About Me
I am a first year PhD student based in Arizona State University’s Department of Psychology working under Dr. Athena Aktipis. I study the dynamics of complex collective systems and the large-scale aggregate patterns of behavior that emerge from the small-scale interactions between their constituent components.
During my undergraduate education I studied the dynamics between individuals during emergency evacuations, which first inspired me to examine the dynamics of collective behavior from a macro perspective. I pursued this particular angle on the subject further after graduating, spending a year working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on disaster preparation and response through the AmeriCorps FEMA Corps program. After many years leading production teams in the manufacturing sector, I've returned to academia to expand on my initial fascination and dive head-first into the study of complex collective systems more broadly.
Research
Current Focus
Complex collective systems are all around us, from the flocks of birds in the sky, to the crowd of fans at a concert, all the way down to the rhinovirus pathogens that inconvenience us every winter when we catch the common cold and feel cruddy for a few days. The rapid advancement in artificial intelligence technologies over the past number of years presents a historic opportunity for the collectives researcher to examine systems of an entirely novel character, both in collectives made up strictly of artificial intelligences themselves and in hybrid collectives made up of humans in interaction with artificial intelligences.
Ongoing Work
- The development of benchmark metrics to measure large language models' understanding of the biological principles of division of labor and its ability to use them effectively in its interactions with users. This is part of a broader development process within the Cooperative Futures Institute to design and make available benchmarks to quantify models' capacities to engage in cooperative behavior.
- The design and implementation of an interface for active, real-time musical improvisation between human and artificial intelligence collaborators
- The examination of the emergent behaviors that collectives made up of many aritficial intelligence agents display relative to those of organic systems
- The modeling of information, behavior, and state propagation within complex collectives to better understand how these processes result in large-scale shifts in the character of collectives as a whole