Research Interests
In a broad sense, my research looks at emerging technologies and studies what are their harms and how can we mitigate these harms. I am interested in anything and everything related to the ethics of technologies, how technologies can harm users (or prevent harms for users), and how to help designers and legislators better anticipate the harms of the technologies they are creating.
Past topics of interest include:
- Looking at VR advertising to understand how it can be used to manipulate users.
- Examining and determining the privacy risks of new software systems.
- Designing new privacy controls for IoT devices.
- Understanding how developers view the harms of the software they create.
Currently, I am interested in exploring:
- Extended Reality technologies
- Brain computer interfaces
- Ethical impact assessments and ethical development frameworks
- Scenario construction, speculative design, and design fiction.
- Figuring out how (and if) to incorporate ethics into CS education.
Beyond looking at technologies, I am also interested in studying academia and how academics do research. Work includes a look at how academics study and analyze privacy policies, and a position piece on how and why overwork negatively impacts academia. In looking to the future, I am interested in expanding this scope to understand what are challenges that researchers face when conducting research, and what can be done to support them.
With that in mind, I do have very broad research interests. Anything relating to technology, research, and ethics fascinates me.
For an overview of my research, feel free to look through my publications.
Research Methods
I am open to a wide variety of methods. Some of the methods I have used in the past include:
- Qualitative Interviews
- Content Analysis
- Design fiction
- Speculative Design
- Impact Assessment
- Surveys
- Experiments
But I am always looking to learn and use new methods!
Research Principles
More than topics, what are my research principles? What broad ideas do I keep in mind when carrying out research?
High quality research: First and foremost, the idea is to make high quality research. Ensure we are using the right methods and doing them rigorously, in the right manner, and get results.
Ambitious, but not toxic: Ambition is a good thing. It pushes us to make high quality work and to push ourselves to create better outcomes. But too much ambition is a bad thing. It can push people to unhealthy extremes, from unhealthy schedules and lack of work-life balance, to unprodcutive stress and anxiety if a paper does not get in. So I push for high quality research, but not at the expense of those doing the research.
Research first, publications second: Publications are an important part of research: but too often, academics focus first on where they want to publish, and then retroactively construct a study for publishing. I take the opposite approach. First let us do good research: high quality research that matters and is important. Then we can focus on an appropiate venue for it.
Spend the time needed to get it right: A delayed study is eventually good, but a bad study is bad forever. This is an adage first used to describe videogame development, but it holds true for research aswell. I would rather have a research study be delayed if it means doing things well and right, rather than rushing to publish as much as possible and take several bad shortcuts along the way.