Abstract
Engineering practice is often framed as a purely technical pursuit, yet it is fundamentally a sociotechnical endeavor where organizational rules shape human experiences. This portfolio explores two distinct projects: a capstone project automating sales prospecting and an STS research project analyzing noise inequality in urban planning. While these projects address different domains, they are united by a common sociotechnical tension: how technical models and "black-boxed" rules can either empower human actors or structurally exclude their concerns. Understanding this relationship is essential for engineering practice, as it reveals that success is defined not just by technical accuracy, but by how a system integrates with its social and historical context.
The technical portion of my thesis produced a prospecting automation system called LeadFlow, developed for Zbooni, a UAE-based connected-commerce platform. The project addressed a critical organizational failure: sales representatives were spending 30% of their time on manual discovery with a conversion rate of only 1%, while a decentralized prospecting model prioritized volume over quality. Using a systems-engineering approach, including stakeholder analysis and requirements traceability, my team designed a five-phase zero-baseline validation framework. This framework elicited stakeholder heuristics to create 43 measurable features, which were then deployed through an explainable rule-based model. By centralizing the lead queue and establishing clear AUC thresholds for moving from rule-based to logistic-regression scoring, LeadFlow serves as a methodological bridge to address sales prospecting as a complex systems problem. The project demonstrates that effective technical design must start by quantifying human heuristics before deploying automated solutions.
In my STS research, I examined how transportation planning networks perpetuate historical noise inequities through technical and regulatory rules. Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Professor Beitske Boonstra’s framework of project becoming, I compared the Purple Line Light Rail expansion with the H Street Bridge reconstruction in Washington D.C. My research revealed how noise inequality can be systematically created by the initial coding of a project. While the Purple Line (Expansion) allowed for community health concerns to be translated into engineering artifacts like noise walls, the H Street Bridge (Maintenance) used a federal loophole stating the noise assessment didn’t need to be carried out if the bridge was not altered by more than 12 inches vertically, and regional travel forecasting models to exclude community voice. This study establishes that when projects are coded as maintenance, they utilize technical loopholes to ignore the cumulative health burdens of noise on historically redlined neighborhoods, effectively silencing the populations they are legally mandated to protect.
Reflecting on these projects simultaneously highlights the ethical weight of engineering decisions across technical, organizational, and cultural dimensions. In the Zbooni project, the organizational culture of volume over quality had to be reconciled with a technical model that prioritized explainable heuristics. In my noise research, the cultural legacy of redlining was reinforced by a technical one-foot regulation that acted as a non-human actor to block environmental justice. Using course concepts like obligatory passage points and sociotechnical systems reveals that considering these elements together is a professional necessity. STS perspectives support ethical responsibility by showing that "good engineering" is not just about a functioning algorithm or a stable bridge; it is about recognizing that technical models are never neutral. A successful engineer must be a sociotechnical analyst, ensuring that the rules we code into our systems do not perpetuate historical burdens or organizational inefficiencies at the expense of human health and equity.
