I am currently teaching computer science courses in the Math and Computer Science department at Adelphi as a full time Assistant Teaching Professor. I was a Visiting Assistant Professor from 9/2104 - 12/2015 and a Senior Adjunct. I also occasionally taught as an adjunct at Molloy in the past.

I usually now teach online courses, and in the past I taught hybrid courses, which are half taught online and half in the classroom.
I was the principal investigator for the NY State STEP grant at Adelphi and helped write the CSTEP grant as well. I was also formerly the Levermore Global Scholar coordinator at Adelphi.

I graduated from Long Island University, C. W. Post campus, with my bachelor's degree in English and my MBA in Finance. I worked in small software companies for about 20 years, usually leaving when the company grew past the small stage.

My most recent business life was in the Salesforce ecosystem with IBM as a Senior Developer / Architect in the federal and finance verticals. I specialize in data integration and business intelligence. I also run a small software company called Octagon Systems, targeting the healthcare industry with a system that sends claims electronically to insurance companies. It offers an array of services, from medical billing and reporting system support  to web design.

Much older background:

In 1985, I started working for a small computer company, IMREX,  using the new relational database IBM machine: The AS/400.  When I started, we had just upgraded to 8 gigabytes of storage, each gigabyte taking four feet of space in a crowded computer room. When the air conditioning quit, we ineffectively blew fans on the disks to keep them from crashing. As a trainer, I carried rolls of huge tapes onto planes to demonstrate accounting and distribution systems. As a quality control specialist, I tried to catch problems at the end of poorly designed code, eventually realizing the solution was in changing the design process. When I happened upon Entity Relationship Diagrams and SQL, my job as a quality control manager became much easier.

I moved to other small computer companies, each of whom grew to medium sized companies. I went to RGTI, to manage quality control and projects for a warehousing system written in C on both Unix and VMS platforms. I managed a team of programmers from Russia, communicating with them via the internet as it was just becoming widely used. Every installation hooked to a different database. This was the first job in which I made things move, programming carousels, monorails and RF equipment.

From there I moved to the telecom industry, working for Comverse Technology, working with switches around the world. I spent three years consulting with Chase, changing the phone system you reached when you called for your bank balance. This company kept me on the cutting edge of technology, programming the systems that controlled text messages and activation scripts for cell phones, and working with advanced speech recognition  systems.

I also worked with AFSUSA, a non-profit that supports intercultural understanding through high school foreign exchange programs. At AFSUSA, I explore Business Intelligence building data warehouses in MSSQL and using Microsoft's Power BI tool to visualize data.


Publications:

REFEREED CONFERENCE: 

Jing, F., Berger, S., Sandoval, J., Pepper, K., Wheeler, A., Redondomayoral, P., Lokesh, D., Feng, A., Mijalkovic, M.,  Chaoyun, B., Dholakia, S. &  Goyal, M. (April 2024). "Designing for Agonism: 12 Workers’ Perspectives on Contesting Technology Futures" ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3641001 ) Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 8, No. CSCW1, Article 162. Presented by Kristin Pepper at 27th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW'24) San Jose, Costa Rica November 9-13, 2024.

topic: collaborative analysis of the opportunities and limitations of participatory research methods  and dissensus-based approaches to AI research and design.

In this paper, we gather 12 workers from a large technology company, as recent participants of a research initiative on the social impact of emerging technologies, to present a collaborative analysis of the opportunities and limitations of dissensus-based approaches to technology research and design. We introduce a series of speculative and deconstructive probes and present findings from their use in four collaborative design sessions. We then draw on the theoretical tradition of Agonism to identify moments of friction, refusal, and disagreement over the course of these sessions. We contend that this approach offers a politically important alternative to consensus-based collaborative design methods and can even surface new rhetorics of contestation within discourses on technology futures. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of worker-authored research and an initial set opportunities, challenges, and paradoxes as a resource for future efforts to "Design for Agonism."

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.

Additional Key Words and Phrases: Agonism, dissensus, emerging technologies, collaborative design, speculative design, deconstruction, agonistic participatory design

∗All authors contributed equally to this research.

NON-REFEREED ONLINE JOURNAL ARTICLES: