09 · Research · Ethics
The ethics of ML & robotics
A research paper and symposium presentation on what machine learning and robots demand from the people who build them.
Through MIT MITES, I studied robotics and science writing, then wrote and presented a research paper on ethical questions in machine learning and robots.
Technical systems inherit human choices
The work examined how technical systems inherit choices from their builders: what gets optimized, who is represented in the data, who bears the risk, and who gets recourse when automated systems behave badly.
When ethics becomes physical
Robots make abstract ethical questions physical. They sense, move, classify, and act in shared spaces, which makes questions of safety, accountability, and human agency harder to treat as afterthoughts.
Writing without draining the consequences
The final paper and closing symposium presentation pushed me to explain technical tradeoffs clearly without draining them of consequence, a habit that still shapes how I write about engineering work.