About Me

Hi, I’m a Cognitive Science PhD candidate at UC San Diego, working in the ProtoLab and the Design Lab. My research explores the intersection of Social Computing, Creativity, and Design Cognition, advised by Dr. Steven Dow. I draw methods and theories from the human-centered design process, psychology, and human-machine intelligence to build interactive digital tools that facilitate creative content production. I have strong interests in understanding and utilizing higher-order thinking skills (i.e., analysis and synthesis) by leveraging the internet to discover creative examples, crowdsourcing to embed additional design insights, and machine intelligence to present examples that increase the opportunity for creativity. In the past, I’ve built interactive example repositories based on community-sourced open ideas as technology probes to study human creative behaviors, such as idea brainstorming.

I received my B.S. degree in Psychology from University of Wisconsin-Madison with Honors in the Liberal Arts and did a Master program in Information Science at Cornell University.

My thesis explores pedagology benefits for individuals who participate in community-driven design and dual benefits for communities to harness the crowd activities. Please feel free to contact me if you want to hear more : )

Selected Research

Investigating how social computing systems can optimize real-time creative collaboration in small teams or with crowds by leveraging collective knowledge.

Design Multi-faceted Fine-grained Example Navigation

Creative ideas are often remixing results of existing concepts. We aim to build a tool that helps people improve ideas via remixing their own designs and those with other existing ideas. By showing associations between ideas, we hope people would foresee the recombinational results and make the optimal decisions on remixing.
React Flask MongoDB GPT-3 Interview Quantitative Crowdsourcing

Support Ideator-Centered Example Exploration CSCW'21

IdeateRelate provides peronalized adaptive visualizations of existing examples in response to designers' ideas. We found that IdeateRelate users leveraged both semantic and categorical similarity, curated a more similar set of examples, and adopted more language from examples into their iterated ideas (without negatively affecting the overall novelty).
d3.js Flask SQLAlchemy SpaCy Btw-Subject Expr

Leverage Crowdsourcing for Creative Interpretations HCOMP'20

We first derived a schema for making sense of design examples and used this to organize metadata around a set of examples, and then conducted an experiment to explore whether and how metadata provided by others within this schema influences participant's interpretations around the design example. We found that using schema along with crowd-produced metadata helped crowd workers contribute additional interpretations that are both on-topic and diverse.
MTurk Survey Crowdsourcing lmer

Harness Community Power for Civic Issues CSCW'18

This project is led by Dr. Brian McInnis. We present an analysis of a two-month civic design competition focused on transportation challenges in a major US city. We examine how the event structure, discussion platform, and participant interactions affected how a community collectively discussed design constraints and proposals.
Field Study Slack Qualitative Quantitative Mixed-methods Analysis

Engaging Community in Data Collection and Research CSCW'17

This project is led by Dr. Eric Baumer and describes the use of the Delphi method as a means of incorporating study participants into the processes of data analysis and interpretation. As a case study, it focuses on perceptions about use and non-use of the social media site Facebook.
R Large-Scale Survey Focus Group Interview Delphi

Updates

Nov '21@HCOMP 2021: CrowdCamp on Nov 14th, Present a WIP on Nov 15th
Oct '21@CSCW 2021: Present IdeateRelate paper in the Coordination and Collaboration session
Jun '21@Social Computing Systems Summer Camp (Virtual)
May '21Student Volunteer @ CHI 2021 virtual
WIPUpdates work in progress
Nov '18CSCW 2018 3 days @Jersey City, NJ
Jun '18Work on improving Autodesk's conversational AI (AVA) for 10 weeks as a summer intern.
Apr '18CRA-W Grad Cohort Worshop 3 days @SF
Apr '18I'll be joining Autodesk's Machine Assistance team as a summer intern in their SF downtown office. Super excited!
Jan '18Second quarter begins.
I am TA'ing for COGS 122, a start-up studio class, where I coach 4 student teams to pivot ideas and launch their start-ups.
Sept '17I am TA'ing for COGS 122, a project-based class that students design solutions for a civic design competition, D4SD (Design for San Diego). I am also coordinating the community of participants from the city for this competition.