Audience: General Public

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are rapidly becoming general-purpose AI systems, yet their capabilities are advancing faster than our ability to evaluate, improve, and validate their reliability in realistic use. Standard benchmarks mainly measure in-distribution final-answer accuracy, leaving critical gaps in safety, robustness, fine-grained reasoning evaluation, and reliability in real-world agentic settings. My research proposes…

Modern system software increasingly needs runtime extensibility: userspace applications need safe ways to expose domain-specific extension points, GPU resource management needs workload-specific memory and scheduling policies, and kernel eBPF JIT compilers need different runtime optimizations as workloads and hardware vary. However, built-in policies are safe but difficult to specialize across rapidly changing workloads and hardware…

Health and wellness content creators play an important role in shaping how people receive and engage with health information on social media. Beyond delivering information, they also convey care, build trust, and sustain relationships with audiences. As generative AI (GenAI) becomes increasingly integrated into creator work, existing research has examined AI disclosure, AI-mediated communication, and…

Workplace concern reporting infrastructure, including human resources (HR) portals, grievance procedures, and whistleblower hotlines, is the formal channel through which employees in most organizations raise concerns about harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. Yet existing research consistently finds that these systems fail the employees they are meant to protect: reports stall, concerns get filtered, retaliation occurs, and…

This dissertation investigates how to make modern AI systems safer as they grow more capable. It addresses two central sources of risk: malicious misuse, in which adversarial users coerce models into harmful behavior, and internal misalignment, in which models themselves pursue goals that diverge from human intent through deception, sandbagging, or other covert behaviors. The…

Play is often seen as a form of entertainment, leisure, or childhood development. However, it also acts as a meaningful experience that shapes how people connect with others and interact with the world around them throughout their lives. Prior work on meaningful play and communities of play has mainly focused on individual experiences and participation,…