Kiubon Kokko
Kiubon will use the $100,000 fellowship grant to create a feature documentary about his father’s seven-hour swim from China to Hong Kong in 1973 in search of a better future
Kiubon is most comfortable in an economy-class airplane seat, with his knees touching the back of his neighbor's chair.
Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Kiubon wanted nothing more than to leave. So, he did.
After attending Claremont McKenna College in California, Kiubon spent nine months in the Sierra Mountains and four months on a hitchhiking adventure across Europe. He then moved to Hong Kong to unearth his roots, learn his mother tongue, and find home.
Now, Kiubon fundraises his salary, supports missionaries across Asia, makes movies, and tries not to let the wet market ladies scam him while buying cabbage. He will use his $100,000 fellowship grant to reconcile his broken relationship with his father by creating a feature documentary about his father's seven-hour swim from communist China to Hong Kong in 1973 and its lasting effects on his family.
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Diana Hrisovescu & Shay McDonnell
Diana and Shay will use their $100,000 fellowship grant to develop Script, which aims to enable multilingual digital access to social welfare resources
Diana and Shay will use their fellowship grant to develop Script. Script aims to enable a greater number of individuals to access social welfare resources and entitlements. It will help immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and minority groups access government support digitally, on a user-friendly platform, and in their native language.
Diana moved to Ireland from Romania aged 14. She learned English in only three months to help her brother access medical support.
Diana taught herself web development by building websites from the ground up and has taught children aged 7-18 how to code via the CoderDojo community. She is also a member of Teen-Turn, an organization aiming to provide teen girls with hands-on STEM experience.
She now attends Trinity College Dublin, where she studies Computer Science with Business.
Shay also attends Trinity College Dublin, studying Computer Science with Linguistics. He began programming aged 13 and, by leveraging online resources, gained experience developing various Android mobile apps, games, and websites. He joined Script as co-founder and lead technical engineer in April 2022.
Rohan Taori
Rohan will use the $100,000 fellowship grant to build flexible, accessible, and interactive foundational video and text-based AI models
Rohan is a machine learning engineer who grew up in the Bay Area (he is also an avid Warriors fan!)
He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Stanford University, where he has trained AI models with synthetic data, tuned them to follow user instructions, and increased their reliability. Previously, he studied and taught computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Rohan will use his $100,000 fellowship grant to create flexible, accessible, and interactive AI models that can handle complex and diverse data. These models will be trained on large amounts of video data, empowering users to easily edit, generate, and reason about video content.
Isabella Teng & Varsha Raghavan
Isabella & Varsha will use their $100,000 fellowship grant to build an AI-powered next-generation video-production platform.
Isabella & Varsha will use their fellowship grant to build Rue, an AI-powered next-generation video-production platform. Rue’s tools eliminate process redundancies and drive creative visions, helping video projects get off the ground faster.
Isabella grew up in the Bay Area before studying and completing a B.S. in computer science at Yale. At Yale, she attended hackathons, programmed various mobile and web apps, TA-’ed CS courses, and conducted bioinformatics research. She has previously spent a month in Tel Aviv completing a data science fellowship and four months in Berlin working at an AI fintech startup.
Before co-founding Rue, Isabella was a fintech product manager working on real-time fraud detection models. She is also a photographer and painter.
Varsha has a keen interest in new technology and its sociological ramifications. As a high school student, she would spend days and nights fabricating hunks of metal into a 120-lb robot. She graduated with a B.S. in computer science from Yale, where she organized conferences on the ethics of AI and founded a licensed open-source web app called PPETrackr.
Before co-founding Rue, Varsha was a machine learning engineer at a drug-discovery startup. She used machine learning to identify novel gene therapies for oncology and published a paper on this work at the International Conference for Learning Representations. She is also a videographer and wildlife photographer.
Mykhailo Marynenko
Mykhailo will use his $100,000 fellowship grant to work on projects that combine technology, art, and human interaction.
Mykhailo is a software and hardware engineer from Ukraine. As well as being a keen researcher of security issues, he is passionate about building modern, collaborative, performant, scalable applications.
Mykhailo will use his $100,000 fellowship grant to work on projects that combine technology, art, and human interaction. One such project involves using AI and a custom-modified EEG headset to generate images from an artist’s brainwaves, thus developing new ways for artists to draw/visualize using visual cortex data.
Tony Morley
Tony Morley will use the $100,000 O'Shaughnessy Fellowship grant to fund research, communication, and innovation in progress studies.
Tony Morley is a progress studies writer and communicator specializing in the historical trends in global living standards and the forces that drive human progress and flourishing. His written work has appeared in TIME, Big Think, Freethink, The Progress Network, HumanProgress.org, and Quillette, among other publications.
Tony will use his fellowship grant to fund research, communication, and innovation in progress studies, including continuing his work on “Human Progress for Beginners,” the world’s first children’s book on progress, scheduled to be published with Pantera Press in Q4 of 2023.
Dr Alice Evans
Dr. Alice Evans will use the $100,000 O'Shaughnessy Fellowship grant to write the first-ever global history of gender.
Dr. Alice Evans is writing “The Great Gender Divergence” (forthcoming with Princeton University Press). This book will explain how the whole world became more gender equal, but why some countries are more gender equal than others.
To this end, she is studying the history of every single country and undertaking qualitative research in six continents. She is a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London and Visiting Associate Professor at Yale.
Nat & Martha Sharpe
Nat & Martha Sharpe will use the O'Shaughnessy Fellowship $100,000 grant to study and make documentary films of alternative childhood education schools.
Nat and Martha Sharpe have been a creative team for over a decade. Nat was a film school graduate and Martha a storytelling enthusiast. They fell in love while filming a musical parody of "Beowulf"with their friends.
After another comedy and two documentaries, they started having children. Focus shifted from art to survival. Even as struggling new parents, the Sharpes found small ways to keep creating and telling stories.
Together, they learned to code, got off food stamps, and traveled around America in an RV. Today, Nat and Martha homeschool their 5 kids and are eager to explore alternative education, expand their comfort zones, and—as always—make movies.
Nat and Martha will use their Fellowship (jointly) to investigate and document how we can prepare kids for a future where no career is safe. Is self-directed learning the answer? What happens when we let kids learn whatever they want? They will film and share the stories of the people who embody these questions.
Dr William Zeng
Dr. William Zeng will use the O'Shaughnessy Fellowship $100,000 grant to pursue open-source quantum computing.
Dr. William Zeng leads a quantum computing research group at Goldman Sachs and is founder and President of the Unitary Fund, a non-profit dedicated to developing the quantum ecosystem to benefit the most people. His research focuses on quantum computer architecture, algorithms and software.
He previously led initial development of Rigetti Computing's quantum cloud platform, and is co-inventor of the Quil quantum instruction language.
He received his PhD in quantum algorithms from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and his BSc. in Physics from Yale University. He was named to Forbes 30 under 30 in the Science category for his work on quantum computing.
Dr. Zeng will use his Fellowship to study how emerging quantum technologies can explore foundational questions in quantum mechanics. This next generation of experimental tests will probe fundamental aspects of nature, by considering what it means for something to be an observation / some-being to be an observer.
