Brave Behind Bars
Lead-instructor, Summer 2023, 2022
Brave Behind Bars is a college-accredited introductory computer science and career-readiness program for incarcerated individuals launched by MIT’s The Education Justice Institute. Instructed both online and in-person, the Summer ’21 pilot program brought together 30 women from four correctional facilities across New England and has now been expanded to men and women for the 2023 mixed-gender classroom of 55 students. They were taught by 21 Harvard- and MIT-affiliated coaches alongside formerly incarcerated graduates of our pilot program. Together, our students develop skills in digital literacy, web design, and career readiness, building websites to help address some of society’s most pressing issues.
My responsibilities include designing the curriculum, leading classes, and mentoring students with class projects.
Quantitative Methods for Natural Language Processing
Teaching Assistant, Fall 2022
How can computers understand and leverage text data and human language? Natural language processing (NLP) addresses this question, and in this course students study both modern and classic approaches. The class mainly focuses on statistical approaches to NLP, wherein we learn a probabilistic model based on natural language data. This course provides students with a foundation of advanced concepts and requires students to conduct a significant research project on an NLP problem of their choosing, culminating with a high-quality paper (5-8 pages).
Engineering Interactive Technologies
Co-Instructor, Fall 2021
Engineering Interactive Technologies is an MIT course that provides instruction in building cutting-edge interactive technologies, explains the underlying engineering concepts, and shows how those technologies evolved over time. Students use a studio format for constructing software and hardware prototypes. Topics include interactive technologies, such as multi-touch, augmented reality, haptics, wearables, and shape-changing interfaces. In a group project, students build their own interactive hardware/software prototypes and present them in a live demo at the end of the term.