ABOUT

My PhD research advanced our understanding of social conversational agents - how human-agent dialogues can be shaped with design, and how the resulting discourse can be meaningfully measured. 

I earned my PhD from Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (2011-2017) with Dr. Justine Cassell. 

My work advanced our understanding of how human-agent dialogue systems are able to serve as learning partners, language models, and ideological mirrors - and the ways in which subtle design decisions shape the magnitude and direction of their influence. We designed, deployed, and evaluated social conversational agents as educational technologies, design probes, and experimental platforms that not only introduced new axes of consideration for conversational design, but further revealed the specific social and cognitive mechanisms that drove these relationships. 

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(This is very relevant for LLMs. Let's talk about it.)

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