(About Me)

Most mornings before starting my day, I check what my mom sent on WhatsApp. It's usually an animated GIF with warm colors, text about flowers and good mornings, which is the kind of thing that makes everyone in the group feel genuinely cared for. Not explicitly beautiful by any design standard I was ever taught, but it evokes a warmth that motivates me to get out of bed. I've spent so much time thinking about this.

The question of why some things feel warm and most don’t, even when they function identically, had substantially influenced my decision to study both Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Yale. The questions I kept running into lived exactly at their border: How do systems reason? How do people actually feel? Why does the gap between those two things cause so many of the problems worth solving?

A lot of my work is shaped by the cultures I grew up in. The archive I built for Sudanese art and music started because I was searching for a centralized platform with music, literature, art, film, but I couldn't find one. The animated greeting I built was a direct attempt to understand my mom's GIFs and to figure out what warmth is made of and whether code could hold it.

My more technical work follows the same curiosity. I built a robot through Yale's Social Robotics Lab that detects cognitive distortions in live speech. I'd been thinking for a long time about what it means to deploy AI in emotionally sensitive contexts with no accountability for what happens when it's wrong. Upon read the Garcia v. Character Technologies lawsuit and writing various research papers about “Responsible AI Deployment,” I wrote and thought extensively about the ethics and psychological implications before touching the software, pneumatics, or hardware. I tend to do a lot of this brainstorming in the journal that I carry around with me EVERYWHERE. This has all made me realize that the thought and framing behind a system matters as much as its functionality—perhaps even more. I absolutely love prototyping, designing, problem-solving and researching. I am deeply fascinated by the digital world, particularly robotics, graphic experiences, cultural preservation, and joyful experimentation. Curiosity and empathy are my strongest qualities, and they ground the way I approach human-computer interaction.

I research first, integrate ethics early, then design, prototype, and build. Upon deployment, I think carefully about what each interaction feels like to use, who's affected by it, and what it assumes about the person on the other side.

I’ve come to see my personal growth as analogous to a flower’s journey—one of blooming, adapting, and thriving with purpose. This perspective shapes much of my creative work, from flower-inspired interfaces to vibrant color palettes that draw from nature. Each project reflects my desire to create technology that feels vibrant, intentional, and deeply engaging.