Faculty
Munmun De Choudhury is an associate professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech; she directs the SocWeB Lab. Dr. De Choudhury’s research lies at the intersection of machine learning, social media, and health. She is known for laying the foundation of a new line of research focusing on assessing and improving mental health from online interactions.
Doctoral Students (Current)
Seunghyun Kim (Matt) is a 5th year CS PhD student interested in emotional analysis through natural language processing techniques. His interest lies in detecting emotions through social media posts and social embeddings to help understand and improve mental health.
Jiawei Zhou is a 5th-year HCC PhD student exploring the impacts of collective narratives (e.g., misinformation, harmful speech, and counterspeech) and the role of generative AI in addressing or exacerbating related public health and societal challenges.
Jasmine Foriest is a 4th year HCC PhD student. She studies digital muting of non-dominant groups, as a form of technology-mediated violence, in health and justice settings, and the implications for knowledge creation and social outcomes. Jay’s research utilizes mixed methods to study technology’s mediation of direct and structural violence.
Mohit Chandra is a 3rd year CS PhD student. Mohit’s research adopts a human-centered approach to analyze the impact of online platforms and AI technologies on people. Combining computational tools from NLP and theories from social science, his current research focuses on analyzing and understanding information quality in critical domains such as health.
Shravika Mittal is a 2nd year CS PhD student. Broadly, Shravika’s research interests are in Social Computing and Natural Language Processing, wherein she seeks to understand how and why technology-mediated conversations occur. This far, Shravika’s research has harnessed computational analysis and theories of social interactions to understand stigma surrounding mental health, interpersonal violence, and substance use disorders.
Cuong (Johnny) Nguyen (coadvised with Prof. Srijan Kumar) is a 2nd year CS PhD student. He is interested in understanding and designing safer and fairer interactions within algorithm-mediated communication systems (e.g. social media, generative AI chatbots). To do this work, Johnny leverages methods from NLP, social computing and HCI.
Pinxian Lu is an incoming HCC PhD student, joining Georgia Tech after finishing his Information Science degree at Cornell. In 2024, Pinxian was recognized by the Computing Research Association (CRA)’s Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award (URA) Honorable Mention.
Masters Students (Current)
Chinar Dankhara (MS CS)Darshi Shah (MS HCI)
Undergraduate Students (Current)
Vinicius Konkolics Possobom (BS CS)Ekta Raj (BS CS)
Zoya Goel (BS CS)
Oscar Zhang (BS CS)
Nicholas Chang (BS CS)
Inhwa Song (BS CS; KAIST)
Postdoc and Research Scientist Alumni
Daejin Choi was a research scientist (2019-2020) who worked on a collaboration with the CDC in building machine learning techniques on ensemble data (social media and syndromic surveillance data) to predict nationwide suicide rates. In September 2020, he joined as an Assistant Professor at Incheon National University.
Talayeh Aledavood was a James S. McDonnell (JSMF) Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research is at the intersection of data science, computational social science, and compuatational psychiatry. She is now the vice head and lecturer at the department of Computer Science at Aalto University, Finland. She also leads the Digital Traces Lab (digitraces lab) at the Aalto University Department of Computer Science.
Mai ElSherief was a postdoctoral fellow working on developing computational methods to detect and characterize the effect of online health misinformation leading to deaths. Prior to that, she obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. Mai is now an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Northeastern University.
Minje Choi (co-supervised with Prof. Srijan Kumar) was postdoctoral fellow at the School of Interactive Computing in Georgia Tech. His research interests include (1) investigating the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on tasks requiring social knowledge, and (2) using NLP and causal inference methods to understand dynamics in large social networks based on social relationships or identities. In 2024, Minje joined Amazon Science.
Ph.D. Alumni
Stevie Chancellor is SocWeB Lab’s first Ph.D. student. Stevie graduated with an HCC PhD in 2019. Her Ph.D. research involved employing computational techniques to understand deviant mental health behaviors online, such as those relating to pro-eating disorder and opioid use disorder. Stevie is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota.
Koustuv Saha graduated with a CS PhD in 2021. During his time in the SocWeB Lab, he worked on developing computational and causal approaches to infer the wellbeing of situated communities (such as college students and corporate employees) with social media and other complementary multisensor data. Koustuv is now a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Montreal.
Sindhu Kiranmai Ernala graduated with a CS PhD in 2021. During her time in the SocWeB Lab, she worked on employing machine learning to examine and use social media as an interventional platform for mental health and thereby to improve patient-centric and clinical outcomes. Sindhu is now a Research Scientist at Facebook.
Dong Whi Yoo, coadvised with Dr. Gregory Abowd, graduated with a PhD in Human-Centered Computing in 2022, with his dissertation conceptualizing and designing new interactive technologies to enable mental health patients and clinicians to integrate patient-contributed data-derived insights into evidence based collaborative decision-making.
Vedant Das Swain, coadvised with Dr. Gregory Abowd, graduated in 2022 with a PhD in Computer Science. His dissertation research was at the intersection of ubiquitous and social computing, with the goal of designing socially-aware context sensing and modeling approaches that can provide comprehensive insights into individual and community behaviors and wellbeing.
Sachin R. Pendse, coadvised with Dr. Neha Kumar, completed a PhD in Human-Centered Computing in 2024. His research was in how identity-based factors (such as culture, race, sexual orientation, and class) influence how we experience and express our mental health, with the goal of designing technology to make it easier for individuals to get personalized and effective mental health support.