I’m an Assistant Professor in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. I work with other HCI faculty in the GroupLens lab. I build and critically evaluate human-centered machine learning (HCAI) for high-risk health behaviors in online communities. HCAI (or human-centered ML) deliberately refocuses computational contributions and impacts on the needs of humans, communities, and stakeholders.
Using machine learning, I use digital trace data from millions of interactions on social media to identify high-risk behaviors in online communities. At the same time, I critically evaluate these predictive approaches and develop more ethical and compassionate research practices for ML and computer science. I am also interested in developing AI-driven interventions for complex mental health behaviors through a user-first design approach.
My domain of interest is online communities (broadly) and mental health, with special interests in dangerous or high-risk behaviors like severe eating disorder, opioid use disorder and recovery, and suicidal ideation and crisis. I’m broadly interested in topics adjacent to online communities for mental health, like moderation and governance, ethics of research in online communities, and AI for social good.
I received my Ph.D. in Human Centered Computing at Georgia Tech with Munmun De Choudhury, and did a postdoc at Northwestern University, working with Darren Gergle.
My work has generously been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Northwestern’s Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI), Cisco Research, Google, and an Amazon Research Award.
Recent Research (see publications page and Google Scholar for more)
Theorizing about practices for HCML/HCAI: [Communications of the ACM 2023 Featured Article] [FAccT 2024]
AI for Mental Health and Evaluations: [CSCW 2023] [NAACL 2024]
Moderator labor, online communities, and their impacts : [ICWSM, 2022 🏅] [ICWSM 2022] [New Media and Society 2022] [CSCW 2023] [ICWSM 2024]
Recommendations and Mental Health: [FAccTRec @ RecSys 2022] [TikTok study @ CHI 2023] [CHI 2024]
Critical lit reviews of mental health and social media: [npj digital medicine 2020] [CSCW 2019🏅] [FAccT 2023]
Video Conferencing, Bias, and Design: [CSCW 2023🏅]
News
6/2024: Finally was able to update the website with all new paper links!
10/9/23: So many updates. Great new papers from Leah Ajmani in FAccT on ethic practices in social media. Three papers at CSCW – mine on contextual gaps that manifest in ML models for mental health prediction, Leah Ajmani’s work on how Wikipedia page protection plays out in practice, and Mo Houtti’s interview study about workplace bias in VC. And congratulations to Mo, for the Best Paper Honorable Mention and Impact Recognition from CSCW.
And thanks to new funding source National Science Foundation and an extended collaboration with Cisco!
4/12/23: New paper for CHI 2023 with PhD student Ashlee Milton about TikTok & mental health, and CSCW 2023 preprint up about our work in video conference and bias with PhD student Mo Houtti. More pre-prints to come soon…
I was also on MPR (Minnesota NPR) to discuss social media and mental health. This was super fun to do!
Also welcome Dan to upgrade from MS to PhD!
Gracious thank you to new funding sources for my group: Amazon Research Awards and Northwestern CASMI!
9/29/22: It’s been a busy few months for me and my students. Hanlin Li published two papers (link to the first and second) about measuring and making more visible moderator labor in Reddit communities at ICWSM, one of which won a Best Paper Honorable Mention award. Yay! Ashlee also published her first workshop paper on the harms of content recommendations for mental health.
Also take a look at this new paper about practices for human-centered machine learning, which is forthcoming in the Communications of the ACM (CACM).
Two new PhD students have joined my group! Welcome Ava and Nuredin!
Also gracious thank you to new funding sources for my group: Cisco Research and Google!
3/30/22: Added a section about Advising and to my students to this website! Also included a link to our new JMIR MH paper about annotation for suicidal ideation in Reddit communities!
4/5/21: Hey, good press vibes! I was interviewed on the TWIML podcast, appeared in a CACM News Article, and our work on data leverage got picked up by Fortune and MIT Tech Review.
1/4/21: New paper about data leverage has been accepted to FAccT 2021, led by Nick Vincent. arXiv link of the pre-print is up on Pubs page. I also start this month at the University of Minnesota 🙂
9/23/2020: New paper was accepted to New Media & Society, with lead author Joseph Seering. The pre-print is up on my Publications page.
4/24/2020: Accepted a job offer, and will start as a professor at the University of Minnesota. Wooohooo!
3/31/2020: New paper out from my dissertation research in Nature Partner Journal – Digital Medicine! Link here to the OA paper and the blog post
1/31/2020: Just saw our work on alternative therapies and opioid use disorder was covered by the Atlantic! How cool.
10/6/19: Our recent CSCW paper on human-centered machine learning was awarded a Best Paper Honorable Mention award!
9/13/19: Started my position at Northwestern CS earlier this month. My paper on human-centered machine learning and mental health prediction (joint with Eric P.S Baumer and Munmun De Choudhury) was accepted to CSCW. The camera-ready is uploaded here, if you’d like a read.
5/21/19: Lots going on in the next few months, in addition to the necessary move to Chicago. I’ll be traveling to Rutgers in June for CSST (Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems). Also excited to be a Workshop Co-Chair for ICWSM 2020, being held in Atlanta.
12/10/18: Our latest paper, “Discovering Alternative Treatments for Opioid Recovery Using Social Media”, has been accepted to CHI 2019, hooray! I’ll have the camera ready up online soon.
Additionally, two workshops that I’m (co-)organizing have been accepted to CHI. First is “Sensitive Research, Practice, and Design in HCI“. Second, I’m helping co-organize the workshop “Where is the Human in AI? Bridging the Gap Between AI/ML and HCI”.
10/16/2018: I was awarded the Foley Scholarship through the GVU Center, thank you to GVU and the advisory board! Additionally, my paper about identifying methods and ethics challenges in predictive mental health research from social media data was also accepted to ACM Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*). I’ll have the preprint of the paper on my website soon!
8/6/2018: I was chosen as a Foley Scholar Finalist by the GVU Center at Georgia Tech. So many fantastic researchers in this group!
6/18/18: My work on #thyghgapp was featured in an article by Wired about pro-eating disorder communities.
6/12/18: I was selected to participate in the Rising Stars in EECS Workshop. This is a fully funded, intensive workshop for women pursuing academic careers. I was also honored for my contributions to the ICWSM Reviewing Process, and was selected as one of the top 20 reviewers.
3/6/2018: Passed my thesis proposal last Friday, so I finally advance to candidacy status. I had a wonderful time talking about my past and future work with my committee. Thanks to Amy Bruckman, Eric Gilbert, Wanda Pratt, and Scott Counts, as well as Munmun (of course), for their thoughtful feedback.
2/9/2018: Grateful and excited that my paper from my MSR internship, “Measuring Employment Demand Using Internet Search Data”, has won a CHI Best Paper Honorable Mention! The camera ready is uploaded to my Publications page, if you’re interested in a read.
12/18/2017: I was named a Snap Research Fellow for 2017. Thank you Snap!
12/12/2017: Very excited that my two papers were accepted to CHI 2018. The pre-prints will be ready soon, but in the meantime, here are the paper titles:
“Norms Matter: Contrasting Social Support Around Behavior Change in Online Weight Loss Communities”. with Andrea Hu and Munmun De Choudhury.
“Measuring Employment Demand Using Internet Search Data” with Scott Counts from MSR.
I’ve also been accepted to the CHI 2018 Doctoral Consortium.
8/4/2017: I presented a poster about the ethics of individualized mental wellness predictions at the CLPsych workshop hosted by ACL this year. Got some great feedback from a really welcoming community.
2/7/2017: I’m excited that I’ll be spending summer in Seattle for an internship at Microsoft Research with Scott Counts. Looking forward to the PNW weather (in summer, of course).
12/20/2016: I’m excited that one of my papers was accepted at CHI 2017! I’ll also be traveling to CSCW 2017 in February.
11/27/2016: I’m honored to be selected as a Foley Scholar Finalist for the GVU Center at Georgia Tech. I was also featured in an article by the College of Computing about powerlifting female PhD students.
5/13/2016: I presented two of my papers at CHI 2016 – a link to them is available on my Publications page. In addition, I’ve accepted a Research Intern position at Yahoo! for the summer.
1/8/2016: Two of my papers about eating disorder communities were accepted to CHI 2016.
In addition, I’m thrilled that both of our papers – “#thyghgapp: Instagram Content Moderation and Lexical Variation in Pro-Eating Disorder Communities” and “Quantifying and Predicting Mental Illness Severity in Online Pro-Eating Disorder Communities” received Honorable Mention awards at CSCW 2016!
10/8/2015: My two first-authored papers were accepted to CSCW 2016! The pre-print versions are available on my Research page. I’m excited to travel to the West Coast in February.
