Current Research
Beyond the Individual: Community-Engaged Design and Implementation of a Framework for Ethical Online Community Research
Advised by Lana Yarosh, Stevie Chancellor, Joe Konstan, and Loren Terveen
Community-level harms and benefits are frequently not captured by ethics reviews focusing on individual-level harms. Moreover, the research guidelines that do exist may be significantly different from the expectations of members of online communities. To address this gap, we are developing and validating a framework for ethical conduct of research with online communities through participatory and community-engaged approaches of several critical online communities.
Civil vs. Global: Explore and Depolarize U.S. Reader News Consumption With Personalized LLM Locality Context
Co-first Author Ruixuan Sun | Advised by Joe Konstan
Diverse news consuption is important facet of social reslience. Increasing the diversity of news recommendation has deminishing returns on consuption diversity. To strength the influence of diversity calibration, we are using large language models to highlight personalized events embedded within diverse news on the news recommendation platform POPROX.
Surrogate Anonymization of Personally Identifiable Information in Math Tutoring Dialogues: A Dataset
Eedi | Advised by Simon Woodhead
Large edutech datasets are highly saught after in learning engineering. However, online dialogues between tutors and student frequently contain much perosonally identifiable information (PII). In partnership with Eedi, an online math learning platform, we design PIIvot, an ML and LLM backed hidden-in-plain-sight approach to PII obfuscation in tutor-student dialogues, to faciliate sharing of the largest tutoring dataset of its kind.
Anonymity, Verbal Person-Centeredness, and Identity in Online Recovery and Social Support
Advised by Lana Yarosh
Social support research has investigated reciprocal self-disclosure and when it occurs in practice, but little is known about the effects of reciprocal self-disclosure on support seekers. Inspired by prior work investigating the effects of verbal person centeredness (VPC), we explore the interaction effects of VPC and identity in 12-step recovery, a context that promotes anonymity.
Experience
Research Assistant
August 2021 - (Current)
GroupLens
Investigating the design of social computing systems through empirically studying online communities; using mixed methods approaches to design, implement, and evaluate human centered systems (see Publications).
Machine Learning Research Consultant
November 2024 - (Current)
Machine Learning Research Intern
May 2024 - August 2024
Software Engineer
July 2019 - May 2021
Microsoft
Designed and implemented services at scale to host Dynamics 365 apps in Docker containers on Service Fabric clusters; led the design and implementation of my team's work on Project Uno (the seamless integration of CDS and Dynamics 365 infrastructure systems)
Co-Founder/Partner
September 2020 - July 2021
IS Software Developer Intern
May 2018 - August 2018
Federated Mutual Insurance
Developed SQL for companywide Multi Product Data Mart reports; automated the company's process for building SSRS reports with VBA Script; presented R&D for an Agile approach to software development to management.
Research Intern
May 2017 - August 2017
UNC Charlotte HCI Lab
Worked independently on the backend recommender system by using machine learning to classify recipe data; conducted empirical study to develop personalized model for curiosity (see Awards).
Publications
Beyond the Individual: A Community-Engaged Framework for Ethical Online Community Research
Matthew Zent, Seraphina Yong, Dhruv Bala, Stevie Chancellor, Joe Konstan, Loren Terveen, Stetlana Yarosh
In-Review at CSCW
Anonymity in Online Recovery: Measuring the Effects of Verbal-Person Centeredness and Identity Disclosures in Recovery Support
Matthew Zent, Kathleen Shae, Svetlana Yarosh
In-review at CSCW
Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support: a Feasibility Assessment
Zachary Levonian, Matthew Zent, Ngan Nguyen, Matthew McNamara, Loren Terveen, Svetlana Yarosh
Accepted to CSCW 2025
Awards
ACM CHI Graduate Student Research Competition
1st Place - 2023
Anonymous Online Support: Investigations of Identity and Heterogeneous Groups in Online Recovery Support
Unstoppable Together Hackathon
1st Place - 2020
24-hour hackathon innovating for Jira, Confluence, and Atlassian users; automation, integrations, machine learning, or Tempo themed; created MyTempo, a Alexa based skill integrating with Jira and Tempo.
Fargo Hackathon - Emerging Prairie
1st Place - 2019
24-hour hackathon for behavioral and mental health issues; developed My Hero, a mobile web app written using Blazor for connecting individuals with peer-support mentors.
Microsoft Fargo Hackathon
1st Place People's Choice - 2019
72-hour open themed hackathon; created Cyber Attack, an educational game developed in Unity for use in teaching important cyber security concepts to non-technical individuals.