My research examines how people navigate, make sense of, and create with large-scale information. I develop interactive systems and computational techniques to support knowledge workers, primarily science journalists, in their sensemaking and creative work. I also study patterns and biases in cultural production, particularly how narratives reflect and reinforce social values. Here are the major projects I’ve worked on:
This project synthesizes across design projects in journalism and HCI to extend value-sensitive design theory into the journalism domain. It maps out the design landscape, provides exemplars and evaluation criteria grounded in domain values, and reveals how value trade-offs often emerge from differing stakeholder priorities. The work offers designers a critical perspective on power dynamics in sociotechnical systems and opportunities to challenge them through design.
Artifacts: DIS 2025 paper (Best Paper Honorable Mention)
This project investigates how generative AI impacts journalists’ agency, creative control, and professional identity during science news writing. Through four design concepts—Pitch Critic, Pitch Assist, Pitch Refine, and Pitch Suggest—offering varying degrees of AI involvement in source discovery, idea generation, text generation, and editing, I studied how journalists negotiate boundaries with AI. The research reveals that writing isn’t merely a task to be optimized but a critical thinking mechanism central to professional identity, leading journalists to value AI for feedback while resisting features that would short-circuit their creative exploration.
Artifacts: CHI 2025 workshop paper • Design concepts
This ongoing project examines how making field-level journalism dynamics visible affects individual practice. News Compass calculates the fidelity of existing news coverage to source research, tracks social media engagement patterns, and classifies news angles in existing coverage. Through a two-week deployment with practicing journalists, this work investigates whether surfacing collective practice impacts creativity, conformity, and idea exploration, and whether it can lead to more original, high-quality reporting in the public interest.
Artifacts: Interactive system • Paper under review for IUI 2025
This project operationalizes news values—factors like social impact, controversy, and timeliness—to help science journalists filter and navigate the overwhelming landscape of new research publications. I built a crowdsourced dataset of newsworthiness ratings, trained predictive models, and developed techniques for matching papers to news outlets based on past coverage. The project culminated in the arXiv Lead Recommender, an interactive tool that enables journalists to explore research abstracts using newsworthiness scores, outlet fit scores, and AI-generated news angles while maintaining their editorial judgment.
Artifacts: CSCW 2024 paper • CSCW 2022 paper • Blog post • Interactive system
Working with journalism practitioners through workshops at SRCCON 2023 and C+J 2024, I developed evaluation frameworks that go beyond technical performance metrics to assess whether AI systems align with journalism’s professional values. These frameworks integrate concrete task performance with abstract professional values like transparency, independence, and public interest, providing newsrooms with actionable guidance for AI adoption decisions.
Artifacts: CHI 2024 workshop paper • Blog post • Aspen Digital talk slides • SRCCON workshop slides
For more details on any of these projects, feel free to reach out or check out my publications.