Bio

My research develops computational models of language for the measurement and understanding of computer-mediated communication — particularly how social media shapes political behaviour, wellbeing, and public discourse.

I have recently started running and beta-testing field experiments with custom-built social media apps. Exciting times!

I was one of the three Virtual Chairs of ICWSM-21, and one of 18 invited speakers in the AAAI 2021 New Faculty Highlights program. My work has been covered by Scientific American and other podcasts; I have also published op-eds in the Washington Post.

I don’t like having pictures of myself on the web — someday I’ll tell you the story of all the phishing profiles that have used my photograph. So the photo above is deliberately pixelated.

Ongoing research in the SMOL Project

I call my lab the SMOL Project: the Social Media, Online behavior and Language project. My students and I work on three themes:

• Building computational models of language to understand affect and discussion quality in online communication.
• Auditing social media platform design for bias and inequity.
• Running field experiments with custom-built social media apps to improve the health of online communication.

I publish mainly in CS conferences with a computational social science track (EMNLP, ACL, ICWSM, WebSci) and in leading research journals including Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS, Journal of Communication, Computers in Human Behavior, and Telematics and Informatics.

Life in Academia

I am an Associate Professor in Computational Communication at the National University of Singapore, and Programme Coordinator for the Master’s in Data Communication degree.

Until 2021, I was organising the Affective Content Analysis workshop at AAAI and its Shared Task. In 2019, I co-organised a Shared Task on Interactional Affect (The OffMyChest Shared Task) together with Adobe and the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, we ran a language modelling task themed around the pursuit of happiness.

Before joining NUS, I spent a year as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, and two years as a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania working with Prof. Lyle Ungar as part of the World Wellbeing Project. Before academia, I was a Data Scientist at Adobe (Nov 2013–Sep 2016), and am a co-inventor on nine US patents.

My older work was in scientific summarisation — notably my PhD thesis, “A Literature Review Framework for Multi-document Summarization of Research Papers”. I also coordinated CL-SciSumm and the NLPIR4DL/BIRNDL workshop series at JCDL 2016, SIGIR 2017, and SIGIR 2018.

My role models are my mom, dad, and Nani.

Thanks for visiting!