Rhea Kapur is a researcher, engineer, and 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. Through Cultural Fingerprints, she explores new ways to intersect language, culture, technology, and place.

As part of the Stanford NLP Group, the Social Interaction Lab (Stanford), the Computation and Language for Society Lab (UCLA), and more, Rhea researches how multimodal LLMs handle visuals, culture, accessibility, intelligent communication, and contextual grounding, collaborating closely with Robert Hawkins and Elisa Kreiss. 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 and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where she also volunteers at Interference Archive. If you see a choking sign in an NYC restaurant with a cool design, please reach out to her about it :)