Profile
I’m a researcher, designer, engineer, journalist and musician working at the intersection of AI, human-centered design, the reinvention of information access, and social progress as applied to a variety of spaces, including education, politics, law and healthcare. I’ve built and led teams at fast-growing startups, designed and defined applied AI systems that resulted in over a dozen patents, and written and given talks about how to think about the future of AI-empowered UX. I also explore various approaches to human-machine collaboration in pursuit of generative art.
Education
Currently a PhD Candidate in Prof. Kristian Hammond’s C3 Lab at Northwestern University, with a research focus on the reinvention of the human-data interface through the synthesis of various modes of machine learning and symbolic representation for natural language processing, intent-driven data analysis, rich conversational system design, and mixed-modality response generation. Research project work includes:
- Satyrn: Leading the design and development of a platform aimed at empowering non-technical users with the toolset necessary to drive data search and analysis without needing to write code or database queries. The UX pulls from the scaffolding of Jupyter notebooks, but the interaction mechanics are based in natural language – the “natural language notebook.” And all analytics, query generators, API components and UX are abstracted away from the particulars of any given dataset, with new datasets being brought to the system through the configuration of a domain ontology.
- Northwestern Open Access to Court Records Initiative: Leading the development of the SCALES platform (implemented as one instance of Satyrn), a core component of an NSF-backed joint initiative involving computer and data scientists, legal scholars, journalists and policy experts aimed at building an “AI powered data platform that makes the details of the federal judiciary and insights into how it works available and accessible to every single person.” More details here.
- Mim: Co-architecting and leading the development of a rich conversational system aimed at question-answering by a process of question decomposition, sub-answer collection (culling candidate answers from a host of corpora, such as relevant APIs, open-source knowledge graphs, and encyclopedia articles) and evaluation, answer recombination (with relevant analysis), and response generation.
- COVID Resource Map: Led the initial design and development of data acquisition pipelines for the collection, collation, and aggregation of various datasets related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including PPE resource shortages and surpluses at a per-hospital level, hospital bed availability, reported cases, reported deaths, unemployment data, proxies for consumer behavior, and a variety of others.
- The Advisor: Co-designing/developing a conversational agent aimed at meaningful interactions with students around internships, job opportunities, class selections, and events. The system develops a profile of each individual through their searches and selections, aiding with suggestions and guidance as new opportunities or classes become available or the system discovers near-perfect matches that meet most of the student’s interests and criteria.
- Pixie: Designed and developed a platform for the exploration of the latent space of GANs, as well as the creation of “human directed” music visualizations culled from those explorations. Currently pursuing a roadmap of feature additions.
Earned an MS in CS as a subcomponent of the PhD program.
Earned an MSJ on a Knight Foundation scholarship aimed at bringing students with design and development skills and an interest or background in journalism to the Medill graduate program. While at Medill, graduate work included development of the American Visualizer, an app aimed at making census data accessible and useful to journalists through dynamic visualization; analysis of the media environment and impacts on the healthcare debate during 2009; and a FOIA-based research project associated with piecing together a timeline of events surrounding United 93 on 9/11.
While earning a BA, designed, built and maintained the first online student publication and hosted a weekly radio show on the college station.
Experiences
Led a team focusing on the conceptual, architectural and UX design of a natural language generation platform based on ontological modeling, data analytics and additional concepts leading to a host of awarded or pending patents (noted below).
Led the design of an end-to-end platform for configurable NLG, inclusive of data ingestion and analysis, chart design and rendering, document creation and styling, and delivery mechanisms for integration with a host of external platforms.
Co-defined and developed key components of a fully configurable, domain-independent natural language generation system.
Served on the board of Rise Above Foundation, a nonprofit based in Massachusetts aimed at providing children in foster care with enriching activities, opportunities and experiences. In addition to board service, built the initial website as well as the web-based application and double-blind approval system, adhering to strict guidelines related to data security. To date, system has powered the application, review and approval process for thousands of grants for children in foster care in Massachusetts.
Freelance work for JW Player, OpenSky, Hospital Energy, Northwestern and other clients.
Lead designer and front-end engineer at company specializing in creating tools for video publishing and monetization; company properties include popular open-source media player, the JW Player. Maintained the website and aspects of registration and invoice systems including design, A/B testing, and SEO of highly trafficked player download pages.
Primary songwriter, lead vocalist, and producer for internationally touring band as well as a solo artist with multiple albums and collaborations. Played shows in 48 US States as well as roughly 30 countries to date, including Japan, Brazil, Russia, and much of Europe.