Publications (37)
Lost in Delusion: Examining LLM Safety Under User Delusions and Distress
Andrew Aquilina, Chetna Nihalani, Vasudha Varadarajan +3
LLM chatbots increasingly serve as a first source of support for people in psychological distress, including those whose distress is entangled with delusional beliefs. Prior work o…
Shifting Patterns of Extremist Discourse on Facebook: Analyzing Trends and Developments During the Israel-Hamas Conflict
Rr. Nefriana, Muheng Yan, Ahmad Diab +5
This short paper explores trends in extremist Facebook data from July 2023 to June 2024. We examined engagement, sentiment, and topics within Facebook groups categorized as anti-Is…
Human-centered explanation does not fit all: The interplay of sociotechnical, cognitive, and individual factors in the effect AI explanations in algorithmic decision-making
Yongsu Ahn, Yu-Ru Lin, Malihe Alikhani +1
Recent XAI studies have investigated what constitutes a \textit{good} explanation in AI-assisted decision-making. Despite the widely accepted human-friendly properties of explanati…
Visual Persuasion in COVID-19 Social Media Content: A Multi-Modal Characterization
Mesut Erhan Unal, Adriana Kovashka, Wen-Ting Chung +1
Social media content routinely incorporates multi-modal design to covey information and shape meanings, and sway interpretations toward desirable implications, but the choices and…
The Dynamics of Political Narratives During the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Ahana Biswas, Tim Niven, Yu-Ru Lin
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has elicited a diverse array of responses from nations around the globe. During a global conflict, polarized narratives are spread on social media t…
Mapping Language Literacy At Scale: A Case Study on Facebook
Yu-Ru Lin, Shaomei Wu, Winter Mason
Literacy is one of the most fundamental skills for people to access and navigate today's digital environment. This work systematically studies the language literacy skills of onlin…
Twitter in Academic Conferences: Usage, Networking and Participation over Time
Xidao Wen, Yu-Ru Lin, Christoph Trattner +1
Twitter is often referred to as a backchannel for conferences. While the main conference takes place in a physical setting, attendees and virtual attendees socialize, introduce new…
Break Out of a Pigeonhole: A Unified Framework for Examining Miscalibration, Bias, and Stereotype in Recommender Systems
Yongsu Ahn, Yu-Ru Lin
Despite the benefits of personalizing items and information tailored to users' needs, it has been found that recommender systems tend to introduce biases that favor popular items o…
Data-driven Computational Social Science: A Survey
Jun Zhang, Wei Wang, Feng Xia +2
Social science concerns issues on individuals, relationships, and the whole society. The complexity of research topics in social science makes it the amalgamation of multiple disci…
From Attention to Dialogue: Does Audience Engagement Reinforce Constructive Cross-Party Communication?
Ahana Biswas, Yu-Ru Lin
While existing works have emphasized how elites shape mass opinion, we ask whether the reverse also holds: do audience reactions on social media actively shape elite behavior? We e…
CASTNet: Community-Attentive Spatio-Temporal Networks for Opioid Overdose Forecasting
Ali Mert Ertugrul, Yu-Ru Lin, Tugba Taskaya-Temizel
Opioid overdose is a growing public health crisis in the United States. This crisis, recognized as "opioid epidemic," has widespread societal consequences including the degradation…
Rising tides or rising stars?: Dynamics of shared attention on Twitter during media events
Yu-Ru Lin, Brian Keegan, Drew Margolin +1
"Media events" such as political debates generate conditions of shared attention as many users simultaneously tune in with the dual screens of broadcast and social media to view an…
Auditing Support Strategies in LLMs through Grounded Multi-Turn Social Simulation
Michelle Star, Andrew Aquilina, Yu-Ru Lin
When users seek social support from chatbots, they disclose their situation gradually, yet most evaluations of supportive LLMs rely on single-turn, fully specified prompts. We intr…
The Public Algorithms Survey in Allegheny County
Yu-Ru Lin, Beth Schwanke, Rosta Farzan +4
This survey study focuses on public opinion regarding the use of algorithmic decision-making in government sectors, specifically in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Algorithms are b…
VISPUR: Visual Aids for Identifying and Interpreting Spurious Associations in Data-Driven Decisions
Xian Teng, Yongsu Ahn, Yu-Ru Lin
Big data and machine learning tools have jointly empowered humans in making data-driven decisions. However, many of them capture empirical associations that might be spurious due t…
Classifying Conspiratorial Narratives At Scale: False Alarms and Erroneous Connections
Ahmad Diab, Rr. Nefriana, Yu-Ru Lin
Online discussions frequently involve conspiracy theories, which can contribute to the proliferation of belief in them. However, not all discussions surrounding conspiracy theories…
GenAI vs. Human Fact-Checkers: Accurate Ratings, Flawed Rationales
Yuehong Cassandra Tai, Khushi Navin Patni, Nicholas Daniel Hemauer +2
Despite recent advances in understanding the capabilities and limits of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models, we are just beginning to understand their capacity to ass…
More Voices Than Ever? Quantifying Media Bias in Networks
Yu-Ru Lin, James P. Bagrow, David Lazer
Social media, such as blogs, are often seen as democratic entities that allow more voices to be heard than the conventional mass or elite media. Some also feel that social media ex…
ESCAPE: Countering Systematic Errors from Machine's Blind Spots via Interactive Visual Analysis
Yongsu Ahn, Yu-Ru Lin, Panpan Xu +1
Classification models learn to generalize the associations between data samples and their target classes. However, researchers have increasingly observed that machine learning prac…
Tracking Employment Shocks Using Mobile Phone Data
Jameson L. Toole, Yu-Ru Lin, Erich Muehlegger +3
Can data from mobile phones be used to observe economic shocks and their consequences at multiple scales? Here we present novel methods to detect mass layoffs, identify individuals…
Political Elites in the Attention Economy: Visibility Over Civility and Credibility?
Ahana Biswas, Yu-Ru Lin, Yuehong Cassandra Tai +1
Elected officials have privileged roles in public communication. In contrast to national politicians, whose posting content is more likely to be closely scrutinized by a robust eco…
Recipe recommendation using ingredient networks
Chun-Yuen Teng, Yu-Ru Lin, Lada A. Adamic
The recording and sharing of cooking recipes, a human activity dating back thousands of years, naturally became an early and prominent social use of the web. The resulting online r…
FairSight: Visual Analytics for Fairness in Decision Making
Yongsu Ahn, Yu-Ru Lin
Data-driven decision making related to individuals has become increasingly pervasive, but the issue concerning the potential discrimination has been raised by recent studies. In re…
Proceedings of KDD 2020 Workshop on Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping: Harnessing Human-Machine Intelligence for High-Stake Public Policy and Resilience Planning
Snehalkumar, S. Gaikwad, Shankar Iyer +2
Humanitarian challenges, including natural disasters, food insecurity, climate change, racial and gender violence, environmental crises, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, human ri…
HungerGist: An Interpretable Predictive Model for Food Insecurity
Yongsu Ahn, Muheng Yan, Yu-Ru Lin +1
The escalating food insecurity in Africa, caused by factors such as war, climate change, and poverty, demonstrates the critical need for advanced early warning systems. Traditional…
Online to Offline Crossover of White Supremacist Propaganda
Ahmad Diab, Bolor-Erdene Jagdagdorj, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng +2
White supremacist extremist groups are a significant domestic terror threat in many Western nations. These groups harness the Internet to spread their ideology via online platforms…
Whose Advantage? Measuring Attention Dynamics across YouTube and Twitter on Controversial Topics
JooYoung Lee, Siqi Wu, Ali Mert Ertugrul +2
The ideological asymmetries have been recently observed in contested online spaces, where conservative voices seem to be relatively more pronounced even though liberals are known t…
De-paradox Tree: Breaking Down Simpson's Paradox via A Kernel-Based Partition Algorithm
Xian Teng, Yu-Ru Lin
Real-world observational datasets and machine learning have revolutionized data-driven decision-making, yet many models rely on empirical associations that may be misleading due to…
Replacing the Irreplaceable: Fast Algorithms for Team Member Recommendation
Liangyue Li, Hanghang Tong, Nan Cao +3
In this paper, we study the problem of Team Member Replacement: given a team of people embedded in a social network working on the same task, find a good candidate who can fit in t…
Interactive Counterfactual Exploration of Algorithmic Harms in Recommender Systems
Yongsu Ahn, Quinn K Wolter, Jonilyn Dick +2
Recommender systems have become integral to digital experiences, shaping user interactions and preferences across various platforms. Despite their widespread use, these systems oft…
#Bigbirds Never Die: Understanding Social Dynamics of Emergent Hashtag
Yu-Ru Lin, Drew Margolin, Brian Keegan +2
We examine the growth, survival, and context of 256 novel hashtags during the 2012 U.S. presidential debates. Our analysis reveals the trajectories of hashtag use fall into two dis…
Regimes of Influence in Trust-Uncertainty Gated Networks
Razieh Masoumi, Ahana Biswas, Yu-Ru Lin
In many social communities, individuals can simultaneously trust and distrust the same source, a feature standard opinion-dynamics models often ignore. We formalize this ambivalenc…
Mesoscopic structure and social aspects of human mobility
James P. Bagrow, Yu-Ru Lin
The individual movements of large numbers of people are important in many contexts, from urban planning to disease spreading. Datasets that capture human mobility are now available…
Characterizing User Susceptibility to COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter
Xian Teng, Yu-Ru Lin, Wen-Ting Chung +2
Though significant efforts such as removing false claims and promoting reliable sources have been increased to combat COVID-19 "misinfodemic", it remains an unsolved societal chall…
Tribe or Not? Critical Inspection of Group Differences Using TribalGram
Yongsu Ahn, Muheng Yan, Yu-Ru Lin +2
With the rise of AI and data mining techniques, group profiling and group-level analysis have been increasingly used in many domains including policy making and direct marketing. I…
Leader-driven or Leaderless: How Participation Structure Sustains Engagement and Shapes Narratives in Online Hate Communities
Rr. Nefriana, Muheng Yan, Rebecca Hwa +1
Extremist communities increasingly rely on social media to sustain and amplify divisive discourse. However, the relationship between their internal participation structures, audien…
Inflating Topic Relevance with Ideology: A Case Study of Political Ideology Bias in Social Topic Detection Models
Meiqi Guo, Rebecca Hwa, Yu-Ru Lin +1
We investigate the impact of political ideology biases in training data. Through a set of comparison studies, we examine the propagation of biases in several widely-used NLP models…