At the 25th annual meeting of the Science and Democracy Network (SDN) in Potsdam, Germany (above), Nicole West Bassoff presented a new paper comparing innovative approaches to the problematization and regulation of social media in the US, EU, and Brazil, which she also workshopped with legal scholars at the Law and Society Association Conference (LSA) in San Francisco. She is using this research to chart her second book-length research project, which will compare how citizens and policymakers in these three different political-cultural contexts conceive of the digital public sphere—the online space of information sharing and opinion-formation that digital technologies make possible—and its role in democracy. For this project, she began taking lessons in Brazilian Portuguese in August.
Nicole also traveled to ETH Zurich in Switzerland to meet with her collaborator Margarita Boenig-Liptsin to advance their co-edited volume project, entitled Code, Carbon and the Promise of Constitutionalism.
In July, Nicole presented her research on the local politics of the Amazon Headquarters development in Northern Virginia at the RC21 Conference on Urban and Regional Development in Vienna, Austria, a chapter meeting of the International Sociological Association. For this conference she also designed a poster for her current book project, The Urban Social Compact in the Digital Age.
Aashka Dave worked on the Community Climate Knowledge and Multimodal Climate AI project in collaboration with Profs. Mona Sloane, Chirag Agarwal, and Antonios Mamalakis, PhD student Sabine Segaloff, and research assistant Caroline Brewczak. The project was awarded a $70,000 Co-Lab grant from UVA’s Environmental Institute this summer.
Aashka also continued working on her book project — focused on how people find and understand information about climate risk as it is mediated through data models — and attended the Responsible AI & Analytics for Insurance Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in June.
Maria Lungu began the summer by participating in the Participatory AI Research and Practice Symposium (PAIRS). The symposium brought together researchers, policymakers, technologists, and civil society organizations to consider how the public can have a meaningful role in shaping the development and use of AI systems. She presented research examining predictive policing in Kenya, focusing on how civil society organizations, journalists, and technologists have challenged surveillance systems such as Nairobi’s “Safe City” program and advocated for greater transparency, accountability, and public voice in decisions about technology procurement.
Maria also participated in an international symposium hosted by the Data Science Law Lab at the University of Pretoria, which brought together researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Nigeria, Zambia, and Kenya. The conversations examined the legal and governance challenges created by AI technologies across African contexts. This collaboration ultimately resulted in a publication in the Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal: “Bridging the Legal-Technical Gap: AI Surveillance and Data Sovereignty in Africa.”
Another highlight was being selected to participate in the Reimagining Africa’s Digital Economies: Sociotechnical Systems, Human-Technology Interactions, and the Co-production of Digital Futures series at the University of the Witwatersrand. The selective initiative brought together scholars whose work approaches digital transformation through African-centered, interdisciplinary, decolonial, feminist, design-based, and practice-oriented perspectives, with participants developing work toward a collaborative book project. Maria presented her research, “Administrative Infrastructure and the Redistribution of Discretion: A Comparative Analysis of Biometric ID Systems in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.”
Closer to home, Maria also attended the Public Management Research Conference (PMRC) in Washington, D.C., where she connected with scholars working across the field of public management. She also conducted research with the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, work that she plans to continue and develop as part of her tenure-track research agenda.
Ehsan Nouri has been working on two projects throughout the summer. In the first project on “Interpretive Conventions on Short Video Platforms”, he collaborates with Steven Johnson (DTD Lab faculty co-lead) and Brent Kitchens (UVA McIntire School of Commerce) on studying how visual and narrative conventions emerge on TikTok, the imitation process that underlies the rise of online trends, using novel AI-based methods of video understanding. In the second project on “Joint Consumption in the Movies Market”, he collaborates with Charles Weinberg (University of British Columbia) and Jason Ho (Simon Fraser University), in the study of how people form groups to watch movies, and how negative reviews influence the group decision making process of moviegoers, providing evidence from a large-scale simulation of the box office market.
During July 31-Aug 4, Ehsan attended the Academy of Management annual meeting in Philadelphia, where he participated in the junior faculty consortium of the Communication, Digital Technology, and Organization Division and presented his recent paper “Awareness by Association: Technology for Crowd Coordination in Interdependent Physical Tasks” (Link to proceedings). In this paper, Ehsan and co-authors (Terri Griffith and Nilesh Saraf) studied how associative cues on digital collaboration platforms can enable voluntary crowds to coordinate physical work from the bottom-up—a common scenario in times of uncertainty and crisis such as disasters, where volunteers increasingly use digital technologies to mobilize for mutual aid.
Over the summer, Jun Yuan worked on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Wenzhounese, a low-resource spoken language, with a focus on language preservation and access to language technologies. As a native speaker, he curated and annotated speech data and evaluated and fine-tuned existing ASR models for Wenzhounese. He is currently developing this work into a paper that examines both the technical pipeline and the practical choices involved in building language technologies for communities that are poorly represented in existing datasets and AI systems. The project also reflects on how seemingly technical decisions, such as what data to collect, how to annotate it, and how to evaluate model performance, can shape whose languages and communities are represented by emerging AI technologies. In doing so, the work connects language technology to broader questions of inclusion, representation, and participation in a democratic society.
Wendy Zhou participated in the AI x Journalism Summit organized by Hacks/Hackers in Baltimore, Maryland in mid-May. She joined discussions on AI governance in newsrooms, AI-supported tools for investigative journalism, visual and audio production, international reporting, fact checking, and audience analytics, etc. The summit brought together journalists, technologists, academics, media managers, and consultants from the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and other regions around the world.
In June and August, Wendy presented her paper on AI use and platform dependency among Chinese diaspora journalists at the Media Sociology Conference, an online post-conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference, and at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Annual Conference in New Orleans, August 5-8.
At AEJMC, Wendy was selected as the incoming Teaching Chair for the International Communication Division (ICD). In this role, she will oversee the division’s teaching award and support pedagogical innovation and resource sharing in international communication and journalism. Previously, she served as a graduate liaison and an ICD at-home series organizer and helped co-organize workshops and meet-up events to foster community building among international communication scholars.
