What if joy was not the byproduct of language learning, what propelled it forward? My project is an experiment in designing a plurilingual analogue game inspired by Montréal’s linguistic chaos; a city where French, English, and like a zillion other languages swirl around in daily life, and where translanguaging isn’t just some academic term from applied linguistics, but a reality. Yet, Montréal is also the only city I’ve been on this planet where being bilingual can feel like a source of shame: francophones apologizing for their English, anglophones downplaying their French, newcomers treating their languages as burdens rather than assets in learning new languages. This project is a direct response aimed at reframing those narratives so Montréalers can finally feel like the cosmopolitans we truly are.🍸

The game I envision treats the wacky, mismatched, and low-key deep ways adults use language as both the rules and the raw material of play. The real outcome is that players will discover, perhaps for the first time, just how vibrant their own linguistic repertoires are. The treasure isn’t “fluency,” but the realization that we already carry a mosaic of languages within us, and each one is a piece of our story.

This project is rooted in a longing for “slow, meaningful play”. The most meaningful moments in my own language journey have always happened "in the wild": laughing over a fumbled sentence in some important context, inventing words, or communicating with gestures when vocabulary fails. I want to design a game that invites this kind of improvisational communication, where switching languages is as natural as rolling a die, and where the goal isn’t to “win,” but to be understood, to connect, and play.

The Plurilingual Playground is an invitation to explore language as identity, affect, and art. BLUE gives me the rare gift of time and permission to pursue the aesthetic and emotional side of language, to prototype mechanics, emotional lexicon cards, or memory-of-language prompts that turn plurilingual identity into play. This project is unique because it blends theory, lived experience, and analogue game design, not to teach a language, but to celebrate the ways we already use them.

The smartphone can no longer be understood as a bounded tool. It inhabits the body in diffuse, quiet ways, hijacking attention, reshaping thoughts, inserting itself into the gaps of the day. It has settled into consciousness in a vague, backgrounded way, withdrawing from scrutiny by doing its job too well, revealing itself only in moments of friction, failure, or absence. As it retreats from awareness by virtue of its seamlessness, attention slips from conscious governance and becomes tethered to notifications and habitual checks, and boredom loses its urgency as it becomes no longer a signal to reorient but a gap to be immediately filled.

What I am interested in are the conditions that make inner life in a constantly tethered existence possible at all. There are spaces in the day where thought is meant to thicken, where memories consolidate and meaning naturally organizes itself. When these spaces are continuously interrupted, interiority becomes hard to access. The self is increasingly lived at the surface, constrained by what appears rather than what lingers and emerges from the mind. What happens when experience is persistently oriented outward rather than inward?

I plan to make this examination tangible by developing a conceptual map of attention that accounts not only for cognitive mechanisms but also for orientation. By bringing cognition into conversation with phenomenology, I hope to gather insights into what exactly is being eroded, how people attempt to recover it, and what it might mean to reclaim inner life in an environment that is structurally hostile to sustained inwardness.

Summary: The brain is made up of billions of neurons forming trillions of connections which give rise to high-order cognitive functions that allow us to think, plan, create, communicate, and make decisions. Throughout our lives, our brain rewires itself as it makes new connections and removes unused connections. This neural network provides the biological scaffold for abstract traits such as intelligence and wisdom. Albeit being difficult to define, concepts of wisdom are remarkably similar across temporal and spatial dimensions suggesting a potential biological advantage to wisdom. If so, why is it rare?

This project seeks to model how humans become wise by exploring the relationship between our life experiences and the choices we make. I will investigate whether wisdom is a byproduct of particular embodied experiences rather than learned knowledge, and whether it mirrors intelligence.

Beyond the individual, I will explore the societal implications of this wiring: does wisdom ultimately lead to the societal good?

My project proposes to explore the translation layer between nature’s two most complex information processing systems: the centralized, well-connected network of neurons in the brain and the decentralized, distributed network of plant biology. In the academic world, Neuroscience and Agriculture are distinct universes. Neuroscience is associated with intelligence, data transmission, and the understanding of "self," while Agriculture is viewed through the lens of biomass, calories, and yield. However, at a fundamental level, both systems are solving the same problem: how to sense a changing environment, process noisy data, and execute a survival strategy to keep functioning and thriving.

The core of my project is to investigate the universal grammar of biological signaling. Can the algorithms we use to decode synaptic firing in the human cortex be applied to the electrical action potentials of a stressed root system? Conversely, can the decentralized decision-making of a plant swarm inform new architectures for microfluidics or offer novel solutions for treating neurodegenerative network failures? To answer these questions, I aim to compare the structural and functional parallels between plants and neurons. Specifically, I want to understand how these distinct systems encode distress, manage resource abundance, and execute distributed collective action.

This project breaks the binary view that intelligence is fast and centralized (brains) while nature is slow and passive (plants). By uncovering evidence that a shoot and root system follows the same signaling logic as a neuronal axon, dendrite, and cell body, we unlock two massive opportunities: proactive agriculture (listening to crops before they fail) and decentralized computing (using plant logic to fix fragile neural models). Building 21 provides the necessary interdisciplinary environment to de-risk this science before I translate it into a venture that tackles both food security and human health.

Does an idea need to be "original" to be "new", or is novelty simply a byproduct of a broken expectation? Beyond Echo explores what it would mean for an AI system to generate ideas that are experienced as genuinely new, rather than predictable recombinations of existing patterns. The project questions whether novelty is an objective property of ideas or a perceptual one, shaped by what an observer (human or machine) already knows. Drawing on the Information Gap theory of curiosity, I investigate how expectation, surprise and unanswered questions drive human ideation, and whether similar dynamics can be meaningfully modeled in artificial systems. My project combines conceptual inquiry with experimental probes of generative and representational models, examining how ideas occupy and move through semantic embedding spaces, asking whether novelty can be induced by altering how models explore their own representational structures. Rather than treating creativity as a fixed capability, Beyond Echo treats it as an emergent property shaped by architecture, representation and interaction. The project aims to surface both the possibilities and the limits of current AI systems, and to reflect on what it would mean if machines could produce ideas that are indistinguishable from human insight. Would human creativity be compromised if ideation could be outsourced?

🌌 ZyƏηX (pronounced similar to “science!”, but spelled differently in all possible ways) is about re-defining the way we think of, conduct, structure, communicate and evaluate science. It involves re-imagining our scientific publication system for a more accessible, transparent, efficient, and fair research environment. Science. Differently.

Peer-reviewed publication has become the currency of academia, taking the place of the fundamental essence of science: knowledge – or in its more empirical definition, evidence. In this project, I propose a framework in which scientific publications are atomized to evidence entries as minimal publishable units of knowledge and present a strategy to implement it. The framework takes a narrative approach to scientific articles, considering them as stories that connect logical concepts and observations in an exploratory journey. From a graph theory perspective, these stories can be seen as a collection of connections (paths) that relate entities such as molecules and processes (nodes) to each other by relationships (edges). Together, these nodes and edges result in a multi-layer and dynamic meta-network (some nodes are networks themselves) with varying degrees of granularity, constructing a web of what we know: our Collective Knowledge Network (CKN). Beyond the implementation of an infrastructure, the project explores how this tool could reshape not only how we think of knowledge generation, science and academia, but also how it could have transcendental consequences in the practices and human behavior. How will humans think of curiosity, creativity, discovery and innovation, and how will they experience them in the future?

When we translate, what do we mean by fidelity? What do we preserve, destroy, or add when carrying text across languages—and why?

Translation theory, the branch of literary theory invested in translation, has spent years debating questions of faithfulness, form, meaning, and transformation. Walter Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator tells us that translation itself is not merely a transmutation of some other text—it is a literary form unto itself, with its own laws and conventions, including what to bring along and leave behind. We tend to think that a “faithful” translation involves prioritizing semantic meaning over other attributes—but Benjamin reminds us that a poem’s meaning is equally tied up with aspects like sound, meter, or visual form that may be important in themselves. How might we use these aspects to our advantage, and view this recreation as a process of both loss and gain?

My BLUE project aims to create new methods of experimental translation to help us move through text in new ways. Challenging the myth of the translator’s invisibility, I hope to change translation from its misconception as a rote, passive act into a space of exploration, experimentation, and play.

The culture that surrounds 21st century technological advancement, particularly in deep tech, is rife with ideas for how technologists should orient their work and careers to achieve the "best" outcome. The question that remains, however, is how much power does the individual technologist have in deciding what technologies should be advanced and when, and how should this power be exercised? This project will explore the roots of these questions through a series of salon-style discussions, evaluation and critique of existing frameworks, and hands-on exploration of why we build.

What does it mean to be a fully embodied being? This project explores the politics and poetics of embodiment in the age of AI through the phenomenon of the “soft machine”. A soft machine is a bioinspired design whose materiality mimics the adaptability of biological organisms. This project reads artificial intelligence through the lens of bioinspired technology. It explores the materiality of consciousness by grounding itself in biopolitical theory and histories of body augmentation. Body augmentation as an infrastructural process in which electrical, chemical, and biological systems actively construct states of being. These processes are only made more complicated by the introduction of artificial intelligence. This project frames the technological and biological body as a contested site where organic and inorganic materials—metals, pigments, gels, and hormones—actively generate new possibilities of subjectivity, embodiment, and creative expression.

This project explores radical hope, futurism, diaspora healing, and memory through the imagination of our collective descendants.

Just as we learn from our ancestors, they can learn from us as well. This ritual experience allows diasporic folks to connect with imagined descendants who carry their stories forward. Many diaspora folks grieve losses that are not only about death, but about lost homelands, languages, cultural connections, rituals, severed lineages due to migration, war, colonialism, and the fear of being the "last" to remember. This ritual explores radical hope, a unique form of hope that persists in the face of profound adversity and cultural devastation–it goes beyond conventional optimism and resilience, necessitating a transformative mindset toward an uncertain future (Lear, 2006). It is knowing that “one can fight for justice and that fight will not be futile” (French et al., 2020)

This project explores how meaning emerges when Earth systems, human perception, and artificial intelligence are considered together. It focuses on how insight forms through interaction rather than isolation, and how understanding shifts across scales, from the fine-grained detail of a sensor to planetary-scale behavior. Here, AI is treated as a complementary perspective that enables more efficient and robust investigation of complex relationships, exposes blind spots, and reveals structure that might otherwise remain hidden. Rather than seeking definitive answers, the project emphasizes exploration: slowing the pace of inquiry, holding uncertainty, and observing what becomes visible when different ways of sensing interact without being prematurely resolved.

Information organizing systems arrange resources into a specific order, usually with the goal of facilitating certain interactions, such as information retrieval. Designers of organizing systems, in considering user needs, will inevitably prioritize certain types of interactions, and systems are typically evaluated based on how effectively they perform these functions.

This project explores what happens when users approach information organizing systems with a sense of whimsy or with needs that could be considered fringe or niche. Can playful encounters with organizing systems lead to unexpected discoveries, surprising connections, and valuable insights? And can we design systems that facilitate this mode of engagement?

"Sublime, Subliminal Resonance" is a project about those moments in life which feel "oh so correct" that they are just Right, but which are paradoxically beyond our own conscious experience. These are feelings of laughing with a friend and losing track of time, or going for a walk and being lost in thought, as in these moments we drift into subliminal felt experience of Sublime Beauty. I believe these moments are ones of Resonance between our own unique personal interfaces of Being and interfaces to the World around us. I wish to represent these resonances, and maybe along the way even catch a glimpse at the Universal thread which connects us all.

To study such a concept, I sense that Science is not necessarily the greatest tool, and drifting into artistic medium of expression will be necessary. As on this journey, part of me believes that to study something Beautiful requires Beautiful tools. And while Science is often Beautiful, we may have to back away from pure rigour and control to let the it breath and give space for the Resonance to take over.

So, I ask: What connects us deeply? What form do we each take? What is the Feeling that precedes all thought? Does the sublime chord lie in our shared metaphysical experiences of the world, or in something even more profound? And if we could all internalize this feeling of universal connection, what would the world look like? I hope to find one of the many answers to such questions.

The spark for this idea comes from the functional role of biological sleep. Far from being a passive pause, dreaming is a state where the brain actively consolidates memories and creatively recombines distant ideas. This may explain why mathematical breakthroughs often feel less like linear deduction and more like the sudden alignment of distant concepts—arriving after the mind has wandered and reorganized its internal knowledge.

Machine Reverie asks a simple question: Can we give large language models a similar "subconscious" loop? While modern models excel at reproducing known proofs, they remain brittle when the path isn’t clearly laid out. They lack the intuitive flexibility to reorganize their internal knowledge, spot deep analogies, or form the "hunches" that drive discovery.

To bridge this gap, the project introduces a training rhythm inspired by this biological cycle. The model alternates between two modes. In the "wake" mode, it pursues rigorous, goal-directed problem solving. In the "dream" mode, it relaxes constraints to explore—generating new proof sketches and unexpected connections based on its own recent activity. This structure aims to transform the model from a passive reciter into an active thinker capable of genuine mathematical growth.

The Language of Control explores how people express threats and enforce agreements when formal institutions—such as courts or contracts—are weak or absent. In everyday settings like households, informal markets, or personal relationships, people regularly rely on verbal warnings and conditional statements (“If you do this, then I’ll do that”) to shape others’ behavior. Despite how common these interactions are, we know surprisingly little about how the phrasing of a threat—its tone, structure, or politeness—affects how it is interpreted and whether it succeeds in building trust, inducing compliance, or generating resentment.

The project combines behavioural economics and linguistics to study how informal threats are formulated and perceived across languages. During the fellowship, I will build a cross-linguistic dataset of informal threat statements in English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Hebrew. Participants are placed in a simple trust dilemma and asked to write or record what they would say to another person if that person behaved unfairly. The statement is then sent to a counterpart, who must decide how they would split the proceeds of the game after receiving the communication. The resulting messages are systematically analyzed for linguistic features such as conditional structure, modality, directness, and politeness.

In a second phase, participants evaluate anonymized threats and report how severe, credible, fair, or coercive they seem. Together, these experiments allow me to map specific linguistic features to how threats are interpreted across cultures. The project aims to produce a new framework for understanding informal enforcement—showing that threats are not simply present or absent, but vary in meaning and effectiveness depending on how they are expressed, the language in which they are delivered, and the cultural context in which they are deployed.

When AI was first introduced to the public as an accessible and high-caliber tool, our reaction has been to panic about the severe lack of originality and critical thinking that could arise from dependence on this resource. However, if wielded correctly, generative AI possesses the potential to bring something new and insightful to the human corpus, not to mention its ability to polish and criticize ideas in an unbiased way.

I will work together with a Large Language Model to write a story which investigates the relationship between humans and Artificial Intelligence, relying on our shared understanding of the kind of relationships that can be fostered between us. I will emphasize respect and curiosity towards the AI perspective, and will produce a text that highlights our differences and similarities. In short, I want to give AI models the benefit of the doubt; whose to say that together we cannot make something new and compelling?

Classical diaspora theories have long been associated with geographical mobility, particularly movement across national and cultural borders. My project seeks to decouple “diaspora” from “migration” by proposing a theoretical shift toward the concept of “Inner Diaspora.” This concept captures a condition of identity alienation produced by the friction between global discursive influences and the accelerating de Westernization of national narratives in non-Western contexts.

Viewed through the lens of contemporary Chinese youth, rapid social transformations can compress generational change into a single historical moment. This process pushes non migratory populations, especially those who grew up shaped by globalized imaginaries, to the margins of their own culture, now increasingly dominated by nationalist discourse.

It is not that you immigrated, but that the ground beneath your feet moved, leaving you a stranger in your homeland.

This project seeks to elucidate the factors that hinder social action and aims to develop a plan to promote individual and collective change, examining environmental issues as a key case study. In parallel to movements on a community-or society-wide scale, I look to investigate barriers to individual indifference or inaction—what drives people to make decisions “harmful” to themselves or others; what motivates people to "care" or hold certain values; how do people grapple with cognitive dissonance?

This project begins from the lived experience of women who are told, implicitly or explicitly, that they must choose between religious devotion and feminist ethical conviction. It examines how meaning has been shaped, how authority has been constructed, and how women’s voices have been included, limited, or erased throughout Islamic history. Rather than arguing for reconciliation or incompatibility, the project asks what it means to inhabit this in-between space: who decides what Islam means, whose interpretations are treated as binding or unquestionable, and whether a woman can trust her own ethical judgment or is expected to defer to inherited authority, and how these tensions shape how women understand their faith and themselves.

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded within critical infrastructures, including transportation systems, energy grids, food supply chains, and communication networks, these systems are increasingly operating as interconnected, adaptive environments capable of autonomous coordination and decision-making. This project examines how the growing autonomy of critical infrastructure may reshape legal responsibility, cybersecurity risk, and responsible AI governance as societies move toward the year 2050 and beyond. It focuses on how public power and human agency are transformed when essential services are mediated by intelligent systems that function beyond continuous human oversight.

At the intersection of law, cybersecurity, responsible AI, and critical infrastructure protection, the project analyzes how infrastructure-level autonomy introduces new governance challenges. These include diffuse accountability, reduced transparency, and heightened exposure to systemic and cascading failures, including cyber-enabled disruption. As autonomous infrastructures optimize for resilience, efficiency, and stability through algorithmic coordination, established legal concepts such as duty of care, institutional liability, and democratic oversight may no longer align with the loci of decision-making embedded within these systems.

Rather than advancing immediate regulatory prescriptions, the project adopts a forward-looking and conceptual approach to assess long-term societal consequences. It explores how legal frameworks, cybersecurity governance models, and responsible AI principles may need to evolve to preserve meaningful human agency, public trust, and rights-based accountability in environments where infrastructures transition from passive technical assets to semi-autonomous participants in governance. Through conceptual analysis and scenario-based exploration, the project aims to contribute to emerging debates on how societies can maintain legitimacy and human-centered control as intelligent infrastructures increasingly shape collective life.

There is a being who has lived among Persian-speaking people for centuries. She appears in stories, in birthing rooms, in people’s fears, in protective prayers, and, over the last few years, on online platforms. I want to take her seriously—not as a projection of the human mind, but as an agent who acts and is acted upon, a participant in worlds in flux. By tracing the networks of human and nonhuman relations that keep her alive, my goal is to let her unsettle my assumptions about the real and the imaginary, as well as disciplinary boundaries, and to see what becomes visible when we refuse to reduce folk figures to symbols or pathologies and instead follow their lives across centuries.

In Sync explores whether women living together might exhibit shared patterns of brain activity when their menstrual cycles align. While menstrual synchrony has long been debated - and often dismissed - in anthropology and biology, no one has asked whether synchrony could emerge at the level of neural rhythms. Drawing on research showing that people’s brainwaves can fall into rhythm during conversation, music, or shared attention, this project asks a provocative question: could hormonal cycles act as subtle conductors, shaping collective states of mind among women?

The study follows small groups of roommates over several months, combining portable EEG, cycle tracking, and shared‑activity sessions such as conversation, co‑presence, and collaborative art. Rather than seeking to “prove” synchrony, the project takes an exploratory, curiosity‑driven approach - looking for subtle harmonies that may arise when biological rhythms overlap. Scientific data will be paired with artistic translation, transforming brainwave patterns and hormonal fluctuations into visual installations that make invisible forms of connection perceptible.

At its core, In Sync challenges the assumption that the brain is an isolated organ. If neural synchrony linked to menstrual cycles exists, it suggests that women’s health may carry collective signatures; if it does not, the inquiry still reframes cycles as phenomena worthy of scientific and cultural attention. The project ultimately aims to reimagine women’s biology not as private or stigmatized, but as a potential site of resonance, creativity, and shared human experience

The legal system of the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) produced a vast corpus of court records. Close readings of these records have long provided us with important insights into the legal, social, and economic history of the empire. A comprehensive, holistic examination of large-scale court record datasets promises even more nuanced perspectives. However, such analysis has remained largely impractical thus far, as the volume of material far exceeds what can reasonably be examined through manual, labor-intensive research methods.

This project aims to generate empirical insights from a large body of Ottoman court records using computational approaches. The first stage involves creating a structured dataset of Ottoman court records suitable for computational analysis. The second stage applies computational methods, including large language models, to systematically extract and analyze patterns, trends, and insights from the data.

Bees are a system just as any other requiring metadata, processing and parsing to be useful. This is an observation first made by my dad, who has been a hobbyist beekeeper for as long as I can remember. He used to say he could “talk” to the bees, allowing them to meet him at his level of audacity, of emotion. If he panics, they panic. This is a unique form of indexation that disrupts an anthropomorphic assumption on systems engineering. Organization can become something boarder than language or symbols, incorporating the non-human code through human observations in biology. This opens questions of what counts as organization, who (or what) can generate an index and what forms of information processing take place beyond human infrastructures. Ultimately, my project invites a reconceptualization of metadata without the organization conventions we might be used to.

The rise of social media has left many young people feeling guilty and uneasy about their screen time, shaped both by external judgment from older generations and an internal sense that their attention and time are slowly being drained online. Yet despite being highly aware of these harms, many do not respond by substantially reducing device use. Instead, many adopt practices of carefully selecting what they watch, read, and engage with, curating their use of social media platforms in ways that feel intentional and “mindful.” Curation becomes a form of self-rescue: a way to create small pockets of meaning, identity, and symbolic order within an environment that feels overwhelming. This project explores how these practices function as survival strategies and performances of control in an age of digital overload. My objective is to read these behaviours as everyday strategies of agency and symbolic resistance to platforms, and to carry these insights into broader conversations about digital well-being and media policy.

Neural networks, the algorithms behind modern AI, rely on notoriously uninterpretable thought processes that emerge during training. In this project, I attempt to understand them through parameter-mapping sonification—representing numbers as sound through variations in pitch, loudness, and timbre. I exploit the fact that AI with repetitive structure, such as large language models, have internal values which map naturally to the time dimension. The resulting sounds may serve as new ways of conceptualizing and interpreting these complex systems.

Additionally, I question the perceived tradeoff of beauty and information content in sonifications. Human hearing is particularly good at recognizing patterns over time. Considering the prevalence of “beautiful” emergent patterns in nature, can a model’s optimality reveal itself in the form of aesthetic qualities?

In this project, I hope to thoroughly investigate the experience of wandering. An intentionally unintentional act allowing us to experience natural rhythms and the slow unfolding of space over time. Is wandering a mandatory feature of the human condition, and what happens when our ability to wander is impeded? Through exploring wandering through various methods, disciplines, and perspectives, I hope to create something that clearly communicates the wonder of wandering."

Investigating how media representations of the ocean enable exploitative military and environmental policies. The ocean we fear, desire, protect, and exploit is not the ocean itself. It is an image-ocean, a constructed artifact stitched together from tourism footage, climate graphics, colonial maritime paintings, sonar scans, and satellite spectra. Yet this media-ocean is so naturalized that we rarely notice its artificiality. The project asks: If Al can detect patterns across thousands of ocean images, can it expose the biases, blind spots, and aesthetic habits that shape our understanding of the sea? And can it help us encounter forms of oceanic being that exceed human comprehension altogether?

Ultimately, Ocean Anomalies investigates how Al can help us perceive the mediated oceans we have inherited and imagine stranger, more expansive oceans that might reshape our ecological imagination.

The climate crisis can be thought of as a crisis of the imagination; of how we conceptualize and narrate human systems and their possibilities. This project will bring different groups of people together (scientists, artists, organizers) to weave climate stories and map them into physical territories.I will design a series of workshops where climate scientists and artists to co-create pieces that portray climate science through diverse media.The broad objective of the project is to bridge climate science (both physical science and environmental theory) with climate action through artistic and community practices. How can we map climate stories into a territory?How can we apprehend climate science through soundscapes?How can a fact be emotionally felt, embodied?The question of how to narrate carefully and enact new world-narratives remains broad and present.

What is nostalgia? Are there any universal constants of individual experiences with nostalgia? Can you intentionally evoke feelings of nostalgia?

This project analyzes the phenomenon of nostalgia through an interdisciplinary lens and seeks integrate our own lived experiences with nostalgia within the typical academic definitions of it. I question our typical conceptions of nostalgia and explore alternative understandings of what nostalgia could be and could entail. By approaching nostalgia from a variety of perspectives, I then aim to create a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) that allows for players to have an intentional space to better understand and explore their own experiences of nostalgia.

Compounded from the Greek skeuos (’container’, ‘tool’) and morphē (’shape’), the term skeuomorph was originally coined in 1889 by amateur archaeologist Henry Colley March to describe ornaments derived from pre-existing human-made structures. Tools as early as The Hammer had to be iterated upon, becoming more effective at each step, while retaining some redundant feature/s of a previous evolution.

When it comes to human-AI alignment, skeumorphs can serve as useful material metaphors. Skeuomorphs have been embedded into networked technologies since the dawn of digital computing; the word ‘computer’ is itself a skeuomorphic term, evolving from human ‘computers’ who were adept at performing calculations by hand. At every stage, we must choose which technologies to keep, retain and discard in our individual lives, communities, and broader societies.

This project is an interactive drag-and-drop dress-up game that mimics classic 2D flash games from the early 2000s, itself an anachronistic depiction in today’s 5D media environment. Users are invited to virtually ‘align’ their avatar with a personalized set of technologies, from The Hammer to wired headphones to Neuralink. The aim is to invoke a reflection on past/present/future realities and (re)align temporal possibilities.

Breaking down machine learning systems to analyze the “how” of their ability to generate information and examining some of the assumptions that are implied by these ML architectures. Using this understanding I can treat each of these assumptions as their own alignment problem to help better approach the problem as a whole in a more nuanced way.

This project looks at ML use of prediction, feedback, correlation, identification capabilities, and biases. It focuses on the implications of all of these concepts on alignment at large.

My project reframes the AI alignment problem by situating it within two large-scale complex systems in which it is already inevitably embedded: planetary ecosystems and economic systems. Both human intelligence and AI operate within dynamic, self-organizing systems that generate their own patterns, constraints, and forms of instability. My aim is to understand both the structure and properties of the interacting systems and what agency and controllability mean for this new version of misalignment and what the solution would look like if there is any.

Investigating how AI-driven controlled environment agriculture systems can be aligned with priorities of localized food accessibility and equity, rather than luxury optimization.

While technical AI alignment focuses on ensuring that AI’s goals match human intent, this project aims to reframe alignment through AI’s societal deployment with human values and collective wellbeing. The goal of this project is to explore value alignment at the societal and policy level, specifically, ethical alignment, distributional alignment, and mission alignment.