Silvio Amir

College: Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Email: s.amir@northeastern.edu

Summary: Silvio Amir studies natural language processing, machine learning, and information retrieval, with a focus on subjective or personalized information, such as the use of machine learning in gauging public opinion. He is working to develop artificial intelligence models that serve to empower rather than replace human workers (Human-centered AI) as well as artificial intelligence to solve humanitarian challenges.

Brian Ball

College: New College of Humanities, London

Department: Philosophy

Email: brian.ball@nchlondon.ac.uk

Summary: Brian Ball’s research focuses on the nature of assertion, beliefs and knowledge, including the justifications for one’s epistemology. Most recently, he has published papers on the nature of language creation, and the state of misinformation. More specifically, he researched the impact of fake news in undermining the transmission of knowledge via journalism, and the undermining of democratic decision making under misinformation.

Rahul Bhargava

College: College of Art, Media, and Design

Email: r.bhargava@northeastern.edu

Summary: Rahul Bhargava uses data storytelling and technology to support social justice and community empowerment. Using his research on data literacy, Bhargava designs data-centric visualizations to educate communities on a wide range of topics. His most recent project focuses on integrating data feminism into K-12 education.

Yakov Bart

College: D’Amore-McKim School of Business

Email: y.bart@northeastern.edu

Summary: Yakov Bart is the founder of the DATA (Digital, Analytics, Technology, and Automation) initiative, which researches and assists businesses in the transition to online transactions . His most recent research focuses on the use of technology to track and market to consumers, including the factors that influence consumer trust in being tracked.

John Basl

College: College of Social Sciences and Humanities

Department: Philosophy

Email: j.basl@northeastern.edu

Summary: John Basl’s work focuses primarily on the ethics of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. His most recent works focus on conscious artificial intelligence agents, and attempt to determine what could make AI conscious and how societies could determine the rights of conscious AI.

Elettra Bietti

College: School of Law

Email: e.bietti@northeastern.edu

Summary: Elettra Bietti’s research focuses on tech law, antitrust and how they overlap in the platform economy. Her most recent work focuses on regulating and limiting the power of the attention economy. Outside of Northeastern, Bietti is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP).

David Choffnes

College: Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Email: choffnes@css.neu.edu

Summary: David Choffnes’s work focuses on combining engineering and science to improve the performance, reliability, and security of internet systems. His work with the ReCon project improves user security by identifying and mitigating personal information leaks, and showed that Android poses a unique threat to personal security by allowing third-party libraries to capture screen contents. He is the executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, which aims to enhance digital security through collaborations between researchers and businesses.

Myojung Chung

College: College of Arts, Media and Design

Email: m.chung@northeastern.edu

Summary: Myojung Chung’s work focuses on the intersection of digital media, mis- and disinformation, and policy making, specifically in understanding the spread and consequences of mis/disinformation. Her most recent research focuses on the behaviors that inspire trust in and use of ChatGPT.

Pedro Cruz 

College: College of Arts, Media and Design

Email: p.cruz@northeastern.edu

Summary: Pedro Cruz creates data and information visualizations. Using nature-inspired metaphors, Cruz has visualized trends in temperature changes over the last hundred years, immigration in the United States and interracial families in the United States.

Laura Edelson

College: Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Email: l.edelson@northeastern.edu

Summary: Laura Edelson’s work involves developing tools to identify false content on social media platforms. While pursuing her PhD, she was a member of the Cybersecurity for Democracy group at New York University, which aims to find weaknesses in websites that leave them vulnerable to misinformation.

Tina Eliassi-Rad

College: Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Email: t.eliassi-rad@northeastern.edu

Summary: Tina Eliassi-Rad is the inaugural Joseph E. Aoun professor at Northeastern University. She is also a core faculty member at Northeastern’s Network Science Institute and the Institute for Experiential AI. In addition, she is an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute and the Vermont Complex Systems Center. Her research is at the intersection of data mining, machine learning, and network science. She has over 100 peer-reviewed publications (including a few best paper and best paper runner-up awards); and has given over 200 invited talks and 14 tutorials.

Chenyan Jia

College: College of Art, Media, and Design and Khoury College of Computer Science

Email: c.jia@northeastern.edu

Summary: Chenyan Jia’s research focuses on the intersection between politics and algorithmic tools. Her most recent work investigates whether AI ranking algorithms can be restructured to consider the values of democracy in their decision making processes.

Katherine Haenschen

College: College of Art, Media, and Design

Department: Communication Studies and Political Science

Email: k.haenschen@northeastern.edu

Summary: Katherine Haenschen’s research focuses on effective digital communications for voter turnout and online political behavior. Her most recent works explore the factors that make an account more likely to like misinformation pages on Facebook and examine the most prevalent analytical methods in measuring digital politics.

David Lazer

College: College of Social Sciences and Humanities

Email: d.lazer@northeastern.edu

Summary: David Lazer’s research interests are in misinformation and computational social science. Most recently, he worked with the COVID States Project, a research group focused on the social implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccine hesitancy, mental health, and political perceptions throughout the pandemic.

Tomo Lazovich

University Affiliation: Senior Research Scientist, The Institute for Experimental AI

Email: t.lazovich@northeastern.edu

Summary: Tomo Lazovich is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Experimental AI. Their research focuses on understanding the impacts of algorithmic systems and creating more equitable and fair socio-technical infrastructures.They are also interested in supporting industry professionals and government officials in adopting responsible machine learning practices.

Hong Qu

Department: Network Science

Email: qu.ho@northeastern.edu

Summary: Hong Qu’s research focuses on the impact of misinformation networks and online civil engagement in shaping public opinion and behavior towards science and technology. He is a 3rd year PHD student in the network science department, and has previously worked on the Lazer Lab’s COVID States Project

Jason Radford

Department: Network Science

Email: j.radford@northeastern.edu

Summary: Jason Radford is a principal researcher for the Social Design Lab, a research facility that attempts to develop real-world strategies for tackling societal issues through social science. His most recent work focuses on the use of social theory in training machine learning models for social science research.

Hilary Robinson

College: School of Law

Email: hi.robinson@northeastern.edu

Summary: Hilary Robinson is currently working on a team aimed at developing comprehensive platform optimization. The goal of the project is to maximize profits for platform owners while allowing for stronger regulation by the federal government and better working conditions and pay for workers.

Ronald Sandler

College: College of Social Sciences and Humanities

Department: Philosophy

Email: r.sandler@northeastern.edu

Summary: Ronald Sandler is the director of the Ethics Institute, which addresses the ethics behind social and environmental issues. His research interests include conservation ethics and the ethics of emerging technologies, such as algorithmic ethics.

Piotr Sapieżyński

College: Khoury College of Computer Science

Email: p.sapiezynski@northeastern.edu

Summary: Piotr Sapiezynski’s work focuses on auditing platforms and their algorithms for security, privacy and human autonomy. His most recent work has focused on targeted advertising algorithms on Facebook.

Saiph Savage

College: Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Email: s.savage@northeastern.edu

Summary: Saiph Savage is the director of the Civic A.I. Lab, a research center focused on creating artificially intelligent, human-centered solutions to real world problems. Her research focuses on creating technology to organize for civil change, such as misinformation detection and increasing job access for rural and gig workers.

David Smith

College: Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Email: david.smith@northeastern.edu

Summary: David Smith’s research focuses on modeling natural language structures and tracking mutations in texts across space and time through social media. He is also a member of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, which combines computer science and humanities to track cultural phenomena through computer science.

Briony Swire-Thompson

College: College of Social Sciences and Humanities

Department: Psychology

Email: b.swire-thompson@northeastern.edu

Summary: Briony Swire-Thompson is the director of the Psychology of Misinformation Lab. Her work investigates the driving factors behind beliefs in inaccurate information, as well as why some individuals are predisposed to not change misconceptions even when confronted with corrective information.

Rebekah Tromble

Senior Affiliate Fellow

 University: George Washington University

Summary: Rebekah Tromble is the director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, which aims to generate policy solutions to digital technology, media and democracy issues. Her research focuses on political communication, digital research methodology, and research ethics.

Brooke Welles

College of Art, Media, and Design

Department: Communication Studies and Network Science

Email: b.welles@northeastern.edu

Summary: Brooke Welles is the director of the Communication Media and Marginalization (CoMM) Lab, which aims to understand why marginalization happens through the lens of communication technologies. Her most recent research focuses on the amplification of marginalized groups in social change narratives through social media (“hashtag activism”), specifically on Twitter.

John Wihbey

College: College of Arts, Media, and Design

Department: Media Innovation and Technology

Email: j.wihbey@northeastern.edu

Summary: John Wihbey’s research focuses on the intersection of news and social media, emerging media technologies, computational journalism and visualization, and misinformation and media literacy. He is the lead investigator for the Ethics of Content Moderation Project, which is exploring misinformation and governance on social media.

Christo Wilson

College: Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Email: c.wilson@northeastern.edu

Summary: Christo Wilson’s work focuses on investigating algorithms to determine how fair or transparent they are. Most recently, he investigated partisan bias within the Google search algorithm. He is a member of the Algorithm Auditing Research Group.

Kai-Cheng Yang

College: Khoury College of Computer Science

Email: yang3kc@gmail.com

Summary: Kai-Cheng Yang is a postdoctoral researcher studying deception via generative AI. His most recent works have focused on the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in fact-checking measures, utilizing artificial intelligence to determine credibility of new outlets, and the prevalence of AI bots on Twitter

Seo Eun Yang

College: College of Arts, Media, and Design

Department: Political Science and Communication Studies

Email: se.yang@northeastern.edu

Summary: Seo Eun Yang’s work focuses on hypergraph-based learning models with multimedia datasets. Using language processing and computer visualizations, she researches the impact of media representation on minority groups. Her latest research project investigated the effectiveness of visual communication in political contexts on Instagram.