I was the principal designer for Truss (and then program manager at the IRS) to create the IRS’ free tax filing solution Direct File in a massive and extremely fast-paced delivery for the 2024 tax season. In less than a year, we turned a memo into a highly anticipated product with exemplary accessibility. Initially, I was […]
I led design and research for Truss with the Department of Labor to deliver a pilot project to transform the unemployment insurance (UI) experience. Our work led to a 48-minute reduction in the time to apply for benefits (and probably helped NJ’s DOL commissioner keep his job). I also conducted design and accessibility reviews of […]
I led research for a $4.5M DevSecOps contract at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This allowed four critical infrastructure teams to increase adoption of devops tools and processes, better monitor their policy compliance, and respond faster to issues that previously took them much longer (if at all) to respond to. I also […]
I led research for and co-designed critical new functionality to the Department of Energy’s Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase), allowing biologists and bioinformaticians in national labs, universities, and companies to better upload and analyze data for genomics and bio-energy research, especially for metagenome analysis. Truss was hired primarily to improve product management, design, and agile software […]
If designers should know how their product may be engineered, they should also know how it may be productized.
When COVID-19 closures started in early 2020, San Francisco was unable to accommodate emergency construction for housing. In just four weeks, we put their building permitting process online! San Francisco’s permitting office was in the midst of transforming processing applications from a paper-based workflow to a digital-based workflow. A critical piece of this effort was […]
Research and design a blockchain-based logistics service at IBM
What’s a better way for folks to get involved in civic hacking?
Aligned our design, business, and user research to create an experience as innovative as it is delightfully effective.
Creating the UI for a secret blockchain service at IBM
I currently lead design research and contribute to interaction and interface design with IBM Blockchain Solutions for food safety applications.
Cross-portfolio research, design, and development
Leading the design and research on a new offering for infrastructure monitoring.
Design and research for a new key management service for IBM Cloud
In mid-2016, my team of five worked with IBM Q to design the in-person experience, then called the Quantum Experience, for visitors to the quantum computing facilities at the TJ Watson Research Center.
In 2015 I worked on a project we called Personalized Learning on the Cloud, which eventually found its way into the then-new offering Watson Education.
I wanted to create things to more easily start doing research with or reference for communicating research in a valuable way outside of the design researchers’ domain.
Part of being a design researcher is helping folks articulate their thoughts and sharing them with their team and stakeholders.
When I moved to NYC four months ago, I already sorely missed my civic hacking community I left behind in Austin. I only knew a few folks here, and there was a lot to get acquainted with. I did know at least one thing might be familiar: the local civic tech hack night. But I couldn’t find it.
We need to overhaul our project management. To get there, and to work in the open, let’s start by clearly defining the problem, the fundamental challenges, and our circumstances. At Open Austin, our projects are for public good and made in the open. Compared to many open source projects that are often for developers, by […]
When I joined the Open Austin leadership team, one of my first goals was to identify specific problems in our project management that might impact members’ ability or motivation to contribute. Early on we defined that problem to be that most project ideas are never completed. However, recently we took a good look at what we […]
Testing how people would perceive and use natural interaction affordances in a live remote collaboration space
User interaction in computing can be captured via many devices, most of them operating on a spatial metaphor (see appendix). In our collection of visual data analytics (VDA) literature this semester, interaction is most often captured in terms of cursor positions and clicks and text entry chains and buffers. This interaction is then often captured […]
Helping citizens prototype and actively build their future city
How things big and small can be made accessible through a common network and identifiable as an array of networked devices.
Community empowerment centered around permanently affordable housing
Modeling the design space of gleaning in order to better inform design decisions for food security and other civic services
Leading organizational efforts on projects, onboarding new members, and helping the organization succeed
I designed and built many mobile web applications as part of a suite of utilities that benefit the Georgia Tech community
Atlanta’s Prima printing company hired me to optimize their e-commerce business. Within months I became an indispensable tech lead to the whole company.
Designed and built the website for the U.S. division of the world’s largest producer of carpet and area rugs
Repackaging a rapid prototyping curriculum for new audiences
Interactive environment game for learning about bees’ waggle dance
Boilerplate code and design for creating mobile reporting apps
What happens to unsold or just-out-of-date food? Waste. Gleanhub could prevent this by connecting businesses to hungry people.
Voting access projects for Georgia
Here’s some things I’m deeply interested in but don’t go into detail describing elsewhere on my site: High-level The most general way I can describe what I like to do is thus: I like learning how things work together and communicating that with others. For the most part, I’m more interested in the high-level, […]
There are myriad ways to formalize, visualize, and query a dataset, but how well have these helped people make sense of it?
Helping communities in need of healthier food options to gain access
Increase and improve the transparency and fairness of democratic processes and institutions at home and abroad
We helped urban farmers and gardeners access and engage in the drafting process of Atlanta’s first Urban Agriculture Zoning Ordinance
How I helped the Friends of English Avenue to explore improvements to their community vegetable garden via digital media and interaction design.
A mobile app for United Way members to help facilitate the process of achieving their goals
A system model for more effective mobilization of resources and services for homelessness
Taking the rush out of the BART rush hour
Driveway helps drivers find a parking space when conventional options are extremely limited, and it helps space owners capitalize on their downtime.
How to make ad-hoc event coordination and individual assistance for attendees to be convenient and comfortable
Browser plugin that augments news articles with context for key concepts, events, and entities
An app that calculates how much you pollute on your daily commute
Plan.it is a daily organizer, streamlining teachers’ daily tasks such as registering absences, requesting teacher and testing materials, and recording notes.
This website tripled attendance to Georgia Tech’s MS-HCI career fair, Interactivity@GT. Since 2011, it has been a boon to the program’s job placement and reputation to both employers and prospective students.
If humans and animals are both able to play and be considered creative, then could we apply both concepts to artificial intelligence, as well? They are both largely circumstantial so that one would know it when they see it (Henricks, 2008) more easily than logically derive it (Graham, 2010). By better framing them in a […]
Urban planning over the last century has evolved from the idealism of a classical political utopia, to modern planning of “new towns,” to postmodern decentralization. Since the industrial revolution, urban centers have grown into sprawling metropolises as waves of people relocate from the countryside. As they grow and change, innumerable factors contribute to their growing […]
A hyperlocal social network for commuters, based on a mobile mesh network
VacantFinder is a visualization of vacant property data and reporting tool for civic engagement
Improve the interaction between freelancers and clients with automation and sexy data
Reintroducing opportunity to Ghana’s mining blights by enabling the public to report injustices, announce improvements, and invite international attention and investment
A community approach to helping people know, learn, and improve local food systems.
Get help! No, really. SkillTrader helps you find people with the skills you need to accomplish your goals.
As a sort of organizational nut who grew up playing many hours of Sim City and other simulation games, I naively wondered how I can so easily create an efficient virtual metropolis in Sim City, yet how real cities like Detroit can utterly fail. Did Detroit not have the kind of real-time information and analysis […]
VacantFinder is a result of my continuing work with the Friends of English Avenue organization. The City of Atlanta has allowed me to further investigate public data, specifically to solving issues of property abandonment. My previous project included a static map of properties reported in the Grove Park neighborhood and a public SMS service for […]
Recently, an Atlanta law firm sought an in-house courier to ferry documents between buildings, offered $10 an hour for the gig, and required the applicant to have a four-year degree from a university (Rampell). Regardless of the job’s technical requirements, the flood of applications had to be pared down to a single candidate eventually, and […]
For LMC 3256-F Spring 2013 – Qi Wang Introduction South Korea of the mid-1990s was in nothing short of a political revolution, with its former President Kim Young Sam targeting corruption and formulating Korea’s long-term globalization policy of segyehwa. This policy to unify Korean interests and pivot itself to the world economic stage included an […]
English Avenue is a neighborhood on the edge of downtown Atlanta, historic for its and past residents as well as its recent social decline. As a food desert and civically neglected neighborhood, its residents have faced declining resources and prosperity. Since 2008, the Friends of English Avenue organization and others have contributed to reinvigorating the […]
LMC 3252-F Spring 2013 – J. P. Telotte Battlestar Galactica’s 2003-2009 re-imagining of its original incarnation challenges what is means to be human, or a person, and what evil lurks in the hearts of humans and machines. This distinction between human and machine is the first challenge that the show presents to its audience, as […]
A gravestone is meant to answer the question, “Who is buried here?” Yasujiro Ozu requested his answer to be “mu.” This absence of an answer and denial of the question forces the audience to reconsider what is being asked by the subject and how the object of a scene is modified. Ozu perhaps influenced Edward […]
My work with English Avenue has broadened in the last few weeks since my previous paper, now including collaboration with the City of Atlanta. In late February, I took their concerns and goals to Govathon, a hackathon hosted by the city government to build digital services based on local needs in about 15 hours. At […]
Design is a way of organizing complexity or finding clarity in chaos. With his mise-en-scène and editing techniques, Ozu masters the design of filmed space and time, wrangling them from their reality as progenitors of chaos while preserving perfectly familiar characters and their lives as narrative. As an information and visual designer, I can relate […]
English Avenue is a neighborhood on the edge of downtown Atlanta, historic for its and past residents as well as its recent social decline. As a food desert and civically neglected neighborhood, its residents have faced declining resources and prosperity. Since 2008, the Friends of English Avenue organization and others have contributed to reinvigorating the […]
Through this food and civic media project studio, I have discovered methods of research through design as well as perspectives in food systems from other students’ projects.
Seeking education outside of formal institutions is gaining ground in both formal and non-formal education environments. It is also one of the strongest cases of popularizing and reducing the cost of education as American students face the highest tuition prices yet in higher education;# however, the dearth of informal sources using an experiential learning approach […]
About MediaWiki MediaWiki is the PHP framework of top-ten website Wikipedia. When founder Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia as an academic experiment the site was based on UseModWiki, a general-use wiki framework written in Perl, and not quite yet well-known. Once it found popularity via high-profile bloggers and news sites, their system was failing in overdrive, […]
Internet infrastructure currently operates in many networking modes; however, to most people, it is the web: a technology stack of files, their unique identifiers, and transfer protocols to serve to user agents. However, now that the web has evolved to include ubiquitous web services, search functions, and other indirect queries or manipulation, the the underlying […]
I have a problem with this book. The problem may be that it was written by a couple guys who know exactly what they’re talking about; that they have planned just how and when to answer questions they think the reader will ask; and that I’m expected to learn half the material in this class […]
In our class discussion of free will and determinism, I was frequently reminded of “god-of-the-gaps” arguments, where gaps in science are explainable by something supernatural.[1] Instead of science and religion, though, what if the concept of free will is the supernatural, the god, in the gaps of causality? Perhaps free will is a purely human […]
If “good design is good business” as former IBM President Tom Watson, Jr. said, and if that business is to encourage users to learn how to code, then good design of a medium must be a significant element in learning. Such a business is Codecademy: a reward-based programming education website with a fairly responsive and […]
This research analyzes Internet users learning skills and concepts more effectively on their own time, often in order to accomplish a specific task, via online resources often generated by non-educators. This trend is particularly evident in computing areas like digital media and computer science, where real-life skills can be trained actively or passively, even remediated […]
My goal for my college education is to learn the foundation and current scope of work in improving how humans interact with computers, how friendly they can be with each other, and how to bring the computer from a thing to be learned and trained for to a simple extension of its user. In essence, […]
of the myriad lessons from this class I have taken is how to best design an experience for a program’s user. Two languages I’ve learned for projects have been more keen on developing my ability to author such an experience: Inform and AIML. Both allow the user to explore stories, and thus making the experience […]
Computationally. ELIZA and its contemporaries are programs that take textual input (natural language) and produce relative, natural language output that only makes sense if it either directly references the user’s previous statement as another statement or poses a question that is at least indirectly related. Removing the textual and language aspect of this model, it […]
Over the last two decades of extremely rapid, silently revolutionary development of the user-touser networking platform that is collectively referred to as the internet, or “Web 2.0,” productivity and even a nation’s economy is dependent1 on how its users and contributors continue to develop it. Businesses like Behance LLC, for example, who offers three main […]
Tools and productivity artifacts developed in just the last decade for digital art are absolutely new media that still mimic its original counterparts, paper and pen. While an eminent figure like Theodore Nelson may see this as baffling and counter-revolutionary, it is more of a transitional phase in art history. If art is to express […]
Springtime Atlanta is heyday for comics, with Momocon just last month, Free Comic Book Day next month. At Tech, local artists and students met at the first Annual Atlanta Comics Symposium to host panels on comics from their nature and creation to the industry’s ambivalent future. Programs from Georgia Tech and University of Florida […]
First let me say that never before have I felt my personal space so invaded than as I attempt to perform (what would in my usual life be un-commented-on) actions. Perhaps I do just want to jump without friend computer condescendingly suggest hopping around the dungeon, expecting itself to applaud, or promoting me to the […]
Not every sandwich can be called worthy of anything but a mindless pile of meat, cheese, and bread, but when a wise cook knows what they’re doing it can yield a sandwich that’s worth a few more of your laboratory-slaving dollars. It can yield a sandwich that’s worth being called a “sammich.” So before you […]
In the quaint neighborhood of Grant Park, a recently gentrified neighborhood where quaint houses are still being restored and graffiti is a legitimate form of business advertisement, restaurants here seem to follow a rustic design and a similar class of food. Ria’s Bluebird, a daily breakfast and lunch place, offers one of the best Southwestern […]
Too often, Tech students limit their food options to standard on-campus fare without realizing there are dozens of restaurants on the Tech perimeter. The lunchtime hamburger should be a sufficient reason to jump just off campus to grab some good grub during those solid eight-hour class days. While making your way to labs and classes […]
Midtown’s stretch of Peachtree Street NE is a rich belt of fine restaurants, bars, and original eateries. Situated on the north end of the belt inside the W Hotel, Spice Market offers an intriguing experience and cuisine but doesn’t quite substantiate its price level. Spice Market’s two key points of interest are the “tasting menu” […]
Nearly every city, metropolis or nowheresville in the Southeast includes some variety of barbecue. Atlanta, with its established wealth of cuisine, hosts a bluesy brand of barbecue. Though barbecue restaurants are spread across the city, the best are usually on the east side of Interstate 85. This week, we found our ribs and blues at […]
If there is any kind of practical inspiration for college students, it is seeing the success of a student with his or her own self-launched career. In this case, it is a recent Tech graduate who won the 2010 InVenture Prize in Spring 2010 and has taken that victory far beyond a competition. The athletic […]
Oh, the humble coffee house. From the corporate hegemony of Starbucks to the lowly carts that dot the city streets, coffee shops come as varied as the roasted bean juice they serve. Their caffeine-deprived patrons flock morning, noon and night to these establishments to drink, converse and thrive amid the buzz of grinders and the […]
My most recent webdev project was the design for the Interactivity @GT 2011 event website. Thanks to Matt Wilczynski for the back end work. Interactivity is a yearly exhibition of projects by graduate students in Georgia Tech’s Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Media programs for the benefit of industry representatives. Organized by the GVU, Interactivity is […]
Buford Highway continues to host Atlanta’s finest (even in the recent hothlanta conditions), with Panahar Bangladeshi and Indian Cuisine as one of the best of its kind around. Panahar keeps a low profile as an unassuming, unique experience into the rarely ventured cuisine and culture of Bangladesh. Actually to that note, their prime cuisine, Bangladeshi, […]
As the Kyoto Protocol was finalized and on its way to be ratified by the U.S., legislators had already decried it as dead on arrival, citing conflicts with existing laws and domestic markets. Even now, communication is breaking down and forecasts are less than favorable in pre-Copenhagen talks. However, zooming in to a single company, […]
(Written primarily by Michael Valente) This week we visited one of three Pure Taqueria locations in Inman Park—one of Atlanta’s most fiercely dedicated communities and home to a myriad of small shops, restaurants and, of course, the glorious hipsters. The first note we made as we walked up to Pure Taqueria in the cold, drizzly […]
Driving through Chamblee area Atlanta in the rain around 9 p.m. looking for an allegedly delicious-as-it-is-dingy Chinese cafeteria may not sound like a prime Monday night excursion. However, we found that if the Atlanta Chinatown Square were to transplant itself to someplace like the Varsity, no Tech student would be spared from its slew of […]
Tech students and faculty brought the state’s major movers and changers together at the fifth annual Legislative Roundtable this Tuesday, Nov. 16, to make headway in science and technology’s incorporation into state and local public policy. The Office of Policy Analysis and Research (OPAR) of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) coordinated the event with […]
A significant portion of humanitarian problems arise from social inequity, and the greatest problem in determining how to achieve social equity is how to recognize it. Equity is the logos to the pathos of equality, which people the world over have fought fervently for, taking for example Jamaica’s independence and decline because of social inequity […]
Does 381SAFETY964 mean anything? One must be slightly familiar with pigpen ciphers and pop culture icons, or else the annual College Puzzle Challenge might be a little traumatic. On Nov. 6, students at Tech and 26 other American and Canadian universities, such as M.I.T and the University of Waterloo, competed to solve as many of […]
Tech is among the highest-rated universities in the Sustainable Endowment Institute’s latest annual College Sustainability Report Card, one of the most-participated-in sustainability rankings in the U.S. Each year, the report card grades participating universities on sustainability-related features of administration, energy use, food, recycling, buildings, student involvement, transportation and finances. This year’s report card grades Tech […]