Jeff Hancock is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University and Founding Director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. A leading expert in social media behavior and the psychology of online interaction, Professor Hancock studies the impact of social media and AI technology on social cognition, well-being, deception and trust, and how we use and understand language. His award-winning research has been published in over 100 journal articles and conference proceedings and has been supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense. Professor Hancock’s TED Talk on deception has been seen over 1 million times and his research has been frequently featured in the popular press, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, CBS and the BBC.

Cuihua (Cindy) Shen is a professor of communication at UC Davis and the co-founder of the Computational Communication Research lab (c2.ucdavis.edu) and the Computational Multi-Modal Communication Lab (https://sites.google.com/view/cmmclab). Her recent research focuses on computational social science and multimodal (mis)information in AI-mediated environments. She is the past chair of the Computational Methods Division of the International Communication Association, and the founding associate editor of the journal Computational Communication Research, as well as the associate editor of Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Facebook. She is a recipient of numerous top paper awards from ICA as well as a Fulbright US Scholar Award. 

Dr. Kokil Jaidka is an Assistant Professor in Computational Communication at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests lie in developing computational models of public opinion, persuasive and argumentative language and building social media platforms that better facilitate constructive conversations. 

Sarah Shugars (they/them/theirs) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Rutgers University. Their work focuses on how everyday people talk about, engage with, and collectively shape the modern world around them. Bringing together computational social science and the principles of deliberative democracy, they develop new text and network methods for examining the relational nature of public life, the linguistic modes through which people express themselves, and the technological affordances which shape digital discourse. They are a first-generation to college student and are deeply committed to increasing access and equity in higher education. Previously, they worked as a Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Center for Data Science and as a Research Fellow with George Washington University’s School of Media & Public Affairs. They received their PhD in Network Science from Northeastern University.

Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud holds the E. M. "Ted" Dealey Professorship in the Business of Journalism and is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the School of Journalism and Media, as well as the founding and current Director of the Center for Media Engagement (mediaengagement.org) in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. Stroud is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and the Annenberg Public Policy Center. She is part of an initiative to re-envision digital public life (newpublic.org) and a co-academic lead on the U.S. 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study. 

Jingwen Zhang is an Associate Professor of the Department of Communication and an Affiliate Faculty of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California Davis. She received her PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on understanding, designing, and testing emerging persuasive technologies in shaping public attitudes and behaviors. She received the Ayman El-Mohandes Young Professional Public Health Innovation Award and the Everett M. Rogers Award from the American Public Health Association. Dr. Zhang’s research has been published in top journals, including PNAS, Nature Communications, Journal of Communication, etc.

Dr. Dunbar is a Professor of Communication at UC Santa Barbara and a Fellow of the International Communication Association. She teaches courses in nonverbal and interpersonal communication, communication theory, and deception detection. She is also Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Information, Technology & Society; Center for Responsible Machine Learning; and the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences program. She has received over $18 Million in research funding from agencies such as the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Center for Identification Technology Research. She has published over 100 journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles and has presented over 120 papers at National and International conferences. Her research has appeared in top journals in her discipline including Communication Research, Communication Monographs, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication as well as interdisciplinary journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems and Computers in Human Behavior. She has served on the editorial board of over a dozen disciplinary journals and as the Chair of the Nonverbal Division of the National Communication Association in 2014-2016. She is the immediate past Chair of the Communication Department at UCSB.

Dr. Rachel Kornfield is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Her work combines user-centered design methods from human-computer interaction with rigorous evaluation methods that build evidence of the efficacy and effectiveness of health interventions and support their integration into care. Supported by a Research Career Development award from the NIMH, Dr. Kornfield is designing and evaluating an automated text messaging intervention, Small Steps SMS, that supports individuals in self-managing depression, and that is personalized through reinforcement learning. Her research also seeks to leverage recent advances in machine learning, such as generative Artificial Intelligence, to improve conversational digital mental health tools.

Hans is a 4th year Ph.D. student at Stanford University supervised by Professor Zakir Durumeric and researching in the Empirical Security Research Group. His research focuses on natural language processing, computer security, and the spread of misinformation online. His research is supported by the Meta/Facebook Ph.D. Research Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Hans completed two Masters’ degrees in Computer Science and in Statistics with the Daniel M. Sachs Scholarship at the University of Oxford. Hans completed his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University.

Christian Baden is an associate professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism, affiliated also with the Center for Interdisciplinary Data Science Research (CIDR). His research focuses on the collaborative construction of meaning in dynamic, political public debates, including its contestation and renegotiation, as well as embedded cultural and discursive resonance processes. His methodological work unites qualitative, quantitative and computational approaches to textual analysis, addressing challenges related to the validity and relevance of measurement and analysis across different forms of textual data, languages, approaches and tools. He chairs the European-wide COST network OPINION, which is dedicated to advancing the study of opinion expressions in digital public spheres.

Fabienne Lind is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna. Her main research interests are the advancement of content analysis methodology, comparative research, European media discourses about migration, and knowledge gap research. In her dissertation, she introduces, compares, and evaluates strategies for the automated analysis of text collections in different languages for cross-country research. Fabienne Lindwas part of the Horizon 2020 projects REMINDER, MIRROR, and OPTED and is currently a member of the COST Action OPINION and the Horizon 2020 project CIDAPE.