Orbital Surveillance & Collision Assessment Radar; Competing Philosophies: How AI Search Is Transforming the Laws of Business Discovery 2 views

Every technical system makes decisions about what its users see, and those decisions are never as natural as they look. Whether it is an algorithm choosing your next video, a ranking function showing what links you see, or a default filter, each draws a quiet boundary for what the person on the other side of the screen gets to see. The user rarely notices, because the internals of the system are invisible by design. You see only what is filtered through, and the system chooses your reality. My capstone project and STS research approach this idea from opposite ends. One aims to be a visualization tool that must render tens of thousands of interactable objects onto a single screen. The other examines how AI search algorithms decide which businesses exist and what it means for consumers and providers. Both highlight that what a system shows is not only technical. It eventually becomes a question about power. My technical capstone addressed a simple question: how do you render over fourteen thousand orbital objects for users in real time? How can they effectively learn and get information for every single one of these objects? With a team of four, we built OSCAR, the Orbital Surveillance and Collision Assessment Radar. OSCAR is a browser-based system that renders NASA’s orbital data through two interactive 3-D views — one geocentric, one from the ground (observatory). Users can select individual satellites, inspect telemetry, and scrub forward twenty-four hours to predict future positions. Rendering satellites is a bounded problem. Deciding which businesses a consumer hears about is not, and that question drives STS research. The majority of Google searches now end without a single click, and AI-generated answers increasingly curate a shortlist of recommended businesses in place of the traditional list of links. I analyzed this shift through two competing sociotechnical frameworks: technological determinism, which treats AI search as an inevitable consequence of the market and competitive pressure, and Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” which argues that technologies embed the values of the organizations that build them and can be consciously redesigned. Neither framework alone is adequate. Determinism without Winner collapses into fatalism; Winner without determinism becomes naive optimism. Taken together, these projects illuminate the gap between what a system shows its user and the full reality where engineering quality becomes a kind of policy. OSCAR taught me this from the inside, as someone making design choices and rendering decisions. My STS research taught me the same thing from the outside, watching a larger system reshape conditions for visibility within the market. Whether a system displays satellites or filters down the entirety of the internet, the engineer choosing how to represent the world is doing moral work, whether it is framed that way or not.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

AI; Philosophy ; Business ; NASA; Space; Orbital; Satellites

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Technical Advisor: Mark Sherriff STS Advisor: Sean Murray Technical Team Members: Elliot Hong, Thomas Welch, Aaryan Asthana

English

2026-05-08