Writing

Research notes for curious people.

Plain-language tours through the papers, prototypes, and ideas behind my work.

phonetic transcription benchmark chart

When More Synthetic Speech Labels Stop Helping

A plain-language tour of our Interspeech 2026 paper on phonetic transcription, why synthetic labels help only up to a point, and what this means for accent-robust speech technology.

Alexander Metzger 2026-06-20
Research Speech ML Accessibility
ASR word error rate plot for ALLSTAR DHR accents

Speech AI Progress Is Not Evenly Distributed

A lay summary of Connecting the Dots, our draft on why automatic speech recognition improvements for mainstream English do not reliably transfer to minority English varieties.

Alexander Metzger 2026-06-19
Research Speech Fairness ML
embedded machine learning hardware

Giving AI Agents Real Hardware to Learn From

A lay summary of Embedded Arena, our benchmark and hardware-in-the-loop harness for AI agents optimizing machine learning models on microcontrollers.

Alexander Metzger 2026-06-16
Research ML Embedded Agents
living sustainability browser extension

Making Product Sustainability Visible While You Shop

A plain-language summary of Living Sustainability, our IMWUT work on in-context interactive environmental impact communication for everyday product decisions.

Alexander Metzger 2026-06-15
Research Sustainability HCI Access
K3,3 embedded on a torus

How Many Holes Does a Graph Need?

A friendly explanation of our graph genus algorithm, why drawing graphs on surfaces matters, and how rotations helped compute the genus of the (3,12)-cage.

Alexander Metzger 2026-06-14
Research Algorithms Math Graph Theory
surfaces folded and glued from polygons

A Gentle Door Into Graphs on Surfaces

A lay summary of my UW honors thesis, which builds intuition for topological graph theory and the Practical Algorithm for Graph Embedding.

Alexander Metzger 2026-06-13
Research Algorithms Math Graph Theory