (AI) from Stanford University, where she was advised by Dan Jurafsky. She is the founder of Cultural Fingerprints, a research-driven creative studio and software lab building new ways to interact with language, culture, and place.

As part of the Stanford NLP Group, the Social Interaction Lab (Stanford), the Computation and Language for Society Lab (UCLA), and the EduNLP Lab (Stanford), Rhea researches how multimodal LLMs handle culture, accessibility, and contextual grounding. Previously, Rhea worked on mobile engineering at The New York Times and built emotionally-aware speech models and infrastructure at Gridspace, a startup creating AI voice agents for consumer and enterprise applications.

In 2023, Rhea photographed historic neon signage in San Francisco, interviewing residents and business owners to understand how it defines the city's different neighborhoods. She then created a neon sculpture of her own while working in Los Angeles (it has since shattered, but the tubes survive on this website). Now, Rhea archives signs and symbols across the world as examples of "cultural fingerprinting," combining techniques from computational cartography, ethnography, linguistics, semiotics, artmaking, and NLP/AI to understand their pattern and variations.

Rhea is on leave from her M.S. in Computer Science (Systems + AI) at Stanford to work on Cultural Fingerprints and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. If you see a choking sign in an NYC restaurant with a cool design, please reach out to her about it :)