Improving decisions across engineering, education, agents, and systems.

Can open-source generative AI scale thematic analysis without hiding the methodological choices?

Qualitative analysis depends on interpretive judgment. Automating it is easy; automating it in a way another researcher can inspect and challenge is the hard part.

Virginia Tech Academy of Data Science Discovery Fund

A small, focused award to develop reproducible workflows for inductive qualitative codebook development.

$10,000 · 2024–2025

GATOS: Generative AI-enabled Theme Organization and Structuring

The workflow summarizes each response, embeds and clusters those summaries, generates candidate codes, and organizes them into themes. It was tested against three synthetic datasets whose themes were known in advance — so recovery of the intended structure could actually be checked rather than asserted.

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2026

Why people leave computer science

The validated method was then used on a real corpus of more than 10,000 Reddit posts, surfacing the reasons people give for leaving the field — an analysis that would not have been practical by hand.

Journal of Engineering Education, 2025

GATOS qualitative analysis workflow

The method is documented, citable, and being packaged for release. The Studio entry states plainly what it does today, what it does not, and which claims the evidence does not yet support.

Research prototype · packaging in progress

Analysis and methods training with other groups

The same workflow is what the lab brings to organizations holding interview, survey, or open-response data they cannot read at scale, and to research teams who want to run the method themselves.