Eshwar Chandrasekharan
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Previously, I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, and M.Tech + B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Research summary:
Using a combination of computational techniques and social computing theories, my research aims to make advances on the problem of abusive behavior online with a long-term goal of making the Internet safer and more welcoming.
Here's the link to my Google Scholar and my latest CV (updated on March, 2022).
Bio:
Eshwar Chandrasekharan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research builds a foundation for evaluating and improving approaches to online moderation, and developing new AI-backed sociotechnical systems. Dr. Chandrasekharan's work has appeared at high-impact conferences venues, and received considerable press coverage—e.g., The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, The Verge and MotherBoard. He recently won a Facebook research award for his project on measuring healthy online behavior. Professor Chandrasekharan has worked with large-scale Internet platforms including Twitter, Reddit and Facebook, and his research has impacted their efforts to improve online governance. For example, he developed Crossmod, a new AI-backed moderation system that is currently deployed in an online community with over 14 million subscribers. His research led Reddit to ban many hate groups (e.g., neo-Nazis) from the platform. Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO and co-founder, also used Dr. Chandrasekharan's work as evidence in a testimony before Congress. Professor Chandrasekharan holds a B.Tech and M.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Recent updates:
[2022]
Research summary:
Using a combination of computational techniques and social computing theories, my research aims to make advances on the problem of abusive behavior online with a long-term goal of making the Internet safer and more welcoming.
Here's the link to my Google Scholar and my latest CV (updated on March, 2022).
Bio:
Eshwar Chandrasekharan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research builds a foundation for evaluating and improving approaches to online moderation, and developing new AI-backed sociotechnical systems. Dr. Chandrasekharan's work has appeared at high-impact conferences venues, and received considerable press coverage—e.g., The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, The Verge and MotherBoard. He recently won a Facebook research award for his project on measuring healthy online behavior. Professor Chandrasekharan has worked with large-scale Internet platforms including Twitter, Reddit and Facebook, and his research has impacted their efforts to improve online governance. For example, he developed Crossmod, a new AI-backed moderation system that is currently deployed in an online community with over 14 million subscribers. His research led Reddit to ban many hate groups (e.g., neo-Nazis) from the platform. Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO and co-founder, also used Dr. Chandrasekharan's work as evidence in a testimony before Congress. Professor Chandrasekharan holds a B.Tech and M.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Recent updates:
[2022]
- March 30: Our paper on "Harmonizing the Cacophony with MIC: An Affordance-aware Framework for Platform Moderation"was accepted to CSCW 2022! This work was led by my PhD student Tanvi Bajpai, along with undergrads Drshika Asher and Anwesa Goswami.
- March 16: Our paper on "Conversational Resilience: Quantifying and Predicting Conversational Outcomes Following Adverse Events" was accepted to ICWSM 2022! This work was led by my PhD student Charlotte Lambert, along with undergrad Ananya Rajagopal.
- February 23: I gave an invited talk at Jigsaw@Google, presenting my lab's work on Quantifying Outcomes in Online Conversations.
- February 18: Our work on "Quantifying the Disruptive Effects of Sudden Spikes in Activity within Online Communities" was accepted as Late Breaking Work at CHI 2022. This work was led by my PhD student Jackie Chan, along with Aditi Atreyasa and Stevie Chancellor.
- February 15: The ICWSM 2022 Data Challenge is now open, and this year's theme is Health-Related Discourse on the Web! Papers are due on April 1st, and we hope to have the results out in May. We invite papers that model, analyze, and contributed towards understanding and mitigating challenges in facilitating online discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- October 6: Our paper examining the effects of quarantining Reddit communities was accepted to TOCHI 2021. This was work co-led by Shagun Jhaver and I, along with Amy Bruckman and Eric Gilbert. We plan to present this work at CSCW 2022 (which appears to have moved to entirely virtual attendance).
- October 5: Agreed to be a Data Challenge Co-Chair at ICWSM 2022! Look forward to compiling cool datasets and problems for folks to work on and provide an entry point for students and young researchers at ICWSM.
- September 21: Was invited to be a panelist on "Transparent Automated Content Moderation" at the TU Vienna Digital Humanism and Illinois EU Center Faculty Workshop.
- February 23: Gave a guest lecture on "Understanding, building, and evaluating social computing systems" for the HCI methods course at the University of Minnesota.
- January 26: I'll be teaching Social Computing at Illinois CS during Spring 2021.
- January 25: SCUBA kick-off! We had our first lab meeting.
- January 15: Our paper on quantifying prosocial outcomes in online conversations was accepted at The Web Conference (WWW 2021)! This work was led by U-M undergrads Jiajun Bao, Junjie Wu and Yiming Zhang, in collaboration with David Jurgens@UMSI.
- October 15: Excited to be on the panel about "Stories at refusal from within the corporate firm" at The Refusal Conference. This is hosted by the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG) at UC Berkeley.
- September 24: Gave a guest lecture on "Combatting trolling and online harassment" in the Social Spaces on the Internet course at UIUC.
- August 15: I'll be teaching a course on Antisocial Computing (newly designed!) at Illinois CS during Fall 2020.
- July 10: Our WebSci 2020 paper on detecting Russian trolls on Twitter won a Best Paper Runner Up award!
- May 5: I accepted a job offer and will start as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2020! #HYPED
- April 10: Our paper on detecting Russian trolls on Twitter, led by Jane Im@UMSI, was accepted to WebSci 2020.
- March 3: I defended my Ph.D. dissertation on "Combatting Abusive Behavior in Online Communities Using Cross-Community Learning" at Georgia Tech.
- Feb - March: Gave a series of talks about "Using Human-Centered AI to Combat Abusive Behavior on the Internet" at University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, University of Minnesota, UIUC and UMass Amherst.
- February 17: We won a research award from Facebook Research for our project on "Measuring healthy online behavior".
- January 23: Crossmod, our new AI-based moderation system, is deployed real-time on r/Futurology, our partner subreddit with over 14 million subscribers. Check out our website for more information.