Strategic Rivals and Competitive Civil Conflict Mediation

When civil war breaks out in a region, third parties will often offer to provide mediation to the conflict. If two states in a strategic rivalry have interests in the region, both states might offer mediation for various reasons such as maintaining stability or increasing their relative influence over less powerful states. In this project, we analyzed the Civil War Mediation (CWM) dataset to explain what factors would lead a state to respond to a strategic rival’s civil war mediation attempt with one of their own, and found that the likelihood of mediation response increases as the hostility of strategic rivalries increase. I was chiefly responsible for developing an index that tracked the quality of the relationship betwen two strategic rivals over time. I did this by taking the running total of a rivalry’s Goldstein Index (used to quantify the nature of two states’ interactions) every month and applying a decay function (to represent how the intensity of a bilateral relationship decays over time, assuming that no further interactions are made). This project was presented at UNT Scholar's Day 2022.

AI-Complete: What it Means to Be Human in an Increasingly Computerized World

I co-wrote this chapter with Noah Velez, another UNT student as part of Bridging Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, a book edited by Drs. Mark V. Albert, Lin Lin, Michael J. Spector, and Lemoyne S. Dunn. In this chapter, we analyze the historical trend of artificial intelligence development and discuss the social and ethical challenges that future artificial intelligence researchers will have to grapple with. A link to view this chapter is available here.

Dashboard system to track cumulative exposure to sound levels during live music instruction

I undertook this project at the Biomedical Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of North Texas under Dr. Mark V. Albert. The purpose of this application is to provide musicians with a means of protecting their hearing health by tracking their sound exposure over the course of a rehearsal. The dashboard is available here, the preprint is available here, and the research poster we made is available here.