SCUBA: THE SOCIAL COMPUTING LABORATORY

The Social Computing Laboratory (SCUBA) aims to make the internet a safer and more welcoming place by developing new scientific methods and computational tools. Our work broadly intersects with social computing, data science, human-centered AI, and natural language processing. 

​SCUBA's current research is related to facilitating healthy online interactions, combatting online antisocial behavior, and human-AI collaborations to promote trust and safety on the Internet.

SCUBA is officially a part of the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 
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ONGOING PROJECTS

1. Real-time deployments of new human-AI collaboration tools for community moderators (e.g., Crossmod, ConvEx)
2. Fostering desirable online behavior (e.g., quantifying prosocial outcomes in online interactions)
3. Auditing and Re-designing algorithmic interfaces based on objectives drawn from HCI and theoretical CS
4. Resilience to influxes of bad actors and bad behaviors within online communities (e.g., Conversational Resilience)
5. Gray areas in online governance: Mismatches in stakeholder expectations (e.g., User-Mod Alignment on Reddit)
6. Design friction as a moderation intervention: Causal effects of quarantining subreddits on Reddit
7. Understanding and designing for audio-based (and other non-textual) social platforms

For a full list of our research papers, check out our publications.
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PEOPLE

​Professor: Eshwar Chandrasekharan

PhD: 
Charlotte Lambert, Fred Choi, Jackie Chan, Tanvi Bajpai

MS: 
Omkar Gurjar, Harita Reddy*, Dominic Jones*

Undergraduate:
Yoshee Jain, Ayaan Shah, Aarohi Gupta, Sowmya Pratipati, Ishq Gupta,
Drshika Asher, ​Ananya Rajagopal, Anwesa Goswami, Clark Lu, Jacqueline Chen ( * = Graduated!)