Gilbert Place, 220 Gilbert Street, Blacksburg, VA, 24060
About Me
I'm an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, where I lead the SAIL (Society + AI & Language) Lab. My research lies at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). My work aims to advance Computational Social Science (CSS) by using computational linguistics to better understand how AI-mediated systems impact interactions across people and machines.
Education
- Ph.D., Informatics, University of California, Irvine
- B.A., Political Science, Columbia University (Columbia College), New York, NY
Professional Appointments
- Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, Virginia Tech
- Postdoc, NLP Group, Computer Science Department, Stanford University
- PhD Intern, Meta, Menlo Park, California
- Associate Consultant, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Seoul, South Korea
- Analyst, Opera Solutions, New York, New York
Grants, Awards, and Fellowships
- Designing AI as a Mental Health Resource for Autistic Adults: Enhancing Therapeutic Approaches with Multimodal Interactions, World Health Consortium, Role: PI; $40,000
- Integrating Neurodivergence into the STEM Workforce, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, 2023, Role: Co-PI; $75,000
- EmotionAIze - Empathy-Driven Interactive Human-AI System for Countering Negative-Self Talk for Autistic Individuals, Virginia Tech Center for Human-Computer Interaction, 2023, Role: PI; $25,000
- Predicting Online Groupthink Rhetoric in COVID-19 Health Mandate Discourse, Virginia Tech Center forPeace Studies and Violence Prevention, 2021, Role: PI, $15,000
- ACM CHI Best Research Honorable Mention Award, 2020
- Kling Endowed Memorial Fellowship, University of California, Irvine, 2020, $2,000
- CSCW Doctoral Consortium Fellowship, 2019, $1,565
- Roberta Ellen Lamb Memorial Fellowship, 2018, $10,000
- Graduate Dean’s Recruitment Fellowship, 2015, $5,000
Talks
- Words Matter: How Language Choices Predict Societal Trends and Outcomes in Media, Health, and Policing, VTLx Speaker Series, February 2024
- Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) Seminar, Johns Hopkins CS NLP Group, November 2023
- Supporting Mental Health in Neurodiverse Communities: Enhancing Large Language Model Accessibility through Multimodal Human-AI Interactions (Project Motivation), Institute for Creativity, Arts, & Technology (ICAT) Playdate, Virginia Tech, October 2023
- AI @ IA : Research in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Internet Archive, October 2023
- Design of Online Environments and the Quality of Democratic Discourse At-Scale, Stanford CS547 - Human-Computer Interaction Seminar Series, Stanford University, February 2021