Together with my advisor Ashok Goel, I founded the VITA project in our lab, which aims to develop a new cognitive model of autism centered around visual representations and processing in order to better understand the nature of visual cognition in general as well as its role in atypical cognition such as in autism spectrum disorders. Our work is partly inspired by introspective accounts of autism like the book Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, an animal behavior scientist on the spectrum who has authored several books about her experiences with autism.
Some questions we hope to answer in the course of investigating our "Thinking in Pictures" hypothesis include:
For a more detailed discussion of this current research, see the project website.
When I first arrived at Georgia Tech, I worked with Tucker Balch in the BORG Lab on modeling the behavior of social agents for the Biotracking project. During this time, I developed AMBID, a software package for Agent Modeling using Biotracking Data.
In my work with Aerotonomy, Inc., I have contributed to a range of projects, from analyzing wind tunnel data from active flow control technologies to designing computational architectures for autonomous sensing and guidance in micro UAVs.
I also worked for several summers in the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Lab on climate change science. In particular, I worked with Gregg Marland and Tristram West, looking at carbon and energy cycle impacts on climate change and their relationships with human agricultural practices. In addition, I helped fellow intern Adam Roddy develop image processing software for his investigations into corn root biomechanics.
At MIT, I did research in robotics and path planning with Nick Roy. We worked with Ph.D. student Jessica Marquez on the development of a flexible and collaborative path planning system to aid astronauts during planetary traversals.