Hi! I'm Keming (but I also go by Alex      ).

Work I do/have done:

• Drummer for east bay-based pop/bossa/jazz/etc group (and in the past, a spanish speaking church, jazz quartet, and city pop group)


• Help teach, lead, perform, create community, play, etc with Jiten Daiko (SF based taiko ensemble)


• Taught undergrads about data science in human contexts, building a curriculum and weaving together perspectives from sociology, history, philosophy, and data science.


• Worked as a qualitative researcher and engineer to understand how people experience harm through algorithmically served content, and how they can be empowered to protect themselves online.


• Exploried data edibilization, text-to-flavor, preserving ambiguity in human-machine interactions - coffee-shop-in-a-box, published at CHI 2022.


• Did award-winning research and engineering work on applying ds/ml/deep learning to climate change, astronomy, public health, and more. Publications pending at Nature and Science.


• Small projects include - honors thesis on the economic geography of the internet , analysis of linguistic accommodation in online settings, a "4D" VR painting experience, restorative justice approaches to content moderation, visualizations of Twitch Chat, lectures on data science project management


• Love cooking, can kickflip.


• Did some professional stuff once.

My academic/work/life focus:

I believe that many technologies of "sight" (particularly in machine learning and data science), paired with the broader sociotechnical imaginary of augmented understanding via data, have dulled our attentive faculties rather than augmented them. They have privileged particular ways of seeing and knowing. They contribute to a false sense of understanding. Rather than acknowledging complexity, these technologies often serve to bulldoze it.

This sucks.

I want to help re-develop this attentive faculty in people. I want to re-develop and hone my own attentive faculty. I want our technologies to encourage intentional and deliberate lives rather than rule-driven, algorithmic ones. What if our information representations acknowledged and revealed complexity rather than abstracted them away? What if those representations made us "work" more to get something out of it? Would that encourage us to look more deeply and closely in our own lives? A picture is worth a thousand words - how can we move towards the picture worth a thousand pictures, the information representation that communicates more deeply and truly? Maybe that's the realm of art, not technology. I'm trying to figure that out.