Hello!

I'm currently working on a PhD in philosophy and an MS in computer science.

As a philosopher, I work primarily in philosophy of science and philosophy of language, though my work also touches on topics in metaphysics and epistemology. I am, in a word, interested in the rich variety of ways that we understand, discuss, and interact with what there is: in our scientific practices and in ordinary life.

I have greatly enjoyed my computer science graduate coursework and research. I have especially enjoyed studying theory of computation, algorithms, and other abstract, mathematical topics in CS. My main research interests in CS are, though, machine learning and the ethics of AI. In fact, AI ethics is one of my two foremost research interests, alongside philosophy of science.

In more ways than one, I work at the intersection of philosophy and computer science. First, as mentioned, I am actively researching and writing in AI ethics. Second, I have multiple active projects in digital humanities. Third, I have used data science techniques to help resolve philosophical issues.

In the summer of 2024, I will be working with the Responsible AI team at Humana. In the summer of 2023, I got married and we spent some time in Hawaii. During the three summers before that, I worked with a handful of data science education teams at MathWorks, the company which is rightly famous for their products, MATLAB and Simulink.

Dissertation (Philosophy)

My dissertation is about natural kinds. I mostly engage with contemporary philosophy of science. Broadly speaking, I aim to understand how and why scientists employ kind concepts. My dissertation also engages with philosophy of language: especially about names, reference, and so-called ordinary language. At the center of my dissertation lies my dissatisfaction with both Kripke-Putnam essentialism and with the more recently popular theory of natural kinds, property cluster theory. I think that our practices and thought involving natural kinds are richer than is suggested by either of these popular pictures.

Masters Thesis (Computer Science)

I am working on the theory and ethics of explainability and interpretability of machine learning (including deep learning). There is much extant discussion of these issues in both philosophy and computer science, but the most central terms are often understood very differently by different parties. I am exploring the possibility that we can have all we need, for informed ethical and political discourse about AI technologies, by just focusing on the complexity of whatever AI models are at issue. I am also seeking a careful, informed account of what makes a model more complex, where 'complexity' is a understood to be ethically or politically relevant.


Curriculum Vitae

Updated March 2024