I spent two years wrestling with the complexities of the Twitch video system and doing my best to contribute useful services where I can. Below are some brief summaries of the projects I worked on. Several details are omitted due to non-disclosure agreement.

In order to increase the redundancy of a service (details omitted), I had to port its distributed locking system from a third party service to AWS DynamoDB so that multiple entities could view the lock state of other entities around them. This required a deep understanding of how the system's locking actually worked, and writing rigorous tests to ensure that the overhaul was actually correct. To use a good phrase from a mentor of mine, I felt that this project bizarrely validated most traditional computer science undergraduate curricula.

My first project as a junior engineer was to build a service that detects abrupt drops in certain arenas of the video system's traffic. These drops are colloquially referred to as 'black holes', and the service is somewhat cheekily called LIGO. LIGO runs on AWS ECS/Fargate and connects to SQS, Kinesis, and Apache Druid. I architected, coded, and productionized the system entirely on my own, and gained a lot of experience on the journey.

Unequal cost multipathing, or UCMP, allows more efficient allocation of network traffic across the video system. I updated the previous algorithm (which implemented equal cost multipathing, UCMP's more inefficent predecessor) and worked with a colleague on the networking team to test the code live on the network. This project was yet another step in my journey to understand how exactly the internet works, something that I likely will never understand.

As an intern in the summer of 2020, I was tasked with building a service to track the Twitch video system's usage of third party CDNs which output a graph showing how many users were routed to CDNs per minute. I got my first taste of assembling AWS services into a single working program, and utilized Kinesis, Lambda, and CloudWatch.

Kids growing up in the age of AI need accessible online platforms with which to learn advanced concepts that will broaden their understanding of the computerized ecosystem they live in. The goal of GenAI was to design such a platform for learners of all levels. We intended to create a prototype to hand off to professional designers.

The platform GenAI was intended to be an online textbook with several chapters about different AI topics, such as neural networks, conversational agents, and robotics, among several others. The chapter we decided to prototype with was the one about generative adversarial networks (GANs) due to the project lead's personal interest in them.

A great deal of time was spent on the interaction design of the website itself, and keeping both the landing pages and the learning material itself as easy to navigate as possible for learners and users of all ages and levels. For example, we determined that while the color scheme and design should remain the same throughout the website, the "feel" (font, UI) should change between content levels.

We also wanted to make AI seem approachable, not futuristic, dark, chrome colored, or hacker-y. We considered naturalistic themes and light colors in opposition to the typical depiction of AI in media.

At the beginning of the project, I worked along with another student in charge of web design to wireframe out the look and feel of the website. I went through several of the educational websites that I used on a daily basis and tried to pick out the elements that I found the most natural and usable, and then combine these into a design. The web designer took my fairly simple ideas and gave them a great deal of color.

Halfway through the project, however, the web designer got too busy, and I was left with coming up with the visual design elements of the website as well. In accordance with our naturalistic ideas for representing AI, I chose a color palette, designed a v1 logo, and created a moodboard.

I was also assigned to write the beginner and intermediate levels of a GANs textbook chapter. This was the first time that I had to think deeply about what it meant to be a learner at each of these levels, and be mindful to use appropriate terminology and complexity. Similarly, we designed the visuals to "level up" as well.

This project taught me a great deal about designing UI and thinking very deeply about my user. Though I had never dabbled in visual design before, I enjoyed the chance to determine how the site looked and felt, skills that proved extremely useful to designing this website!

Through my work with the MIT AI Education initiative, I've had a hand in creating a variety of websites for hosting our curricula and educational material. The sites are widely trafficked by educators worldwide.

DoodleBot

DoodleBot was the first website that I actually created mostly myself. I got my first actual exposure to HTML and learned how to make websites using github.io, an invaluable skill that has carried me far in life.

aieducation.mit.edu

The MIT AI Education website is probably the most public facing and highly trafficked website that I'll work on for a long time. It houses the entirety of the MIT AI Education Initiative's resources, projects, publications, and fully tested curricula. This article that I helped write explains the initiative and its goals.

Creating this website was where I really honed my HTML and CSS skills, and learned how to run Javascript for interactivity as well. It's also the site that I'm the most emotionally attached, having committed 100+ times to the repo; my grad student and I were reluctant to let it be externally managed.

Dancing with AI

I'm mostly responsible for maintaining this site, but it's notable for being one of my first exposures to using the Jekyll framework, which came in handy for building this website! It was also my first experience with having educators contact me personally and ask for clarifications and fixes on curriculum material.

On their own, these websites were fairly small projects in the scope of things. However, tooling away on them gave me a much better feel for web dev and UI design that is coming in useful for this portfolio website in particular. The increase in my HTML/CSS skills has been, frankly, astronomical compared to where I started from. I used to find it insufferably frustrating, but now, working on these websites induces a sense of comfort and satisfaction in me similar to doing my laundry or cleaning my room. That feels like a huge improvement.

When creating a game as huge as God of War, designers do an almost unimaginable amount of tweaking and twiddling with different game engine properties to get the gameplay feeling just right. My task as an intern was to create a prototype for an updated engine debugging menu. Several details are omitted due to non-disclosure agreement.

Like many triple A game studios, Santa Monica Studio utilizes a custom built engine for God of War. As such, the tool for tweaking settings within said engine was also custom designed, and was over a decade old when I was tasked with creating a more modern prototype.

I was tasked with using the Dear ImGui library to create this prototype. ImGui is an open source C++ library for creating user interfaces, primarily for game engines and other real-time 3D applications.

This was my first time working with a codebase on a massive scale. I learned how to parse through huge chunks of relatively undocumented code, and gained an intuition for how to look for the code actually relevant to my needs. I had also never worked with an external library as big as ImGui, so figuring out how to integrate it into the existing PlayStation codebase was a slow task.

I also learned what it was like to have multiple stakeholders for a system. Designers, artists, and programmers all used the engine debugging tool in different ways, and had different opinions on the changes that should be made to it. From the way the PS4 controller was used to navigate the menu, to the actual widgets used for certain features themselves, I learned the importance of taking multiple voices into account when creating an end product for a variety of users.

The biggest challenge I faced was struggling through the nuances of C++. I learned that low-level programming is definitely not my forte, and the intricacies of buffer overflows and overwritten caches did not bring me much joy. But in the end, the experience of working in a triple A studio on such a huge project was worth all the frustration. As a small contributor, I'm excited for the world to see God of War: Ragnarok, and as a fan of the franchise, I'm dying to play it myself!

TaleBlazer is an augmented reality (AR) software platform developed by the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) Lab that allows users to play and make their own location-based mobile games in a browser-based block programming language. My task as an undergrad researcher was to prototype and add certain highly requested blocks to the web editor.

An important feature for AR games, which happen both in real locations and in real-time - is time! When I joined the TaleBlazer project, some of the most highly requested features from users were time-based event blocks, in which a user could trigger an event using elapsed time. My task was to brainstorm, prototype, and implement the best set of blocks for users to achieve this functionality.

I began with brainstorming a variety of time-based features that could come in handy in a location-based AR game:

I then created paper prototypes and iterated upon them multiple times before finally moving on to implementation. The TaleBlazer backend is written in Javascript on top of a CakePHP backend. I primarily wrote Javascript in Android Studio, and built countless iterations of the app onto an old Android phone. The final result was that these three blocks were added to the TaleBlazer programming language:

My project for TaleBlazer was, in itself, relatively simple. However, this summer was absolutely instrumental to my growth as an engineer for several other reasons. I learned how to use Git, and managed, committed to, and pull requested branches with my chcanges. I learned the process of prototyping and adding user requested features, and learned how to go through several iterations of ideation. I learned how to adjust to different development environments, and code in languages that I had never encountered before. For all of these reasons, my summer at TaleBlazer will likely remain the most formative summer of my career.

From September 2017 to January 2021, I wrote 77 blog posts (an auspicious number in retrospect, given how much I love Final Fantasy VII) for the MIT Admissions website. The mission of the Admissions blogs is to paint a genuine, unedited picture of MIT life and culture to potential applicants.

From September 2017 to January 2021, the MIT Admissions front page got just about 40 million pageviews with around 7 million unique users from all around the world. With my blog posts, I contributed to a small amount of those pageviews with a variety of different types of blog posts: compilations of MIT culture, several enthusiastic posts about Spotify, and some minorly viral data visualizations. Compiling most of these posts helped me develop what I now consider to be a life skill: shamelessly asking large groups of people to provide me with similarly large amounts of data. At some point, I even had a salty MIT Confessions post written about just how shameless I was. However, I firmly believe that these experiences built character, and will serve me well in the working world. When I need to get something done, I'll get it done.

I had never written for such a large audience before, and it was both strange and gratifying to receive comments and emails from incoming students telling me how much my blogs resonated with them on different levels. Being told that my blogs were the reason that a student applied to MIT certainly ranks among the more touching experiences in my life. In the grand scheme of things, the impact of my blogs on the internet was quite small, but if they could change even a few people's life trajectories, then I think my quest as a writer has been fulfilled.

I'm not an artist by any means, but I do enjoy dabbling in modeling and animation. The works shown here are almost exclusively done from the summer that I learned Blender, but I'd like my future to contain more visual art as well.

I’ve been playing music for most of my life - piano from ages 5-8, and violin from 8-18. While those first two ventures didn’t really stick, they did leave behind a lifelong love for music, and a passion for singing and playing the guitar.

A Cappella

I had a year long stint of college a cappella, in which I had the absolute privilege of singing some phenomenal South Asian fusion arrangements with my friends. Some of my favorite performances were:

Covers

My friend and I have a Soundcloud with various covers that we’ve done of our favorite songs. Recording is an arduous process, so there’s not too much on there, but we’re hoping to continue our journey together and write a few of our own sad songs.

• My first real test of my own recording setup: Akatonbo, a folk song from Japan, where I sang the soprano, alto, and tenor parts and mixed them.
  

Arrangements

I’ve only dabbled in arranging, and what I’ve managed to do so far has been pretty simple. Hopefully I’ll have time to do some cooler stuff in the future.

As a blogger and humanities major, I’ve generated a decent amount of writing over the years. The selected pieces below showcase some of the work that I’ve done, spanning a wide range of writing styles and topics. These do not include my publications, which you can find in their rightful place on my CV.

Blogging

I was an MIT Admissions blogger for my 3.5 years of undergrad and wrote on the order of ~100 posts on my life and experiences as an MIT student. There were a couple of blogs I wrote that resonated with a fairly large audience:

Gaming

My interest in video games led me to take nearly all of the gaming adjacent classes that MIT had to offer. I got to live my dream and write several academic papers on various facets of the gaming world. This prepared me well to write semi-professionally about games - I have two chapters upcoming in the Psychgeist of Pop Culture series, which explores our favorite video games through academic analyses written for a general audience.

Ethnographic

As a comparative media studies major, I occasionally had to go out into the field to investigate the effect of media on the people around me, and learn to use the data gathered to form research questions and create narratives. As a positive result, I was pushed farther out of my comfort zone than I could have ever gone by myself.

Creative

As a senior at MIT, I had the great privilege of taking a class with Junot Díaz, which rekindled my long dormant love for creative writing. I would love to do more in the future, and expand upon some of the work I started in this class.

I was a design collaborator for the Science+C initiative through the Educational Development Center. I designed a three day data science curriculum for integration into high school biology, chemistry, and physics classes. I ran workshops with educators and iterated using their feedback. The curriculum will be used by the State of Massachusetts.

The Science+C project is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to create an alternate pathway to college and science careers for high school students by developing and testing three new computational science courses. These courses—Computational Biology, Computational Chemistry, and Computational Physics—will be available to all Massachusetts high schools beginning in the 2022-2023 school year.

I specifically worked as a design collaborator on the Data Science + Machine Learning units. The units were divided into data science, decision trees, clustering algorithms, and neural networks. I designed the data science curriculum, a 3 day workshop with a lesson and associated activities for each day.

I created lesson plans designed to introduce beginners to data science at a low level. I cover the basics of data science and what data scientists to, and designed activities to teach summary statistics and visualization usage in an interactive manner.

I ran this curriculum in a workshop with several high school science educators and iterated on the activities with them. Their feedback was invaluable for iterating and improving on the activities.

The curriculum will continue to go through iteration cycles until it pilots with schools across the state of Massachusetts in September 2022.

After about a year working at Twitch, I decided that it was time to test out the service that I work on! I'm starting with streaming my very favorite game - Final Fantasy VII, if that wasn't obvious from the rest of this site - and I'm hoping to stream more of the classic Final Fantasies, playing guitar, and maybe - just maybe - myself applying to grad school. Reaching Partner status seems like a lofty goal, but I'd like to at least reach Affiliate.

Check my channel out at W0LFHEART on Twitch!

As part of the Civic Media Codesign Studio, I learned theory and practice of codesign, including methods for community participation in iterative stages of project ideation, design, prototyping, testing, launch, and stewardship. I was part of the research team that investigated collectives throughout history, and conducted sensory ethnographic interviews to construct transmedia narratives for community partners. Our work was part of a display at the Venice Biennale 2021.

Open Collectives is ana initiative that seeks to "leverage the power of solidarity in order to strengthen economic sovereignty, housing affordability, communal self-determination, and mutual aid". As part of the class working on the initiative, I worked on the CarePod project (now Carehaus) team to develop stories and visual media for the initiative. The goal of CarePod is to developing intergenerational co-housing where caregivers live alongside and care for older adults and disabled people.

We started our project by conducting an in-depth sensory ethnographic interview with an individual who gave up his career to take care of his grandmother, both out of familial obligation and a lack of other options. From this interview, we were told to construct a story told from the point of view of an object important to the interviewee's experience with their aging relative. We chose to focus on a rocking chair that was a prized possession of the interviewee's grandmother, but unfortunately, as she aged, she no longer was able to stand up if she sat down in it.

In addition to the media we created, we conducted research on the aging population in the United States and how we could rethink elder care in times of crisis. The class was being run right at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, so finding affordable housing models for both the elderly and their care workers was a particularly salient issue.

Over the course of the semester, our team produced five stories, to which I contributed two. Our research and the visual/written media that we produced were part of a display at the Venice Biennale in 2021.

Part of my research appointment as a PhD student is with the Universty of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, one of the premier centers for misinformation research. As part of the Loki's Loop team, I help create and co-design media literacy games with stakeholders all over the world. As belief in misinformation is a cultural and socioemotional phenomenon, we believe that co-design helps us tailor educational experiences to specific contexts. Below are a few of the sub-projects I've worked on for the team.

While our team has used co-design methods in the past to 'reskin' our games for different cultural contexts (published in the DiGRA 2025 proceedings), we desired a method to efficiently design game scenarios from the ground up with input from our stakeholders. I worked with a capstone team from the MLIS program to create a curriculum based off of my design framework (described below). We currently plan to test this curriculum in a 2-day workshop format in the Netherlands and at the NextLibrary festival in Denmark.

Building on my hypothesis that the narrative mechanic in misinformation education games must be of some consequence, I conducted a 2x2 between-subjects study using two of the Loki's Loop games, which are identical except for their narrative framings. The participants were split by how much they identified with the subject matter of the second game (online fandom and Twitter usage). The study was primarily quantitative, measuring narrative engagement as the dependent variable. There were indeed differences of consequence, which I discuss in my paper accepted to CHI 2025, the premier conference in human-computer interaction.

The narrative mechanics of educational games are often overlooked. In misinformation education, I believed this to be a particularly large miss, as the stories we tell ourselves become what we believe (and in many cases, what we believe is misinformation). This led me to believe that most misinformation education games are focusing on the wrong thing: using rational processes to discern what is and isn't misinformation, rather than exploring how sociocultural narratives may affect our own beliefs. I did a deep dive into narrative theory, and performed a systematic review on the current body of misinformation education games to see how they use narratives to teach about misinformation. The discussion, as well as the resulting design framework, was published in the Harvard Misinformation Review.

When I started grad school, I moved 1000 miles and 2 states away from my partner doing his PhD at Stanford. To cope with the sudden change in distance, we started playing a lot of Stardew Valley together. As a researcher, I wanted to know what my field had to say about technology and long distance relationships, as this was now my only way of staying in contact. Surprisingly, there wasn't much that was applicable outside of a lab format, or custom artifacts that had been built in research settings. There wasn't much on the use of existing technologies that people use to stay connected, most notably games. Almost everybody I know in an LDR plays games with their partner as quality time together. This was the beginning of what I consider to be my most passion-driven research project.

In my first ever self-initiated project as a PhD student, I conducted a diary study and semi-structured interviews with 13 couples from all over the world in LDRs. Through a combination of inductive and deductive analysis, we extracted key themes surrounding the affordances of cooperative vs. competitive multiplayer games, the liminality between in-person and in-game social interactions, and the appropriation of game mechanics to express affection.

I also conducted a design activity based on the MDA framework where I had couples assemble game elements to envision their ideal game to play together. This led to some wholesome brainstorming sessions, shown below. This work is published in the DIS conference proceedings and you can read the full paper here.

As a software engineer by training, I'm comfortable with implementing apps and websites, but not at all with ideating or designing them. This is where the undergraduates and masters students in my department, who are trained to become interaction and UX designers, are an invaluable resource. I ran my first Directed Research Group (DRG), and we used the data that I collected from couples to ideate on various prototypes that couples who play games together could use to increase their sense of connection. The final prototype was a "digital diary" that couples could use to document virtual memories made together in game worlds.

I'm currently working with another Directed Research Group to build out the prototype into an actual desktop application. The current version is built with Flask, React, and Electron with media uploads to AWS S3. A preliminary demo can be found here. Deployment study coming whenever I feel that the full app is acceptable enough to give to users...

I'm only in my mid 20s, but people my age have lived through a huge amount of unrest - the first Trump administration, COVID, and the second - much more fascist - Trump administration, with very little mental break in between. In both personal and environmental times of darkness, I find myself going back to the games that have taught me strength, given me characters to model myself after, and given me a place where I feel like I can fight back against evil. I firmly believe that playing games like Final Fantasy VII in my formative years - all about how a giant corporation destroys the world through capitalism and greed - has been key to shaping my own will to live on and fight on. With that in mind, the area I hope to write my dissertation on someday is in how playing games can support eudaimonic well-being, human flourishing, and mental health. Games for mental health are often discussed in the language of escapism, but I think there are a lot of important lessons we can learn from our ability to agentically interact with stories of resistance, resilience, and heroism within games.

After wading around in readings about self-determination theory, narrative games, and eudaimonic well-being, I identified a theoretical gap that had mysteriously gone unfilled. Media studies scholars have elaborated extensively on why a person may seek out a eudaimonic gaming experience, but the long lasting effects of such experiences were unknown. Partly motivated by getting to read about peoples' positive and life-changing experiences with games, I conducted a large survey that received 100+ responses, and conducted a structured deductive analysis to identify pathways to certain types of changes that people believed these gaming experiences had on their broader lives. Our findings support conjectures floating around in the HCI game space, namely that 1. often, meaningful experiences are incidental rather than intentional 2. people undergoing times of stress may actively be seeking meaning in their gaming experiences and 3. narrative elements in games are influential on people's perceptions of themselves and the world. The full paper is published in CHI PLAY 2025.

The games that have supported my mental health have always been narrative heavy RPGs. In my first year, I took a particular interest in narrative games, and like a good junior PhD student, I decided to do my first systematic review on how narrative game-based interveions are used in mental health research. Myself and Jamie Espinosa-Briones (DUB REU '24) reduced almost 2000 papers down to 17 games for analysis. A preliminary analysis (presented at DiGRA '25) revealed that a majority of the games surrounded treatment for depression and anxiety; however, how these constructs were measured differed significantly between studies. In addition, theoretical underpinnings such as narrative theory (popuarlized by communications scholars) were often overlooked in the design of these games. In future discussion (journal paper coming soon), we intend to suggest design guidelines for further cross-collaboration between communication studies, mental health, and human-computer interaction.