An Empirical Study of Cognition and Theatrical Improvisation
I was a research assistant in Dr. Brian Magerko’s Adam Lab during my time at Georgia Tech. Our project involved studying theatrical improv actors to learn what strategies they employ when making decisions about how to progress a scene. This research, in turn, would lay groundwork in developing artificial intelligence systems that could use similar improvisation strategies. This paper was accepted at the ACM Creativity and Cognition conference in 2009.
Detecting and Resolving Informational Uncertainty in Complex Domains
In undergrad at Pitt, I did research with Dr. Christian Schunn in understanding what techniques problem solvers in complex domains, like naval weather forecasting, fMRI analysis, and remote planetary science, used to resolve uncertainty in the information they were analyzing. This paper was accepted at CogSci 2007.
The work I did here was critical in leading me to the field of user experience design, through a tangential anecdote Dr. Schunn told about how the naval weather forecasters did their work. Incidentally enough, he noted that forecasters that were using newly installed computer systems were actually performing worse than those using the traditional reams-of-paper-on-a-wall approach. This struck me as pretty curious, as you’d think having a computer at your disposal would make the process easier; that curiosity led me to find out about human-computer interaction and eventually study it at Georgia Tech.
