I am a CIFAR AI Safety Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, where I study Human-Centred AI and compathy: computation and empathy.
I am affiliated with the Department of Psychology's Work and Play Lab and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and have since held research positions at the University of Waterloo, McMaster University, and the University of Toronto.
Two questions I try to answer through my work:
- RQ1How could empathy inform the design of better computational tools and models?
- RQ2How could technology impact, and ideally reinforce, humans' capacity for positive empathy, without losing sight of moral reasoning?
Three pillars
Compathy is the thread that runs through everything I do; these three pillars are how I follow it, each bringing computation and empathy a step closer to one another.
- Responsible AI
- Embedding fairness, transparency, and accountability into how intelligent systems learn and decide.
- Human-centred design
- Treating people as active contributors, so that human goals, values, and context shape computational intelligence.
- Human experience
- Understanding trust, comprehension, and reliance on AI through real, repeated, everyday interaction.
Compathy sits where human-computer interaction meets computational intelligence, and its questions cut across computer science, engineering, psychology, philosophy, and medicine, so the work is collaborative by necessity. Across all of it, the aim is to close the growing gap between people and the intelligent systems that increasingly shape their lives.
