Hi, I’m Ran :^)

I study Computer Science and Modern Culture & Media at Brown University. I’m interested in how tech, power, and sociolegal understandings of new media co-produce each other.

In the past, I’ve had the luck to RA at Brown’s DISCO Lab, where I researched and helped engineer AI-supported systems helping no-code communities design custom moderation tools on federated social media. ¹ I’ve also visualized social networks in open-source lobbying data for the Watson School of International and Public Affairs. ²

Right now, I’m spending many waking hours working on my senior thesis, which considers artist communities’ refusal of AI scraping by:

• [hci] Taxonomizing the methods of individual and collective action artists take across different creative domains as a function of their sociolegal conditions.

• [crypto/ML] Hardening commitment-based non-membership proofs to adversarial augmentation, such that these proofs can be used more robustly to verify that sensitive data hasn’t been used in AI training datasets.³

More broadly in life, some things I love are visual art (comic art, printmaking), the critical history of language technology, and all of Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell poems. Please reach out about any of the above :)