Hello World

I'm Uzayer Masud, I'm 21 and I used to be, above everything else, a writer. I started when I was 6 years old and primarily did just that up until 2024. I worked as an editor for years, have multiple published pieces that I'm still somewhat fond of, a magazine I built from scratch by mentoring writers, and countless unpublished pieces in my writing folder.

Since then, I've mostly done (and implemented) system design at the sociotechnical and organisational layer. My foray into tech and research was very non-linear and interdisciplinary and I am still finding my way through it. At every step of the way, I wanted to create something, and the infrastructure I needed didn't exist, so I built it for myself and those who come after me. I believe in resilient systems that outlast individual actors and are designed for humans in mind. Most of this work is structural (therefore difficult to quantify and demonstrate) but its effects and benefits compound later at scale.

My dream was to study Stanford's Symbolic Systems (intersection of CS, Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology), now I'm planning to do research and apply for a PhD in my final year of undergrad.

My interests are in linguistics and cognition, NLP, AI ethics, cognitive science-inspired AI models, human-computer-interaction and system design. I cannot, for the life of me, let go of the explanations of the "why this matters" and "here's the thought process and how everything connects." I almost always think in graph-structures and have a hard time linearising my thoughts, hence the metacognitive philosophy-filled mess this doc has turned out to be.

I'm also somewhat good at business.

Colophon

A colophon is a snobby designer word for 'how this doc was made'

I started writing this in November 2025, when after a long depressive period I realised I could macrothink in the projects I did but struggled to connect the dots and find proper semantic throughlines in the work. I've revisisted this doc countless times, both as trying to build the building blocks for my college applications at the time, but also as a reminder to myself that I exist and the work is real.

The History section contextualises my projects in what happened to me in my (so far short) life and expains the decisions I made. The projects are structured with a What, Why and Additional Info.

Everything else is reference material. I have some publications linked at the end if you have the appetite to read more of my writing. This document might be the densest piece of work I've produced so far.