About

I am a PhD candidate in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, working on the environmental cost of consumer-facing generative AI.

My doctoral research argues that the interface is the right site for addressing this cost, because the interface is where the use that drives it happens. It develops the conceptual vocabulary for a second, largely unexamined burden, the data these systems accumulate, and builds a working system to test whether making cost visible changes what people do.

I was born in Germany and have lived in China, Singapore, and the Netherlands. Since 2012 I have been based mostly on Canada's West Coast. My degrees are all in cognitive science, taken across two countries, and that interdisciplinary training is what makes the current work possible: the questions I ask about generative AI are as much about perception and behaviour as they are about energy accounting. My earlier research used computational creativity systems to study how aesthetic experience is processed along the brain's visual pathways, and it was working with those systems daily that made the absence of any measurement of what they consumed impossible to ignore.

Teaching and science communication remain central to how I want to work, and I expect to continue conducting research in industry.