Online Community and Communication Research
Project 1: Rehabilitative AI Conversations
- Can conversations with chatbots can help problematic users?
- ~10 large subreddits, large field experiment
- Mixed methods
- Analyzing conversations
- Tracking users before and after the intervention
Project 2: Companion AI and Privacy
- How do people understand and navigate the privacy risks that come with talking to companion AI?
- Interviews with companion AI users
- AI are available, non-judgmental, and disconnected from social networks, which all encourage sharing
Getting students involved
- I love to collaborate with students on projects that they lead
- I have been working with computer science undergrads more and more
- A few projects have come out of Intro to Programming course projects
- Comparing how different subreddits perceive risk
- Looking for parasocial relationships in YouTube comments
- Using AI to interview trolls
- Testing the influence of narratives on persuasion in r/ChangeMyView