This post is part of the Meet the ETCL Team series, which introduces the wonderful people who work in the lab and who have worked with us in the past.
Victoria joined the team in October 2021 as the lab’s Coordinator of Operations. She keeps the lab running, provides operational support to the team, and is responsible for facilitating the upcoming DHSI in summer 2022.
Victoria completed her undergraduate degree in philosophy and Pacific & Asian Studies at the University of Victoria in 2017. She worked briefly as a research intern for the department of Pacific and Asian studies as well as the Centre for Pacific-Asian Initiatives (CAPI) on campus. In 2020, she received her MA in philosophy from the University of Toronto.
Outside of the lab, Victoria has her own project on diagnostic reasoning. She’s using corpus analysis on patient/doctor reports to isolate the semantic markers we use when we’re imagining ourselves and others counterfactually. She describes it as a weird fusion between philosophy, psychology, and computational linguistics that’s inspired by current problems in developing trustworthy and justifiable explainable artificial intelligent (XAI) interfaces.
When it comes to content, Victoria is a big fan of poetry and reading. She enjoys Ingeborg Bachman, Emily Dickinson, Anne Carson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and Robert Bringhurst. Her favourite film director is Lynne Ramsay. She likes podcasts about medicine and technology, but she prefers to read the transcripts. Victoria’s other interests include listening to music and she is an avid walker. She often seeks grounding activities like yoga, meditation, interacting with plants and animals, etc., but day-to-day, she’s obsessed with the stars.
Like many who are concerned with the downs and outs of west coast weather, Victoria’s go-to app is whichever one tells her the barometric pressure fluctuations in the area.