Research Projects
(click on the pictures to explore)
User Identity Covertly Biases Chatbot Recommendations
With Anjali Kantharuban, Emma Strubell, and Graham Neubig.
When users implicitly reveal their racial identity in a request, they get stereotypical recommendations — and further conversational turns obfuscate the effect of implicit identity disclosure.
Inside the Echo Chamber
In progress, presented at TADA 2023
We demonstrate that language models can be leveraged to measure echo chambers and identify cross-community ideological and linguistic similarity.
From Nuisance to News Sense – Reference-free Fact Verifaciton.
EMNLP 2023 (Demo Track), with Ziqi Ding, Zhijin Wu, and Sherry Wu.
A novel interface to help readers make sense of news article clusters. We leverage consensus to automatically identify, highlight, and link supporting evidence and contradictory statements across multiple documents. Demo video.
Efficient Multi-Segment Encoding with Layerwise Adjustable Interaction
ACL 2023, with Tal Schuster, Annie Louis, Alex Fabrikant, Javad Hosseini, and Donald Metzler.
We study the extent to which cross-segment attention is needed for multi-segment reasoning tasks. We found that partially parallel segment processing (ie, late interaction) can enable segment caching and reduce latency without harming performance for many reasoning tasks.
Transparently Synthesized Speech
With Jessica Huynh, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, and Shinji Watanabe.
We developed a new method for voice conversion that continuosuly shifts between speaker identities, creating an eerie effect. This achieves improvements in speech anonymization and naturalness, and I hope to develop extended uses for emotion and personality-design in human-computer interaction.
Paths to Power
With Adarsh Mathew and James Evans
We performed a computational study of the behavior of "power users" on Reddit. We found that users move through the social network in strategic ways, and that as they rise to power they increasingly use their power to drive division. We suggest new strategies for taming radicalization and addressing misinformation networks online.
Aligning Multidimensional Worldviews and Discovering Ideological Differences
EMNLP 2021, with Adarsh Mathew and James Evans
We align unsupervised word embeddings to automatically discover polarized word meanings across communities, find unexpected conceptual homomorphisms, and enable the study of ideological and worldview differences in text.
Networked Influence on Reddit
INDE 2021, with Adarsh Mathew and James Evans
Using methods from link analysis, we identify the most influential and powerful users on Reddit. Then, we explore how they move across communities over time.
Representing Repositories in the Open Source Ecosystem
IC2S2 2021, with Yutao Chen, Deblina Mukherjee, and James Evans
Collected from over 28,000,000 repositories on Github, we built a training dataset, designed an evaluation suite (based on practical downstream tasks), and trained a set of baseline models for representing Github repositories.
Other Work
Creative Coding
Some art, some games, some interfaces
I love to write beautiful code that makes beautiful things! Sometimes when I get hooked on a game (like NYT's "LetterBoxed") I write a program to let me play more than 1/day. Sometimes I write projects to help me visualize data. Sometimes I turn classic algorithms into art :)
Green Homesteads
Finalist (top 0.25%), The Economist's Open Future Essay Competition
I developed an economic plan to combat climate change. My "green homesteading" program would simultaneously: create market incentives to promote energy farms, associate greentech with American entrepreneurship and innovation, and create a platform to address historic land inequity. You can read it here.
Simmer (formerly "Foodie")
YCombinator 2019
Some college friends and I built an app which helped people find the best dish on every menu. I worked on the machine learning pipeline, which involved named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and working with data labeling contractors. I also built an trend-tracking tool for restaurants. The app is defunct, but I've documented some stuff here!
Dungeons and Dragons
At the UChicago Fab Lab
In college, I played Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. More than just play, I loved to design worlds, characters, and even the tabletop objects for the game! At UChicago's Fab(ulous) Lab, Elise and I made artistic player tokens and laser-cut wooden architectural maps.
Programmable Turing Machine
Just for fun.
For an added layer of irony, I programmed it entirely using Elm.
Student Privacy Initiative
At the Berkman-Klein Center
As a research assistant intern at the Berkman Center, I assisted with research on privacy and EdTech. I also managed the Center's "This Week in Student Privacy" newsletter (complete with weekly cat pictures), and advised the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten team on communicating the remix philosophy :)
Programming in Scratch!
A walk down memory lane...
Although I started programming in Microworlds at a very young age, it was not until Scratch came about that I fell in love with the ability to build my own worlds, games, and systems with code. I attended the very first Scratch conference, and later had the privilege to work with the Scratch team.