Welcome to my web site. I am an assistant professor in HCI at Carnegie Mellon. My research focuses on understanding and improving distributed and individual cognition to help people make sense of overwhelming amounts of information.

My research on distributed cognition examines how groups of people can collaborate to process information on a scale that exceeds individual cognitive capabilities. For example, I am investigating how large social collaborative systems such as Wikipedia and crowdsourcing markets like Amazon's Mechanical Turk function and can be made more effective. I am also a collaborator on the Cognitive Atlas project, whose goal is to build a knowledge base of mental processes, tasks, and brain systems using principles of distributed cognition.

My research in cognitive psychology seeks to understand cognitive processes in the individual which underlie categorization and memory by combining empirical studies with computational and statistical modeling. I am also involved in developing interfaces which improve the efficiency of storing and retrieving information in large knowledge spaces by combining machine learning, visualization, and interaction methods.