Salma Alkhoudi
anthropologist of science (in the making) at stanford.
i work on intelligence between theory, writing, ethnography, art, and engineering
building 01
latent noise
a digital art and academic piece on dialect-specific semantic geometry in arabic word embeddings, tied to my dissertation. experimentally traces words through dialect portraits, an essay that distorts as you read it, an interpretability machine failing on arabic, and a bilingual coda left untranslated. nlp? poetry? linguistics? disciplinary lines blur.
spar
a thought experiment on the collapse of intelligence turned full-stack platform for human cognitive reinforcement. the focus as of late has been machine learning reinforcement, as we accumulate a slow growth of cognitive debt. spar is a platform that reimagines human-machine interaction, an attempt at building ai around a process that guardrails productive frictions for our mind. it reimagines education, learning, and working with ai as a thinking partner. in its first iteration, spar is a pedagogical ai tool with pilots running in real classrooms.
writing (and theorizing) 02
against intelligence
an essay tracing intelligence, whatever that means.
ai & ijtihad
what role does ai play in answering questions that tradition values on the basis of virtuous struggle?
imaginaries of ai
vignettes on labor, locality, and imaginaries of "intelligent" work.
bridging the ai divide
a report on the state of artificial intelligence governance and competitiveness across the arab world.
dissertating 03
Arab Technofutures: Natural Language Processing, ‘Arabness’ and the Cultural Worlds of Algorithms in the Gulf
my dissertation is an anthropology of science pulling at the frays of intelligence, machines, language, capital and cultural imaginaries.
ethnographic fieldwork sits in the labs where the parsing and training happens, in the fragments of machine learning and natural language processing, strewn across dialects and training corpora, between benchmarks and venture capital, laboratories and research institutes, as models exceed the billions and trillions of parameters.
teaching 04
sts 1introduction to science, technology & society
critical perspectives on the history, social context, epistemology, and ethics of science, technology, and medicine. the goal of the course is to learn about major concepts and methods from science & technology studies, introduced in the context of real-world issues.
anthro 82 · humbio 176amedical anthropology
how health, illness, and healing are understood, experienced, and constructed in social, cultural, and historical contexts. topics: biopower and body politics, gender and reproductive technologies, illness experiences, medical diversity and social suffering.