Application Spotlight: Pauline

Being a hackNY Fellow last year was a lifechanging experience for me. The mentors, friends, and alumNY I met through the program shifted my world in various little ways, and I can’t imagine who I’d be now if I hadn’t gone through the program. Last year, I wrote this application trusting that hackNY would see my passion for using technology to serve my community, but I also really benefited from reflecting on my own experiences and values. I hope my essays help you in your own process of self-reflection! Best of luck!

Tell us about a coding project or a developer community project you’ve built that you are most proud of:

GPTrue Love is an AI dating sim game (made by me and Dania Ezz with Python and JS) where you help GPTheo get together with GPTessa! (Best on 13" screens, or scroll to the end of this for a demo: https://www.paulinewee.com/interactive-media) The choices are generated by scraping and processing Reddit forums, cookbooks, love poems, horoscopes, and more through GPT-2 (back then in 2021 GPT-3 was in closed beta and AI wasn't the massive tidal wave it is now!) Our dev approach was: map out design, architecture, and functionality for the MVP, build small working versions of each of the tools (e.g. the web scraper) until we had working components, and then stick things together. The biggest challenge was running GPT-2, because back then it was pretty complex to feed it data, finetune it, and figure out weights. We studied and tested it for over a week until we finally got it to the right level of adorably coherent but still very random. We honestly overcame most frustrations and annoyances through sheer stubbornness, a lot of Googling, and a mad desire to get our two ASCII-art computers to fall in love.

Why did you build this project? What about it matters to you?

This project was the culmination of a lot of Python, ML, and Javascript learning, as well as a desire to see how far we could take GPT-2 given the level of incoherence it had at the time. We thought: hey, if we can't feasibly make GPT-2 sound human, we can at least make it sound like a socially inept and word-stumbly computer who's madly in love, which is how the spark for GPTrue Love emerged. That's an insight I continue to apply to everything: how can I transform weaknesses (incoherence) into strengths (sounding madly in love), and what are creative and engaging ways to make tech accessible and interesting, especially to a world increasingly wary of technology worming its way into crumbling human institutions? How can we bring human emotions, compassion, and intention back into human computer interaction, especially with the rise of AI?

Why apply to hackNY specifically?

HackNY stood out to me for three reasons: the tight-knit community, the focus on diversity and inclusion, and the focus on tech for social good. First, I was attracted to the focus on diversity and inclusion.

First, I loved hackNY focus on community. I’m a big community person – in freshman year, I founded UXAD, the first UX student organization at NYU Abu Dhabi, taught a ton of workshops, and scaled it to 100+ members because I was so passionate about creating space for people to learn together. I also worked in other communities in creative technology (NYUAD’s Interactive Media Lab) and tech for social good (Reboot fellowship sponsored by the Stanford Public Tech Interest Lab) because I loved building and participating in community-centric cultures. From what I’ve heard from my hackNY friends and alumni (Sarah Al Towaity, Alex Ko, Paulin Alcoser, Mar Jaramillo, Abdullah Zameek), that’s precisely what the co-living community offers!

Second, as a Chinese-Filipino woman studying in NYU Abu Dhabi (currently New York!), I’ve always had a weird in-between identity, so I’ve always sought to make and join inclusive spaces where diverse perspectives are not just valued but also celebrated. I just think that these spaces allow people to be their best selves, come to unique insights, and do their best work together. Naturally, I’ve always made it a point to work with and lead with diverse teams whenever possible (UXAD’s E-board was from 4-and-something different countries, and I felt the difference in our discussions!). I love that hackNY shares the same values about diversity, which was what drew me to apply.

Lastly, I looked through the programs, Speaker Series, and social good opportunities for the summer and got really excited! I would love nothing more than to learn with and from all the brilliant hackNY alumni and community speakers, especially with regards to how tech can be more specifically applied to improving institutions for social good, not just locally but across the world. I’d also love to perhaps teach some workshops of my own (e.g. Figma, my one true love) to contribute to the knowledge pool! Beyond that, I’m particularly excited to join volunteering opportunities to be more involved with the broader NY community.

Tell us about societal issues that you'd like to solve, why they matter to you, and what you've done to address them․

There are three social impact initiatives that I’m excited about: using design and technology to improve accessibility, using existing “weak” AI for pressing issues in developing countries, and creating better education about AI safety and ethics.

First, I’m excited about using design and technology to democratize education and accessibility. At UXAD, we led and organized a campus-wide poster campaign critiquing poorly designed structures such as heavy doors, missing safeguards, and bad emergency exit paths that cause accidents or make it harder for disabled people to pass through or evacuate safely. As a member of the hackNY community, I would be eager to continue contributing to similar projects that shed light on accessibility through design, tech, and advocacy.

Second, I’d love to work on the application of existing "weak" AI to support developing countries across various social causes such as health, climate, and financial technology. I’m currently beginning work on a research project with the Human Data Interaction AI Research Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi, where we’re training LLMs to help with Emirati nurse education, especially to improve quality of care for the underserved. For me, this is evidence that we don’t need to wait for superintelligent AI – we can use the tools we have right now to start creating positive changes, and that’s another area I want to work in and around at hackNY.

Lastly, I recently joined a Global Existential Risks Workshop in Berkeley, which led me to realize how urgently we need effective curricula about AI safety and ethics across all levels of education. After the workshop, I worked on some research for tiered AI safety levels, but I want to expand on that work by developing open-source resources for AI safety-related education, perhaps through basic modules or an interactive game accessible to all, especially in developing countries where there's a lot of hype around AI, but very little concern about its ethical and social implications. By doing so, I hope to ensure that more people know how to navigate AI-related challenges in a responsible, ethical, and educated way. This would be a project I would love to collaborate on with peers at hackNY.

You are on a casual stroll to your favourite café when you suddenly notice your treasured fictional character, whom you decide to invite for brunch. Paint the scene for us: tell us who the character is, why you invited them, what you would discuss, etc. Frame your response to give us a genuine depiction of who you are and what values you hold dear.

I would bring Jiro Horikoshi from The Wind Rises to omakase. In another world, I’d talk to The Little Prince in a sheep cafe or talk art with Yatora Yaguchi from The Blue Period in a paint-and-sip, but in this world, where many of our most beautiful experiences and noble ambitions are also entangled with corrupt institutions and cruel realities, I want to talk to Jiro. In The Wind Rises, we follow Jiro as he grows up, becomes an engineer, finds and nurtures a doomed love, and ultimately invents the famous "Zero" fighter, which was used by the Japanese navy during World War II. In this way he does everything “right” in his career, and yet, like Oppenheimer, ultimately creates a tool that helps kill thousands of people around the world, including parts of the Philippines, where I was born and raised.

I want to ask him: What were you chasing? What would you have done differently? Could you have done differently? What went wrong, and what was your hand in it as the creator? Who would you have talked to, and what human institutions could have made a difference? Out of all the things that I think about as a technologist, I worry most that in our pursuit of building the most exciting technologies, we forget who we’re building for, or who in the developing world might be affected by the advancement of developed countries’ nearly superpower-level tech. This feels especially poignant in the age of AI, but has always been an issue (see: Mechanical Turk, Axie Infinity, Facebook in the Philippines, etc.) For those reasons, I’d like to talk to Jiro, who in many ways represents the morally gray failure to intervene, because there is probably a lot more to learn from those who have deeply failed despite their best efforts (Jiro was a hardcore pacifist strongly against Japan’s “futile war”, would you believe?) than from those who have succeeded