Research Projects
My research is organized in three interconnected layers: how countries govern emerging technologies, how organizations involve people in shaping them, and how individuals actually use them in practice.
Macro — Pragmatic and Flexible Technology Governance
How countries design, adapt, and experiment with policy frameworks for technologies they are still learning about.
Paradoxical Strategies for Emerging Technology Governance
How do countries govern technologies they don't fully understand? Drawing on Paradox Theory and interviews with 28 senior AI policymakers from 22 countries across five continents, this project conceptualizes emerging technology governance as a system of enduring and interdependent tensions. Rather than resolving contradictions through trade-offs, effective policymakers adopt paradoxical strategies that sustain competing demands in productive balance over time.
- Paradoxical Strategies for Emerging Technology Governance — SSRN preprint, 2026 (with Pertuze, Caffrey, Cheyre)
- Addressing the Paradoxical Nature of Emerging Technologies in Transformative Policies — Atlanta Conference on SIP, 2025
- Transitioning between Gimmicky and Adaptive Approaches to AI Policy — Atlanta Conference on SIP, 2023
Flexible and Experimental Technology Policy
How can governments test regulatory approaches before committing to permanent frameworks? This project examines regulatory sandboxes and other experimental governance mechanisms as prototyping tools for public policy, with a focus on the challenges that generative AI poses for traditional sandbox models designed around for-profit innovation.
- Redesigning AI Regulatory Sandboxes for Generative AI — Privacy Law Scholars Conference, 2026 (with Ganesh, Moraes)
- Recomendaciones para la implementación de sandboxes regulatorios de IA — IDB report, 2025 (with Trivelli)
- Sandboxes regulatorios como herramientas de prototipado de política pública — Book chapter, 2025 (with Illanes)
Science and Technology Governance in the Global South
How do AI readiness frameworks, governance models, and policy narratives travel across institutional and cultural contexts—and what tensions arise when they don't fit? This line of work combines country-level assessments with comparative analysis of how countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia navigate the governance of science and technology, from AI policy to astronomical infrastructure. It examines how political crises reshape participatory governance, how natural laboratories raise tensions between local and global interests, and how dominant technology narratives are experienced from the Global South.
- Context Matters: Localising UNESCO's Readiness Assessment Methodology — UNESCO report, 2026 (with Danaditya, Jameson, Martinez Pinto)
- Participatory AI Governance: Lessons from Brazil and Chile — PAIRS, 2026 (with Alanoca, Graciano)
- UNESCO AI Readiness Assessment reports — Chile, Cuba, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Cambodia, Dominican Republic
- Crises, Deliberation, and STI Policy in Chile — Book chapter (with Goñi)
- Natural Laboratories as Policy Instruments — Book chapter in Handbook on Living Labs and Real-World Experiments (with Pertuze)
- Natural Laboratories as Policy Instruments for Technological Learning — Research Policy, 2020 (with Pertuze, Pfotenhauer)
- Friction as Method: A Latin American Reading of Digital Culture Shock — Tapuya, 2025 (book review)
Meso — Participatory and Sustainable Digital Transformation
How organizations, design teams, and public institutions can meaningfully involve citizens and stakeholders in shaping technology.
AI in Public Participation
How can AI tools support public participation processes without flattening the voices they aim to include? This project examines both NLP tools for analyzing civic input and generative AI as a medium for collaborative design. On the NLP side, I study how policymakers decide whether and how to adopt these tools, revealing that political context and institutional incentives matter as much as technical capability. On the generative AI side, I study how image-generation tools function as boundary objects in participatory design of public spaces—finding that imperfect, conversation-sparking images are more valuable than polished outputs.
- Thoughtful Adoption of NLP for Civic Participation — PACM HCI (CSCW), 2025 (with Cheyre, Yang)
- From Fake Perfects to Conversational Imperfects — PACM HCI (CSCW), 2025 (with Hwang, Santo, Goula, Cheyre, Humphreys, Rangel)
- Image Generative AI to Design Public Spaces — Digital Government: Research and Practice, 2025 (with Cheyre, Goula, Santo, Humphreys, Shankar, Souras)
- Supporting Participation Processes Using NLP in Constrained Resources Settings — EGOV-CeDEM-ePart, 2024 (with Pertuze, Zamora)
Micro — Responsible and Reflective Human-AI Interaction
How individuals actually use AI in professional practice, and what this reveals about the distance between technological promise and everyday reality.
AI Use in Government and Policymaking
How do government officials adopt AI tools for policymaking tasks, and what shapes their decisions to use, adapt, or resist these technologies? This project examines AI adoption in the public sector, including how LLMs are used to analyze incident reports and support evidence-based decision-making.
- Using LLMs to Analyze Incident Reporting and Support Policymaking — Atlanta Conference on SIP, 2025 (with Kim)
AI for Qualitative Research
How do qualitative researchers adopt, resist, or negotiate the use of AI in their work? As a CCSS Data Science Fellow at Cornell's Qualitative and Interpretive Research Institute (QuIRI), I am studying the reasoning behind researchers' choices about AI—whether they use it, avoid it, or are somewhere in between—and what this reveals about the changing relationship between methodology and technology.
AI Adoption in Professional Practice
How do professionals in creative and design fields adopt generative AI, and what happens when general-purpose tools don't fit specialized workflows? This project examines AI adoption patterns in professional practice, focusing on the gap between what AI tools promise and what practitioners actually need.
- When Tools Don't Fit: Generative AI Adoption in Landscape Architecture — BIG.AI@MIT, 2026
Cross-Cutting Collaborations
Other Collaborations
I also contribute to projects at the intersection of my research layers, including work on responsible AI design for mental well-being and social dynamics in virtual environments.
- Framing Responsible Design of AI for Mental Well-Being — CHI, 2026 (with Cooper, Hwang, Kolko, McGinty, Yang)
- Anonymity and Self-Disclosure in Social Virtual Reality — CSCW, 2023 (with Jang, Hsieh, Yang)