Current Research
Beyond the Individual: Community-Engaged Design and Implementation of a Framework for Ethical Online Communities Research
Advised by Lana Yarosh, Stevie Chancellor, Joe Konstan, Kangjie Lu, 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.
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.
Classifying Verbal Person-Centerdness in Online Health Communities Through Transfer Learning Models
Advised by Lana Yarosh and Andrew High
30 years of research has shown the diverse and impactful effects of verbal person centeredness (VPC) on social support outcomes. Manual classification of VPC has traditionally been tedious and attempts to automate this process have proved not to generalize. We combine multiple datasets from prior work and use modern NLP approaches to classify VPC and evaluate generalizability on an online health community.
Validation of a Classification Model for Naturalistic Expressive Writing
Haiwei Ma | Advised by Lana Yarosh
Expressive writing has been shown to have beneficial health effects. We build on the baselines from prior ML approaches in this space and validate multiple methods for classifying expressive writing beyond accuracy measures using test validity, test-retest reliability, and evaluations of generalizability.
Technology Mediated Disclosure: HIV, Stigma, and Sensitive Self-Disclosure
Fernando Maestre | Advised by Lana Yarosh
Sensitive self-disclosure can be challenging, especially when it involves highly stigmatizing identities. Using a low-fidelity prototype derived from a prior workshop with people living with HIV, we probe participants on using technology to facilitate sensitive self-disclosure in both remote and in-person scenarios.
Experience
Research Assistant
August 2021 (Current)
GroupLens
Investigating the design of social computing systems through empirically studying of online health communities; using mixed methods approaches to design, implement, and evaluate human centered systems. (see Publications and Awards)
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; Lead 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 companies 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 Publications and Awards)
Publications and Awards
ACM CHI Graduate Student Research Competition
1st Place - 2023
Anonymous Online Support: Investigations of Identity and Heterogeneous Groups in Online Recovery Support
"Some other poor soul's problems": a peer recommendation intervention for health-related social support
Zachary Levonian, Matthew Zent, Ngan Nguyen, Matthew McNamara, Loren Terveen, Svetlana Yarosh
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.