Talks and presentations

Assessing the reliability of large language models for deductive qualitative coding: A comparative intervention study with chatgpt

November 17, 2025

Talk, ASIS&T Annual Meeting, Washington DC, VA, USA

I this talk at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting I presented my paper “Assessing the reliability of large language models for deductive qualitative coding: A comparative intervention study with chatgpt”. The paper assesses whether ChatGPT can achieve standard benchmarks in structured deductive classification tasks. The study uses the Comparative Agendas Project Supreme Court classes as a human-coded benchmark, finding that with a step-by-step task decomposing strategy aproximating chain-of-thought prompting, ChatGPT reaches acceptable levels of interrater reliability and accuracy levels approximating a custom-trained classifier such as ROBERTA. My talk focused on the implications of utilizing chatbots as approximate human coders or assistants.

The epistemological consequences of llms: Rethinking collective intelligence and information institutions

November 14, 2025

Talk, ASIS&T SIG-AI Symposium, Washington DC, VA, USA

I this talk at the ASIS&T SIG Symposium I presented my paper “The epistemological consequences of llms: Rethinking collective intelligence and information institutions”. The paper advances an analysis of LLMs from the perspective of modern epistemology, arguing that LLMs fundamentally lack reflective knowledge, the type of knowledge that endows propositions with internalist justifiedness and upon which knolwedge transmission ultimately depends. Because LLMs are transmitters of already justified bodies of knowledge, their use as sources of justifiedness threatens to erode the epistemic status of human reasoners. The erosion of internalist justifiedness across networks of human reasoners threatens the advancement of knowledge and can exacerbate the proliferation of errors. The talk proposes the institution of epistemic norms within human-LLM interaction, proposing both institutional and individual norm-setting models that seek to preserve and promote epistemic virtues.

An enactivist approach to HCI: Bridging the gap between agent autonomy and affordances - HCI International 2025 Proceedings

June 22, 2025

Talk, HCI International 2025, Gothia Towers Hotel and Swedish Exhibition & Congress Centre, Gothenburg, Sweden

In this talk, I presented my paper “An enactivist approach to HCI: Bridging the gap between agent autonomy and affordances”, which advances draws from the Enactivist theory of cogntion to reoperationalize the “sense of agency” variable in HCI into “feelings of agency” as a neurophenomenological variable. The decomposes feelings of agency into two subconstructs: (a) affective engagement, measured neurodynamically through Frontal Alpha asymmetry and alpha-beta ratio, and (b) volitional attention, measured neurodynamically through cross-frequency coupling in the anterior cingulate cortext (ACC) and orbitofrontal cortext (OFC). The talk proposes that this reoperatioanlization is a better measure of how emerging HCI modalities affect personal agency and advances three design principles: (i) Engagement-Disengagement Modulation, (ii) Affordance Gradation, and (iii) expressive and authorial interfaces.

Dazzling data visualizations: Interactive community maps with tableau public

June 12, 2023

Talk, OLITA Digital Odyssey Conference, Toronto, Canada

In this conference I presented how to use Tableau Public to create community data visualizations that leverage open public library data. The purpose of the presentation was to (a) teach participants how to leverage different data sources, conduct data manipulations and joins, leverage Tableau Functions to transform data and convert them into effective visualizations and (c) showcase these steps using Toronto Public Library data in the service of community planning and communicating data-driven outcomes.

Institutional values and information environments, Presentation, iSchool Student Conference

September 01, 2016

iSchool Student Conference: Canada Now, Annual Meeting, University of Toronto iSchool, Toronto, ON, Canada

In this talk, I argued that emerging social media information environments such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook erode the quality of public discourse, in consequence undermining democracy. Specifically, the presentation argued that the new social media platforms effectuate the disaggregation of information channels and sources, potentiating information siloes and favoring small and simple information units with the capacity for memetic dissemination, leading to a reduction of rational standards. Leveraging dual-process theory and reverse-adaptation theory, the presentation argues that because information units on social media platforms favor replication over epistemic merit, they undermine system which is indispensible and conductive to rational thought: the processing of sequential information for logical rigor, as well as consensus-building mechanisms that rely on social norms of civil discourse.