Sam Passmore

Research Fellow associated with the HASS Digital Research Hub. Focusing on the application of computational methods in HASS disciplines within ANU and beyond.

Research Fellow associated with the HASS Digital Research Hub, focusing on the application of computational methods in HASS disciplines within ANU and beyond.

This project sits at the intersection of language documentation and technology, focusing on three Pacific Creoles—Tok Pisin, Solomon Islands Pijin, and Bislama. My role is to build and analyse the rich audio corpora, applying and testing state-of-the-art speech-to-text models to capture and understand how these languages are spoken today. This research not only advances computational linguistics b

I study the remarkable linguistic diversity of New Guinea and its relationship to human genetic variation. By combining large-scale linguistic datasets with genomic data, my research explores how languages and genes have diversified together over time, offering new insights into human history, migration, and cultural change in one of the world’s most linguistically rich regions.

I investigated global patterns of musical diversity, examining how musical styles, structures, and traditions vary across cultures and regions. By integrating ethnomusicological archives, specifically the Global Jukebox, with computational analysis, my work uncovers connections between music, cultural history, and human social dynamics, shedding light on the shared and unique ways people create an

I breifly worked on analysing the global diversity of grammatical structures within the Grambank team (grambank.org) - analysing how languages differ in the ways they encode meaning and organise information. By combining large typological databases with computational and statistical approaches, this research reveals patterns in how grammar evolves, spreads, and adapts to different social and envir

During my PhD I tutored across several courses including: Anthropological Methods, Evolution and Human Behaviour, and Anthropological approaches to Kinship

Research and Development for Pingar’s flagship product DiscoveryOne. Developed machine learning tools to categorise files and create topic models

Title: Quantitative approaches to kinship terminology evolution
Funder: European Research Council project (VARIKIN)

Title: New approaches to Galton’s problem in cultural evolution
First Class Honours

Title: Bayesian additive regression vs logistic regression in hospital comparisons
First Class - Second Division