At Adobe, I'm an Applied Scientist working to improve GenAI image & video systems. I earned my PhD in Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego, under Dr. Judith Fan @ The Cognitive Tools Lab.

I lead the Scientific Evaluation team's efforts in evaluating state-of-the-art imaging and editing technologies like Adobe Firefly. My research statistically measure's improvements & regressions in model behavior related to: text-to-visual & visual-to-visual systems, semantic editing, object recognition, and user intentions

I do this by developing large-scale benchmarks (e.g., 1K-50K assets across ~100K annotations) to understand how models interpret people's goals and collaborate with them in creating and editing visual media. Leveraging this scale of data, my work identifies market trends in GenAI behavior and provides insights to PMs, modeling, and engineering teams on how to develop the next generation of creative tools. I work with culturally diverse professional photographers & editors, graphic designers, and video creators/editors to better understand human-AI collaboration.

I also collaborate with AI Ethics teams to ensure that models do not create or enable the creation of harmful content.

My dissertation research evaluated how user intentions shift visual production behavior and downstream user interpretations. I tested these questions by generating & analyzing large-scale datasets of drawings, diagrams, and data visualizations. In other words, I studied how people make pictures. And now I study how GenAI models make pictures.

Bio: I grew up on Whidbey Island, WA. As an introverted teen on a rural island, I spent most of my time sketching and hiding away in art studios. After two fine arts apprenticeships and double majoring in Philosophy and History of Mathematics & Sciences from St. John's College, I was fascinated by how novel visualizations catalyzed and served to communicate most major scientific discoveries (e.g., Cartesian coordinate system, periodic table, Vitruvian man). Despite this critical role of visual media in human innovation, relatively little is known about how people communicate in visual form. This question continues to inspire my research.