Reva Hirave

Project 1: Checkpoint 1

History of Coffee

I am a big fan of coffee and think that it would be interesting to learn more about the history of my favorite beverage. I also think that this topic could lend well to an earthy aesthetic, which I am curious about translating into a digital medium like a website.

The effects of social media on political polarization

I spent my summer working on an app that aims to use AI to reduce political polarization on social media and the issue has become very important to me. I find it incredibly concerning how social media has so much influence over the way we think, which most people either aren't aware of, or don't care. I'm working on a spin-off computational social science project this semester that will try to quantify viewpoint diversity and argument quality within a set of discussion threads. I care deeply about this issue and think that it would be interesting to visualize the little-known dangers of social media.

How do language models work?

Most of my research has been in natural language processing, which is the field of processing and understanding human "natural" language. However, I still don't seem to fully understand how large language models work, and the more I learn, the more confused I get. I think I would benefit immensely from the challenge of visually communicating this technically complex topic to a general audience. I also think that many people would be interested to learn the technology and math behind ChatGPT and other chat bots and I would hope to remove some of the mystery and fear that surround AI. If I'm feeling ambitious, I think it could be fun (and doable?) to hook up an inference API endpoint to my webpage so that users can interact with a generative AI webpage as a part of the demo. That may require Javascript skills that I don't have, though.