CSMR - Key Persons
Former CSMR Architect Aviv Ovadya is a technologist and researcher focused on ensuring technology enables a positive future. He was one of the few who warned about the vulnerability of social media platforms to misinformation and propaganda prior to the 2016 US presidential election. Aviv earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked and consulted in Silicon Valley before becoming a Knight News Innovation Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. He led the development of the Iffy Quotient Platform Health Metric.
Carolyn Duran has a bachelor's degree with a concentration in UX Design from the University of Michigan School of Information. She is interested in human-computer interaction, social computing, and graphic design. At CSMR she worked with Ashwin Rajadesingan on cultivating more deliberate political conversations in online communities.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Information and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering
Ceren Budak is an Assistant Professor of Information and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering. Dr. Budak's research interests lie in the area of computational social science, a discipline at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and the social sciences. She is particularly interested in applying large-scale data analysis techniques to study problems with social, political, and policy implications.
Christian Sandvig is the H. Marshall McLuhan Collegiate Professor of Digital Media, Professor of Information, Professor of Communication Studies, Professor of Art and Design, and Faculty Associate of the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. Dr. Sandvig specializes in the design of Internet infrastructure and social computing. His current work focuses on the implications of algorithmic systems that filter and curate culture. Sandvig's research has appeared in The Economist, The New York Times, Le Monde, National Public Radio, CBS News, and other media outlets. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. He has consulted for Intel, Microsoft, and the San Francisco Public Library.
Cliff Lampe is a Professor of Information. Dr. Lampe researches the social and technical structures of large-scale, technology-mediated communication, working with sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, Slashdot, and Everything2. He has also been involved in the creation of multiple social media and online community projects, usually designed to enable collective action. One of Dr. Lampe's core values is combining top-quality research with community engagement.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Information
David Jurgens, Assistant Professor of Information, researches how humans behave by observing the things we say, what we do, and who we are to improve our theories using data-driven insights and methodologies. His work frequently examines the language and behavior on social media platforms by drawing on methods from computational social science and natural language processing.
Job Titles:
- John Derby Evans Associate Professor
Eric Gilbert is the John Derby Evans Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Before coming to Michigan, he led the comp.social lab at Georgia Tech. Dr. Gilbert is a sociotechnologist with a research focus on building and studying social media systems. His work has been supported by grants from Facebook, Samsung, Yahoo!, Google, NSF, ARL, and DARPA, and covered by outlets including Wired, NPR, and The New York Times.
Erin Brynn has a BSI from the University of Michigan School of Information and worked as an interface designer for CSMR. She is a UX designer for Navv Systems, a Detroit-based startup.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering
Eytan Adar is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering, and Associate Professor of Information, School of Information. He works on temporal-informatics, which is the study of the change of information-and our consumption of it-over time.
Former CSMR Data Scientist Fernand Pajot was head of data science at Change.org and Remind. He has experience in machine learning, data & distributed systems engineering, and shaping product & research roadmaps.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Information and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering
Florian Schaub is an Assistant Professor of Information and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering. His research interests include: privacy behavior and decision making, effective privacy notices and controls, human-computer interaction, emerging technologies, and public policy.
Former CSMR Executive Director Garlin Gilchrist II was elected Lieutenant Governor of the State of Michigan in November 2018.
See the biography of Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist at Michigan.
Hamza Baccouche is a senior at the University of Michigan School of Information pursuing a Bachelor's of Science in Information with a minor in Computer Science. His work with CSMR involves data collection, data labeling, and software development.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director
- Member of the CSMR Leadership Team
James Park is the Assistant Director of the Center for Social Media Responsibility at the University of Michigan School of Information. In addition to overseeing the day-to-day alongside the CSMR Director, he also collaborates with stakeholders inside and outside of the U-M community to advance the Center's mission and research. He previously worked in U-M's Center for Academic Innovation, and he holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton and master's degrees from Yale.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Josh Pasek is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan. His research explores how new media and psychological processes each shape political attitudes, public opinion, and political behaviors. Josh also examines issues in the measurement of public opinion, including techniques for reducing measurement error and improving survey design.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Head of Community Operations, Pinterest
Jud Hoffman graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA (Economics) in 1993 and a JD in 1999. He is currently Head of Community Operations for Pinterest, and his team is responsible for the policies regarding how people use Pinterest, the enforcement of those policies, and user support. Prior to joining Pinterest, he was Global Policy Manager for Facebook and in-house counsel for AOL, and he practiced law with Butzel Long in Ann Arbor and Latham & Watkins in Chicago. He lives in Menlo Park, California, with his wife Krista, an interior designer, and two of his three children. His oldest daughter attends the University of Michigan.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- VP Product, Twitter
Job Titles:
- Associate Director
- Member of the CSMR Leadership Team
- Associate Professor of Information and Research Associate
- Professor
Libby Hemphill is an Associate Professor of Information and Research Associate Professor in the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, Institute for Social Research. Dr. Hemphill studies politicians, non-profit organizations, and television fans to understand how people use social media to organize, discuss, and enact social change. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Nayar Prize, Mozilla, Amazon, DiscoverText, and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Mark Ackerman is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, Professor of Information, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Professor of Learning Health Sciences, Medical School. His research interests include computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, and social computing.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Information
Nazanin Andalibi is an Assistant Professor of Information. Her research interests include: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); Social Computing, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW); Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC); social media; social technologies, stigma, & distress; marginality; self-disclosure & privacy; social support; wellbeing; reproductive health; emotion artificial intelligence and ethics.
Job Titles:
- Karl E. Weick Collegiate Professor of Information and Professor of Information
Nicole Ellison is the Karl E. Weick Collegiate Professor of Information and Professor of Information. Her interests include: computer-mediated communication, mediated interpersonal interaction, self-presentation, social media use in organizations, relationship initiation and maintenance in online contexts, virtual communities, social network sites, online dating sites, educational uses of new technologies, college access and social media. (Disclosure: she currently serves as a part-time, paid consultant to Facebook.)
Job Titles:
- Director
- Member of the CSMR Leadership Team
- Michael D. Cohen Collegiate Professor of Information and Associate
Paul Resnick is the Michael D. Cohen Collegiate Professor of Information and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at the University of Michigan School of Information. He was a pioneer in the fields of recommender systems and reputation systems. The GroupLens system he helped develop was awarded the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award. He co-authored the book Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Michigan and a doctorate in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Disclosure: he previously served as a part-time, paid consultant to Facebook from May 2018 - May 2020.)
Phil Mendez is a master's student at the University of Michigan School of Information, studying human-computer interaction and user experience design/research. He is particularly interested in using qualitative methods to create equitable, community-based information systems. His past work involves civic, food, education, transportation, and business technologies. He enjoys reading and cycling.
Job Titles:
- Doctoral Student Researchers
- Professor of Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience
Priti Shah is a Professor of Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience and Educational Psychology. As a cognitive and educational psychologist, her primary goal is to understand how to overcome limitations in the performance of complex cognitive tasks. In particular, she investigates cognitive tasks that require managing multiple goals, integrating different sources of information, and forming coherent, memorable representations.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda is the creator of the once-popular "News For Nerds" platform Slashdot.org and its user #1 from its founding in 1997 until 2012. During that time he experimented heavily with many now-commonplace ideas like "blogging," "social media," "content aggregation," and of course crowdsourcing comment moderation. He made a comical number of mistakes, but he also got a lot of stuff right years before any platforms you have heard of even registered their domain names. He currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his family of humans and cats, and occasionally podcasts "Geeks in Space," which of course was started long before the term "podcast" existed!
Sagar Kumar is a Network Science Ph.D. student at Northeastern University. As a research & project assistant at CSMR, he provided critical assistance to the CSMR team with research, writing, data collection and analysis, and coding.
Saya Takai has a BSI with a focus on Information Analysis from the University of Michigan School of Information. She contributed to the Iffy Quotient platform health metric as a Research Assistant.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Fellow
- Research Fellow
Siqi Wu is a postdoctoral research fellow at CSMR. He is broadly interested in measuring and modeling collective human behavior on the web and social media. His work lies in the fields of computational social science, social computing, and data mining, and he has previously been a research fellow in the Computational Media Lab at the Australian National University.
He earned a B.E. (Electronics Engineering) from Tianjin University, an M.S. (Information Technology) from the University of Melbourne, and a Ph.D. (Computer Science) from the Australian National University, where his advisors were Prof. Lexing Xie and Dr. Marian-Andrei Rizoiu.
Summer Nguyen has a BSI with a concentration in UX Design and Research from the University of Michigan School of Information. She is a designer, illustrator, and researcher, and she explores all of these facets throughout her work. You can find her at snguyen.design or at her desk creating comics when she's looking to tell a good story.
Job Titles:
- Member of the CSMR Leadership Team
- Dean of the University
- Executive Sponsor
Thomas Finholt is the Dean of the University of Michigan School of Information. His research focuses on the energy costs of forming and maintaining social ties; computational mediation of trust in virtual organizations; and the use of ultra-resolution collaboration environments.
Job Titles:
- Developer
- Software Developer
Vitaliy Lyapota is a Python Developer at AnvilEight and Senior Lecturer at KhNURE.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- CEO of Jigsaw
- CEO, Jigsaw ( Google )
Yasmin Green is the CEO of Jigsaw, a unit within Google that addresses threats to open societies. She leads an interdisciplinary team that researches and develops technical solutions to a range of global security challenges, including violent extremism, repressive censorship, hate and harassment, and harmful misinformation.
Prior to Jigsaw, Yasmin's roles at Google have included negotiating deals for syndication partnerships, heading operations for Sub-Saharan Africa, and serving as the Head of Sales Strategy for Southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Yasmin is a member of the Aspen Cybersecurity Group and the boards of the Anti-Defamation League and the Tory Burch Foundation. Yasmin has been named one of Fortune's "40 Under 40" most influential young leaders and one of Fast Company's "Most Creative People in Business."
Yuncheng Shen is a proud UMSI Alumna, web designer, and developer.
Zain Padamsee (he/him) is a Bowdoin College student majoring in math and sociology. At CSMR he helped to design and conduct a study on political YouTube comments.