Lifestreams

Proposals to use machine learning algorithms in healthcare, work performance evaluation, and criminal justice are on the rise. For my master's thesis, I examined how algorithms, beyond just automating practices in these domains, are used to shape their values and assumptions.

I developed Lifestreams to study and critique the StudentLife system, which proposed to equip students with wearable technologies to monitor their health and academic performance. The StudentLife platform released a dataset about student health and behavior at its pilot program at Dartmouth University, which I used to investigate how this data might be arranged. I was interested in not just how the data could be visualized, but how algorithmic techniques would influence its interpretation.