Derrick Zhen

Email: dzhen001@gmail.com | CV

I'm a philosophy MA student at Georgia State University. Previously, I studied computer science and philosophy at Swarthmore College. I'm currently seeking PhD opportunities in HCI. Here are some questions that interest me:
  • How can GenAI-powered EdTech be used to enhance students' critical thinking skills?
  • How do we ensure that the next generation of EdTech is designed with input from students and teachers?
Profile picture
Taken at Redwood National Forest, OR

Peer Reviewed Publications

  1. We report self-identified ethical concerns of 115 practitioners. We enumerate their concerns and discuss how even relatively powerful software engineers often lacked the power to resolve their ethical concerns. I worked on this paper Summer '22 during a REU at CMU.

  2. We use emerging Riemannian geometry based classifiers and regressors to perform eye-tracking tasks over a 2021 dataset: EEGEyeNet. This was my final project for CS099 (Brain Computer Interfaces).

Some Recent Projects

  1. Final project for my Parallel & Distributed Systems class (Fall '23), taught by Dr. Tia Newhall. We designed, implemented and evaluated a P2P chat network that leverages a hypercubic topology to guarantee log(n) neighbors and log(n) hops for n total peers.

  2. 3 projects from my Game Systems class (Spring '23), taught by Dr. Keith O'Hara. These projects include: a remake of a retro game, a demake of a modern game and an original game. Made using TIC-80, C++ and 8bitworkshop.

  3. 3 projects from a Computer Graphics course I took at Bryn Mawr (Spring '23), taught by Dr. Alina Normoyle. These projects include a 3D mesh viewer, a particle system and a tree modeler, all written in C++ using the OpenGL library.

Miscellaneous

  1. I helped put together the physical and digital infrastructure of WSRN, Swarthmore's oldest student-run radio station, after a prolonged hiatus.

  2. Accomplishments & reflections from my gap year (2021-2022), during which I was a full-stack engineer at Kapwing, a cloud video editor.

Philosophy

  1. Term paper for my cognitive science seminar (Fall '24), taught by Dr. Dan Weiskopf. This paper defends an underexamined assumption in cognitive science, namely that the formats of public representations (like maps and languages), can be applied to mental representations.

  2. Term paper for my Adam Smith seminar (Spring '25), taught by Dr. Eric Wilson. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of Smith's account of how the 'impartial spectator', a kind of super-ego underlying our moral judgment, develops in childhood.

  3. Term paper for my Nietzsche seminar (Fall '24), taught by Dr. Jessica Berry. I argue that Nietzsche's problem with hedonism is that pain and pleasure, as conscious states, are superficial and subject to influence from the 'herd'. Therefore, they cannot be a source of value to noble individuals.