An Update

January 10, 2016

Here's what I've been up to this past semester:

On December 15, I defended my PhD thesis, entitled "Language Technologies for Understanding Law, Politics, and Public Policy." I'm grateful to everyone in the Berkman community for their support during these dissertation-writing months. In particular, Ethan Zuckerman was one of my thesis committee members and gave my work a very close reading that really helped shape and strengthen the document.
The course I co-taught in Fall 2014, Principles and Practice of Assistive Technology, is now online on MIT OpenCourseWare under a Creative Commons license. Last fall, we had 11 teams of 3-4 students work in collaboration with a person with a disability in the Boston area to develop customized assistive technologies, from 3D-printed cochlear implant covers to accessible tablet-based apps for speech synthesis and caregiver assistance. To be clear, this isn't an online course; rather, it has the course materials and supplementary descriptions, interviews, and videos that describe how to implement such a course in a physical setting. It's been very exciting, and positively unexpected, to find this experience in assistive technology come up in conversations at Berkman, especially about accessibility, ethics, and inclusive innovation.

Currently and beyond:

I'm continuing work with Finale Doshi-Velez on discovering and characterizing repeated text in large document collections -- I presented this work in my thesis and plan to turn this into a machine learning publication.
I'm preparing to present parts of my work to the City of Boston's Citywide Analytics team and the University of Maine's School of Law this month.
I'm actively exploring what's next! After focusing on a dissertation, it's been fascinating to talk to people working on so many different projects and fields in data science, industry-scale machine learning systems, crowdwork and artificial intelligence, civic technology, and open government. I've cast a pretty wide net and have been learning about possibilities in academic settings, industry research, product teams, government, non-profits, and both startups and large tech companies. I feel like I've learned a lot along the way and would be happy to share with the Berkman community; as well, I'm quite open to new short- and long-term opportunities, particularly in Boston but also beyond, so don't hesitate to get in touch!

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