Research · An academic story · 2020 – ongoing
I build the thing first, then write the paper
Three directions, one live research graph, and two drafts looking for a place to publish.
This is a research agenda with receipts, not a wishlist. Every direction below has something already shipped, measured, or taught behind it. I build the instrument first, then earn the right to write about it. And the writing has started.
Origin · August 2020
My thesis found schools could not carry sex education
My graduation thesis started in August 2020: design interventions to bridge the gap between the sex education Indian students get and what they need to become fully functioning adults. The plan was quantitative: measure how much kids actually understand across the sub-topics, and how that understanding shifts across stages of psychosexual development. There was no single moment where it died. Schools kept declining, and the experts and teachers around the study kept reporting the same thing: teachers are not equipped to carry this. The conclusion, that formal education was not the way, redirected the next five years.
The thread · No grand plan
Building something is one thing. Surviving the real world is another.
There was no five-year master plan connecting any of this. What there was: an instinct that kept resurfacing, that building something and having it survive brutal real-world testing are two different beasts. It showed up in a 2020 wellbeing evaluation platform, in healthcare-grade AI evals, and in a content forge that red-teams learning games before children see them.
The instrument · /knowledge
Agents do the reading, I take the decisions.
The knowledge base behind this agenda is how I look at prior art, with Claude in the loop and me at the gates. Agents run the stages, a critic shadows each one with its own lens, and three human gates decide what moves. A ledger records every gate and exits non-zero on lies.
A hypothesis or an open question enters.
Seams, web scans, impact and a kill condition.
Adjudicate against the graph. Evenhanded gap-finding.
Ingest, verify, review, drift audit.
Re-run the verdict. Ship only the delta.
Read the constraints. Design the study.
Consolidation faithfulness, then auto-freeze.
Then the study leg: pre-register, apply for ethics, execute, ingest my own results.
Around the loop sits standing infrastructure: integrity checks on every node, a weekly drift monitor, a weekly adversarial spot-audit, and a drift self-test proven able to flag at-risk. About 480 papers went in over three weeks, read as abstracts and AI reviews rather than deep manual reads. The depth is the apparatus, not a claim to have read every one.
Direction 1
Using play to study topics people won’t talk about
Surveys and interviews provoke the very stigma they try to measure. Gamified micro-learning creates private, non-judgmental environments where honest signals surface as choices instead of confessions. Receipts: the 2020 thesis no school would host, and SwipeEd, the live instrument, built with a community partner. The measurement study is future work, and it goes through ethics review before a single datapoint flows.
Direction 2
Keeping AI tutors fair across cultures
Long-horizon AI tutors need guardrails that hold pedagogical neutrality across socio-cultural contexts, not just across prompts. Receipts: AI Studio, where guardrails and evals shipped at healthcare grade, and SwipeEd’s content forge, where deterministic gates and adversarial review kept 33,713 scenarios safe for children.
Direction 3
Measuring the mind in isolated, confined, extreme environments
This one came from a convergence: what else can play-based assessment do, which other taboo topics could use it, and a lifelong obsession with Mars and life in isolated, confined, extreme environments. One day it clicked: astronauts might need something to keep them sane, and this could be that. Default Mode Network research in ICE environments is the stress test of the whole methodology.
The papers · 2026
The writing has started
Two drafts are ready and looking for a publication venue. Paper 1 is about the instrument itself, written up as a design case. Paper 2 makes the argument: a pedagogy of approach comes before a pedagogy of discomfort, for learners who are willing but shut out. Both grew inside the graph, and both were red-teamed by the same adversarial critics before any human reviewer sees them.
Papers first. The degree when it earns its place.
Teaching · Writing
The semester that sent me back to industry
Three courses at a design school, in three capacities: teaching assistant under the dean of academics, then co-facilitator, then a full course of my own. I went to test whether academia was my exit from industry. The students went the extra mile on every detail and sent me back the other way. Now industry is where I collect what is worth teaching.
Learning and relearning. Always!
On the writing side, two essays. Agile Collaboration with Mid-Fidelity is already published on the Innovaccer Design blog, on how mid-fidelity keeps a team moving without over-committing too early. Stop Shipping Finished AI, the companion to the AI Studio story, is what a 1990s printer teaches about shipping AI products before they are done learning.
The base, in numbers