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# quick stuff
# research
# teaching
# contact
# in brief
I'm currently an MPCS student in the Computer Science department at the University of Chicago, currently working on projects with Gordon Kindlmann and Dennis Shasha .
I grew up in New York City, but I've been in Chicago for 5 years completing my undergraduate and Master's degrees here at UChicago. You'll often find me at the CSO or Lyric Opera, or rehearsing for my next performance with the UChicago Piano Performance Program . I'm a big reader of historical biographies (recently completed the third of Robert Caro's LBJ series which I'd highly recommend to anyone curious), a huge fan of objectively terrible television, and an ok-computer scientist or so I've been told.
# research
My research lies at the intersection of machine learning interpretability, visual analytics, and human–computer interaction. I work with Gordon Kindlmann at the University of Chicago on Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits (NERO), a visualization system for analyzing how neural networks respond to transformations in input data. I also collaborate with Dennis Shasha at NYU on PatentNerd, an AI-powered platform that uses large language models to evaluate and refine patent claims. Together, these projects combine computational rigor with visual reasoning, helping humans better understand how models and ideas behave.
# teaching
I've served as a Teaching Assistant for several core computer science courses at the University of Chicago, including Introduction to Computer Science I & II and Data Visualization. I also was one of the primary instructors for the 2023 Summer Coding at UChicago: Builder's Academy program here at the UChicago, teaching programming fundamentals to 25 Chicago public school students over the course of a summer. One more: I founded and led a Girls Who Code program right here at Carnegie Elementary School that introduced elementary-school students to creative coding, robotics, and computational thinking, experiences that shaped my belief in accessible, inclusive CS education.
# contact me
The best way to reach me is by email at abeckler@uchicago.edu.