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My research interests include:

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  • Human-centered AI;

  • Creativity;

  • Future of work;

  • Augmenting skill;

  • Social factors in technology;

  • AI and work teaming

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At this point, I hope to: 

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Study the relationships between AI and creativity and identify productive ways to augment human skill with AI.

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In my PhD program so far, I have completed:

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  • Research

    • Contributed to There's no AI in Team paper​

    • Contributed to the shift handover (HATIT) project

      • Helped develop interview protocol

      • Recruited participants

      • Interviewed analysts to facilitate development of the research tools

      • Synthesized analyst interview information in order to fine-tune requirements for development team

      • Developed world-building materials

      • Developed survey within Qualtrics

      • Developed HIT requests through MTurk and ran studies

      • Collected and analyzed data

      • Worked with an interdisciplinary team

    • Completed Integrated Paper: Considering creativity in artificial intelligence and work

      • Abstract: AI is used daily to complete work tasks, and some worry about human relevance in the workforce of the future. Research has looked at the impact of AI in areas like manufacturing, fast food service, and sales check-out. Much of this and related research points to a need for concern among employees of fields with repetitive, easily-automated tasks, while some show that the impacts to knowledge work will be stronger than previously believed. I conduct a document analysis using data from O*Net and documents related to AI's creative capabilities to determine if creative occupations should be examined for susceptibility to AI intrusion and contrary to assumptions, creative work might not be much "safer." Findings show overlap between creative requirements in occupations and creative abilities of AI and indicate that it may be prudent to take a more nuanced look at how occupations requiring creativity will be impacted by AI.

      • Completed a literature review on creativity in AI and jobs

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  • Selected Coursework​​

    • Quantitative Research Methods - gained some familiarity with common NLP models: BERT, GPT3, coding Python to run a model based on Covid-19 media information, and Google Colab.

    • UX design - gained familiarity with heuristic apps, evaluation software for user studies with task completion and survey components, and foundational accessibility in design principles.

    • Future of work - deepened understanding of Sociotechnical Theory (STS) with respect to the future of work.

    • CSMC 828L     (AI and Existential Threats)

      • Became more familiar with common NLP models

      • Learned about machine learning's use and impact in addressing issues such as climate change, fake news detection, and Covid-19

      • Created a research proposal based off an NSF template

      • Created a presentation on my proposal that addressed machine learning from a social science perspective, and presented to a highly technical, mostly computer scientist audience.

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  • Independent Work

    • Collected and created a repository of links to useful, free datasets to share with my cohort.

    • Learned many new programs to a functional level, including Adobe Premiere, Adobe Audition, Doodly, Scrivener, Paperpile, Zotero, Overleaf, Mindomo, Notion, Wix, XKCD-style chart developer, etc. etc. etc, as well as many sites that aid in better design.

    • Attended (either in-person or on-demand) workshops, meetings, roundtables, forums, conferences, presentations, etc. related to human-centered AI and the future of work

    • Familiarized myself with literature, research organizations, researchers, seminal products, etc. related to human-centered AI and the future of work.

    • Attend UMD's Human-Computer Interaction Lab discussions.

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