CS PhD Student at the University of Chicago researching HCI, childrens' privacy, and AI safety.
What students taught us about governing AI before anyone had a policy - When we started talking to high school students about ChatGPT, schools were still making up the rules in real time. That turned out to be the whole point. Our paper, Investigating ChatGPT Usage in High Schools: Student Perspectives on Policy and Practice, presented at FAccT 2026, looks at how students...
GitHub Classroom is being sunset. If you taught with it, you already know; if you didn’t, the short version is that the tool a lot of us used to hand every student their own repo for an assignment is going away. There are alternatives. I’m sure some of them are...
I am on the job market. Not right now — I finish my PhD in 2027 — but soon enough that I needed to start building the spreadsheet that everyone says you need and nobody actually maintains past month two. You know the one. A tab for opportunities. A tab...
I wanted a simple printable weekly habit tracker. This turned out to be much harder to find than expected. Most of the free templates I came across were either: overly complicated, built around app ecosystems, visually cluttered, or hidden behind paywalls and signup forms. So I made two .docx templates...
Understanding People’s Emotions & Help Needs During Financial Scams - When we hear about online scams, we often focus on financial loss. Our paper, “It didn’t feel right but I needed a job so desperately”: Understanding People’s Emotions and Help Needs During Scams, looks beyond that outcome. It examines why people engage with specific scams and what kinds of support...
One day after futzing about with my Proxmox server I restarted it and noticed that it would not resolve the network name. However it was on the network and I could ping it from another machine. These are the steps I did on the physical machine to diagnose and fix...
Cory Doctorow’s framework of enshittification describes a reliable platform lifecycle: serve users first, then squeeze them to serve business customers, then extract value from everyone until the whole thing decays. I have spent the last few years studying K-12 EdTech from a privacy and HCI perspective, and the pattern fits...
I’ve been giving Logseq a try, especially as a daily task manager. One thing that piqued my interest was the Task Management Shortcuts plugin because it adds a richer set of task states than Logseq provides out of the box. Instead of the default TODO → DONE flow, the plugin...
Under 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), copyright in an original work attaches automatically the moment that work is fixed in a tangible medium. A student submits an essay. At that instant, they are a copyright holder. The exclusive rights enumerated under 17 U.S.C. § 106 belong to them: reproduction, distribution, preparation...
Insights from Our Multi-Year Research Project - Automating Privacy Policy Analysis: Insights from Our Multi-Year Research Project Privacy policies are essential in defining how our data is used and protected, yet their complexity often makes them inaccessible to the average person and difficult to analyze for researchers. To address this challenge, my team and I embarked on...
In the summer of 2021, I wrote a blog post on how to make Likert-scale charts in R because I just wanted future-me to have a clear reference instead of spending another afternoon endlessly poking around stackoverflow for how to center diverging bars. That post ended up getting a lot...
Serving as the Paper Chair’s Assistant for CHI 2025 was an eye-opening experience. Seeing firsthand how a conference of this scale comes together gave me a new level of appreciation for the effort involved. CHI has always been a conference I enjoy attending, and it consistently publishes excellent research, so...
Set Up a Daemon-ized Bash Script to Automate File Scanning and Ensure Real-Time Protection - Keep your downloads folder safe (on your unix machine)! I developed a Bash script that automatically monitors my Downloads folder, updates ClamAV, and scans any new or modified files. This setup is great for ensuring that potentially harmful files are detected before I interact with them. The script can…
In a distant kingdom, a group of royal architects was tasked with designing a new marketplace for the townsfolk. The king wanted it to be the grandest, most efficient marketplace ever built. However, gathering input from the townspeople was a daunting task. The architects would need to travel to every...
A Guide For Tech Novices - Below are the steps I took to get MacOS ready to run message-book – bkettle’s excellent iMessage –> PDF book program. I was running this whole thing on someone else’s Mac who does not code so I had no preinstalled programs to rely upon. Since I had to work from...
Creating small tools that perform simple tasks to enhance the lives of others can be surprisingly rewarding. Let me tell you a short encounter that led to the creation of my dta to csv repository. […] Recently, a colleague of mine found herself staring at a .dta file, tasked with...
What You Need To Know Transitioning From R - Introduction This post is the mirror image of an R primer I wrote for people coming from other languages. If you already know R and find yourself needing Python, this is for you. The usual reasons: you want seaborn for plotting, or you’ve hit a wall where the machine learning...
What We Found About Privacy and Security in K–12 Schools When we started our research on technology in schools, we knew educational tools were everywhere. What we didn’t know was how deeply they might expose students’ personal information. Our study, Uncovering Privacy and Security Challenges in K–12 Schools, presented at...
Notes from the front - openai command not found I have been working on fine tuning GPT3 for a research project recently. Things have been going smoothly until I opened up my terminal today and tried to finetune a new model with the standard openai api fine_tunes.create -t <TRAIN_FILE_ID_OR_PATH> -m <BASE_MODEL> . I got the...
Pointers On The Hidden Curriculum - This blog post was adapted from a talk I gave during October of 2021. Literal books have been written on how to succeed in grad school. Having read several of them – and a healthy dose of blog posts – it can be overwhelming. This post is a distillation of...