Current Research
Beyond the Framework: A Case for Evaluating Theory
Advised by Lana Yarosh, Stevie Chancellor, Joe Konstan, and Loren Terveen
Evaluation is a core pillar in HCI, yet methods for evaluating theoretical contributions remain underdeveloped. To address this gap, we leverage Halverson's four attributes of HCI theory to systematicallya sses the strengths and limitations of our recently published FACTORS framework. Through this evaluation, we aim to establish standards for evaluating theory during peer review, early adotpion, and iterative refinement.
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.
Position: How Online Community Ethics Offers Lightweight Solutions to Strengthen the Ecological Validity on ML Evaluation
Advised by Stevie Chancellor and Harmanpreet Kaur
Applications derived from ML research increasingly have pervasive impacts on society. Building on prior work, we argue this gap stems from a directionality problem in how use-implications are retrofitted to technical evaluations. Our position uses case studies in two online communities to demonstrate how lightweight mechanisms for reciprocting value and overseeing community bright-lines in dataset preperation and benchamrking can improve the quality of what we evaluate in online community ML research.
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 - August 2025
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
CSCW 2025 | Best Paper Award
PIIvot: A Lightweight NLP Anonymization Framework for Question-Anchored Tutoring Dialogues
Matthew Zent, Digory Smith, and Simon Woodhead
EMNLP 2025
Anonymity in Online Recovery: Measuring the Effects of Verbal-Person Centeredness and Identity Disclosures in Recovery Support
Matthew Zent, Kathleen Shea, Svetlana Yarosh
CSCW 2025
Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support: a Feasibility Assessment
Zachary Levonian, Matthew Zent, Ngan Nguyen, Matthew McNamara, Loren Terveen, Svetlana Yarosh
CSCW 2025 | Best Paper Award
Awards
ACM SIGCHI CSCW
Best Paper Award - 2025
Beyond the Individual: A Community-Engaged Framework for Ethical Online Community Research
See Publications
ACM SIGCHI CSCW
Best Paper Award - 2025
Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support: a Feasibility Assessment
See Publications
Boss Rush Jam - itch.io
38st Place Boss Design - 2025
1-month "spin"-themed game jam; created Super Smoothie Slasher; spin the speed up on this blender to battle it out with flipping bananas, web-spinning coconuts, and disco pineapples.
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.