I am a human-computer interaction researcher, with a focus on creativity and writing assistants. My thesis focused on how creative writers make use of language models, but recently I've become more interested in the ethics of data collection, how to create and support community models (i.e. models created outside of and in resistance to corporate models), and the impact of langauge models on ownership, agency, and learning.
I'm currently a Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. Prior to that I was Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science with Elena Glassman at Harvard University, as well as a Fellow with the Library Innovation Lab. I completed my PhD at Columbia University with Lydia Chilton in 2022. I have been supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and an Amazon Research Award.
I'm also a poet and essayist. My first book of poetry, The Anxiety of Conception (Nothing to Say Press, 2025), came out this year. In 2020 I was named a Brooklyn Poets Fellow and was a 2020-2021 CultureHub Resident Contributing Writer. I was a Writer in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center in 2022. I used to be on the editorial team for taper, a literary magazine for small computational pieces; now I co-edit Ensemble Park with Kyle Booten, a literary magazine that collects experiments in human-computer co-writing.
I used to build machines and sensors. I hold a Bachelors of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT, where I recieved the Carl G. Sontheimer Prize for Excellence in Innovation and Creativity for my work on soft robotics. I worked at two startups: Rest Devices (we built baby monitors) and Soofa (we built smart city furniture).
To contact me, email me at myfirstname.mylastname @sydney.edu.au
See my CV, Semantic Scholar, or Google Scholar for a full list of publications.
I am broadly interested in creative writing and language models. In particular I want to understand how computer-generated text impacts the writing process, and how it can support writerly values like iteration, exploration, agency, joy, and learning. Recently, I have become interested in the ethics of data collection, and how we might create language models that support writers and writerly values by, e.g., building community models trained on consensually shared data, or showing connections between model outputs and the writing most influential in creating those outputs. I'm also doing work on creative ownership and how and why AI systems impact ownership.
I would love to do more work on technical innovations in language models to make them weirder, smaller, more personal, and more private creative artifacts; study and surface how different kinds of training data create stylistically different outputs; and produce empircal evidence for how to teach writing with (or without) language models.
Select publications:
During my PhD, I was always looking for people's materials (thesis proposal, fellowship application essays, etc.) to use as examples, particularly anyone whose thesis was similar to mine either in content/subject area or form. Here are my own materials, for those looking for examples:
Application for NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2017) [personal essay] [research plan]
Application to Columbia University PhD program (2017) [statement of purpose]
Candidacy (2020) [list of papers] [presentation]
Thesis Proposal (2021) [original document] [revision]
Dissertation (2022) [dissertation] [presentation]
Forthcoming...
The Anxiety of Conception (Nothing to Say, 2025) is a book of 'dynamic' poetry in which the 217 prose poems I wrote over the course of conception, pregnancy, brith, and postpartum are dynamically rearranged in every printing to represent the mixing and remixing of memories.
Ensemble Park collects literary experiments in human-computer co-writing. Neither completely computer-generated nor absent of computational intervention, the works explore how machines may enter the literary process iteratively, and how literary artifacts may be changed by such iterations. Co-edited with Kyle Booten, Ensemble Park comes out in print and as a pdf.
I have created some freely available writing tools. These tools range from a simple website that will rearrange the lines of your poem, to custom generated thesauruses based on different styles and topics. Poetry is often about seeing the familiar anew, and computation provides a way to interact with your own writing in curious and foreign ways.
My poems, essays, and small computational pieces have been published in a variety of venues, as well as been performed live. I'm interested in computation as a way to deepen how we can experience literature, but I'm also invested in writing as a manual, human process. When computation enters my work, I prioritize the beauty of language over the concept of the algorithm, and in this way I often feel more aligned with the concrete poets than the computational ones. I love the browser as a place of play, and see websites as a medium worth taking seriously.
I curate a list of publications that accept computational poetry.
Last updated Jul, 2025