In my research, I focus on understanding how technical knowledge crosses national boundaries. My main research project involves an ethnographic study of software developers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, focusing on their use of technical documents produced in other countries. My analysis draws on literature in economics and sociology of knowledge as well as literature on economic and cultural globalization. I am interested in the conflicts between the local and the global commitments experienced by the software developers, and the ways in which such conflicts affect their use of "foreign" documents and ultimately the re-creation of foreign practice locally. My dissertation project is summarized in an abstract for my upcoming talk at the CSCW doctoral colloquium. The following are my other recent and upcoming talks related to this topic (the texts of the papers are available upon request):

• "Persistent Technical Conversations: A View from the Periphery," Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40), Waikoloa, Hawaii, January 3-6, 2007.

• "Foreign Knowledge in the Work of Brazilian Software Developers," CSCW Doctoral Colloquium, November 4, 2006.

• "Decaying into the Global: Construction, Decay and Re-configuration of Brazilian Computer Industry," Society for Social Studies of Science, Vancouver, November 2-4, 2006.

• "Reading the Free Manual: Foreign Knowledge in the Work of Brazilian Software Developers," Informatics Goes Global, Bloomington, Indiana, March 3-5 2006.

While my dissertation project focuses on the consumption of online resources, I am also quite interested in how such resources are produced. I recently presented a paper on journaling, which was following up on another one co-authored with Joseph Hall:

• "Online Journaling as a Federated Community of Practice," American Sociological Association, Montreal, August 11-14, 2006.

• "Blogging Together: Digital Expression in a Real-Life Community," (with Joseph Hall), Social Software in the Academy Workshop , Los Angeles, May 2005.

During 2003 and 2004 I also participated in a project on emerging uses of digital photography lead by Nancy Van House and Marc Davis. See our CHI paper and some unpublished papers.

Prior to starting my program at SIMS, I worked at the intersection of computational linguistics and human-computer interaction, trying to figure out how to build speech interfaces efficiently. While at Stanford, I worked on a project to provide speech interface to a robotic helicopter. I later joined a startup (Quack.com, later bought by AOL), where I worked lead development of tools for design of speech interfaces. Earlier in college I took great interest in computer assisted language learning, which ended up being my concentration area within my major (cognitive science), combining psychology of learning, computational linguistics and language learning. I still take interest in linguistics, and may try to incorporate it into my research in the future, though it's a low priority.