am Carey Okal, a master's student in Information Science at Cornell University (B.S. May 2026). My research spans three corners of computational social science: LLM-agent simulations of social behavior, large-scale analysis of persuasion in political news, and data science for disaster resilience and humanitarian response. This website is a window into my work.
At the Social Dynamics Lab, I work on a multi-agent social simulation where autonomous LLM agents interact, form relationships, and navigate a shared virtual world. My focus is in building the tooling to check how agents behave against what the world engine records, track down where the two diverge, and fix the bugs behind those gaps.
I built the roughly 2-million-article corpus of U.S. news articles (14 outlets, 2000–2025) the lab used to study how persuasive strategies vary with outlet credibility and ideology, collecting articles via sitemap crawling and archival scraping, then deduplicating and standardizing them into a unified schema.
The Data Science to Build Resilience and Improve Humanitarian Response Thought Summit, held at Cornell in May 2026, convened researchers and humanitarian leaders from institutions including the World Bank, the World Food Programme, UNHCR, IFPRI, NASA JPL, and Kenya's National Drought Management Authority.
Community conservancies in East Africa compete for visibility against booking platforms that take large commissions. Through Cornell's SMART Fellowship, I built a direct-booking and marketplace platform for the Il Ngwesi conservancy, which won our cohort hackathon and was adopted by the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association for nationwide extension.
I've taught at Cornell since Fall 2023, supporting around 300 students per semester across machine learning, data science, and web development courses, and earned perfect 10/10 TA evaluations all semesters.
Graduate Teaching Assistant · INFO 4555/5556 · FA 26
I'm joining the course staff for INFO 4555/5556, an upper-level business intelligence course taught by Jeff Christen. I'll support students through the work sessions and the semester-long team project that anchors the course, holding office hours and grading their work as they move from dimensional modeling and data transformation into metadata and data governance.
Course Assistant · ORIE 3120 · SP 26
I led weekly recitation sections for ORIE 3120, a large applied data science course in Cornell Engineering, covering everything from SQL and Tableau through regression, forecasting, and A/B test design. Outside of section, I held office hours, graded homework and project milestones, and kept an eye on Ed Discussion so students got help between classes.
Teaching Assistant · INFO 2950 · FA 24
I taught weekly lab sections for INFO 2950, Cornell's introductory data science course. Most of my time in lab went toward Python, statistical analysis, and helping students build the confidence to debug their own work when something broke. I held office hours, responded to Ed Discussion posts within a day, and met weekly with the professor to relay student feedback and refine the course.
Teaching Assistant · INFO 1300 · FA 23, SP 24, FA 25
I taught weekly lab sections for INFO 1300, an introductory web design and programming course. In lab, students designed and shipped their first accessible websites, working from markup and layout through basic UX decisions. I also held office hours, graded exams and projects, and answered questions on Ed Discussion throughout the week.