Hi, I'm Noah!
I’m a creative technologist and researcher working at the intersection of place-based learning, conversation analysis, and machine learning.
I study how technology can either amplify or flatten local language, identity, and knowledge as they are negotiated in everyday interaction, and I use those findings to design and build tools that improve intercultural understanding through in-person, place-based conversation.
Across projects, my work advances a consistent position:
- Conversation is a primary site where culture, power, and belonging are negotiated
- Conversation is fundamentally embodied - in-person conversation is more precise and complete than mediated substitutes.
- Technology should support global adaptation to place rather than adapt places to global standards
- Human judgment and social verification remain central, especially in AI-assisted systems
In an era of large-scale generative models optimized for fluency and synthesis, my work prioritizes locally situated context, traceability, and spatial reality.
My background spans education, technology, and design. Currently, I am pursuing independent, self-funded research in Oaxaca, Mexico, where I run two parallel research programs: one to understand how people relate to place, and the other to create enhanced tools for in-person conversation data-capture & analysis.
Research Programs
Conversation is increasingly captured, analyzed, and designed for through infrastructure that assumes it is textual, dyadic, and context-independent. These assumptions produce technical and institutional systems that reward conformity to dominant languages, interaction styles, and knowledge frameworks, while the situated, embodied, and multilingual character of everyday exchange is treated as noise to be filtered out.
My research asks what becomes possible when that orientation is reversed: when infrastructure is designed to preserve local context rather than abstract away from it, and when intercultural understanding is pursued through adaptation to place rather than the flattening of place into universal standards.
This work is organized across two complementary programs:
Local Conversation Studio (Intervention)
Place-based research on language, identity, and everyday interaction.
Local Conversation Studio is a place-based research and design program that investigates how locals and visitors negotiate language, identity, and knowledge through everyday conversation. The work combines ethnographic field research and qualitative analysis with the design of small, analog interventions that facilitate in-person intercultural dialogue.
Tools for Conversation (Infrastructure)
Infrastructure for capturing, encoding, and analyzing embodied interaction.
Most conversational data, whether used for research or AI training, is reduced to text, despite evidence that gesture, gaze, timing, and spatial arrangement are central to how meaning is produced in conversation. These losses originate not only in models or methods, but in the capture, recording, and annotation infrastructure itself.
Tools for Conversation is a methods research program that treats conversation as spatial, embodied, and multi-party from the point of capture forward. Through an integrated set of tools - from physical instrumentation to processing pipelines to human-in-the-loop correction - the program investigates how infrastructure shapes what becomes knowable about conversation.
How They Relate
Local Conversation Studio generates the field conditions and research questions, while Tools for Conversation builds the infrastructure to capture and analyze them. Together they ask what it would take to study conversation without first stripping away the features that make it meaningful.
Research & Design Philosophy
Design is like a conversation. We plan to speak, but the most conscientious approach begins not with speaking but with listening - and not just listening, but watching, feeling, being with. And even this is not enough. Before we can listen well, we have to situate ourselves in the local context and knowledge that frames what we are hearing in the first place. Only from that grounding can a response emerge that is accountable to the place and people it serves.
Knowledge → Understanding → Response
- Knowledge is situated and local. People speak from particular histories, geographies, and social positions.
- Understanding requires reflexivity and adaptation, especially across difference.
- Response — whether social, cultural, or technical — should emerge from this grounded understanding rather than override it.
Outside the Lab
- Polyglot with a case of topophilia: I enjoy learning languages in the places that formed them.
- Maker: I love to work with my hands, especially with plants. I've grown 50+ species of native plants and enjoy making through traditional fiber arts, such as handmade paper & weaving.
- Collaborator: I am looking for partners to expand this work. Currently volunteering with a local Oaxaca library to improve language exchange and website resources.
Contact
I work with researchers, designers, and institutions exploring how technology can support local knowledge and human conversation. I also offer 1:1 AI building sessions for researchers and professionals.
What Colleagues Say
I had the pleasure of working with Noah during his time at Microsoft, where he played a pivotal role in our Conversational AI workstream - specifically focusing on elevating conversational experiences in the Contact Center space.
From the outset, Noah stood out not only for his deep customer empathy and commitment to project success but also for his positive, can-do attitude that energized everyone around him.
Noah brings a rare combination of innovation, execution, and storytelling via creative sprint videos. I saw firsthand how he went above and beyond to support our customers, unblock high-impact initiatives, and serve as a trusted bridge between engineering, product, and customer-facing teams.
He's the kind of person you want on your most critical projects: reliable, creative, and relentlessly focused on impact.
Quick Facts
- Homebase
- Connecticut, USA
- Focus Areas
- Conversational AI · Systems-engineering · Place-based Learning
- Current Work
- Local Conversation Studio - OaxacaTools for Conversation