Writing ✍️
Senior Honors Thesis: “Deploying AI Systems Responsibly: Evaluating Explainable AI Techniques for Trustworthy Decision Support” 📚
As part of a select group through the McDonough School of Business Senior Honors Thesis program, I had the opportunity to conduct original research under the guidance of a faculty advisor. Motivated to combine my business curriculum with my interest in AI development, I worked with Professor Robin Dillon-Merrill to research methods that could help increase adoption of AI technologies in business and social contexts.
In this paper, I highlight the “black box” system design as a bottleneck for AI adoption and evaluate explainable AI methodologies as solutions to algorithmic trust and safety issues. I conduct a lab simulation experiment to show that in use cases involving high risk and social costs, explainable AI can improve the performance, learning, and understanding of algorithms by decision makers. I successfully defended this thesis in front of a panel of professors on April 26th, 2023.
Hoyalytics Medium Blog 📝
In order to drive awareness for analytics initiatives and help people start their learning journey in data science, I launched Hoyalytics’ Medium blog and served as its Chief Editor. I often contributed to our newsletter to provide commentary on current events in data science, which can be sampled below.
“Another One — Sanofi Signs Billion Dollar AI Drug Discovery Deal with Insilico Medicine”
Quote: “Think of the implications of such an achievement: if we can map the human genome and predict molecular interactions in computers, we can solve complex biological problems, finding cures and treatments for disease at the speed of computation.”
“Imagine If You Will… The Promise of Using Synthetic Data for Video Data Sets”
Quote: “The upshot of such a project is that researchers can not only avoid the large costs associated with collecting video data, but also mitigate the ethical and privacy concerns of using videos of real people.”
“Can Analytics Tell Us If A Player Is ‘Clutch’?”
Quote: “Therefore, the player who is consistently clutch does not exist, and delivering in such moments lacks predictability because the events are so small in sample size.”
“The White House Releases Guiding Principles for an AI Bill of Rights”
Quote: “In the US, this is a big first step towards increasing the transparency of AI systems and ensuring that the necessary checks are in place to prevent harmful outcomes for society.”
“‘Simon Says…’: Google and Everyday Robots Pair Language and Image Models with Reinforcement Learning to Help Caregiver Robots Understand Your Directions”
Quote: “Then, just like you would train a pet, researchers let robots perform tasks, correcting them along the way and “rewarding” the robot if the task was completed successfully. This type of learning is called reinforcement learning, where you set up some rules in a program, and all that you need to tell a computer is that it should try to maximize a “reward,” which is what you assign if a computer produces your desired response.”
“Passing the Torch: PyTorch Is Now Part of the Linux Foundation”
Quote: “With the move to LF (Linux Foundation), PyTorch will establish and codify its organization and procedures, which will improve trust in the platform’s use for large-scale projects.”
“How Meta Is Using AI to Understand How the Brain Works”
Quote: “If researchers are able to build accurate models of the brain’s pathways for recognizing speech, they can understand how our brains decode speech, which has revolutionary potential for solving speech and communication impairments.”
The Georgetown Voice: “The MLB Has a Competitive Balance Issue, and It’s Related to Money and Payroll Inequalities” ⚾
Published in The Georgetown Voice, a student-run newspaper, I examine the relationship between MLB team wins and payrolls from 2000-2019. In the article, I highlight the systemic inequalities that prevent small market teams from competing with large market teams, diving into performance and payroll data in addition to analysis of the MLB collective bargaining agreement. I then elucidate strategic patterns of successful small market franchises, and I make policy prescriptions for MLB franchise tags, stringent luxury taxes, and a playoff format redesign.