Hi there, I’m Kendall 🌸
I’m PhD student at MIT advised by David Karger with MIT CSAIL. My work is supported by the NSF CSGrad4US fellowship.
Previously, I was a software engineer at Microsoft working on productivity for Copilot Dashboard and digital wellbeing for Viva Insights in Teams.
I graduated from UC San Diego in 2022 with a B.S. in Cognitive Science: Human-Computer Interaction with minors in Computer Science and Design. While there, I worked on projects advised by Philip Guo with Design Lab, Steven MacNeil with Temple HCI Lab, and Steven Dow with ProtoLab. I also co-founded the largest computing organization on campus, ACM UCSD and hosted professional development events with IEEE UCSD.
Kendall Nakai and Philip J. Guo. Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum of University Computing Majors via Undergraduate-Written Mentoring Guides: A Learner-Centered Design Workflow. ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, 2023.
Stephen MacNeil, Ziheng Huan, Kenneth Chen, Zijian Ding, Alexander Yu, Kendall Nakai, Steven Dow. Freeform Templates: Combining Freeform Curation with Structured Templates. ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 2023.
Kendall Nakai and Philip J. Guo. Scaling Up Access to the Hidden Curriculum: A Design Methodology for Creating Undergraduate Mentoring Guides. ACM Conference on Learning at Scale (work-in-progress short paper and poster), 2022.
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