Organizers
Charles Kiene
Charles (Charlie) Kiene is a PhD student in the University of Washington’s Department of Communication. He works with Dr. Mako Hill in the Community Data Science Collective and has published interview and ethnography studies exploring the strategies and technologies that leaders of online communities use for dealing with large scale disruptions and change, from massive influxes of newcomers on Reddit to online group mergers in virtual worlds.
Shagun Jhaver
Shagun Jhaver is a PhD candidate in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research aims to inform the design of efficient and equitable content moderation systems. He has studied online harassment, moderation mechanisms and human-computer collaboration for content regulation on social media websites like Twitter and Reddit. His current work explores the tradeoffs of implementing transparency in content moderation systems.
Eshwar Chandrasekharan
Eshwar Chandrasekharan is a PhD candidate in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research aims to develop a deep understanding of abusive online behavior via statistical machine learning (ML) techniques. His recent work introduced a new class of interactive ML systems that are based on cross-community linguistic similarity, and discovered the existence of widely overlapping norms across distinct online communities on Reddit.
Bryan Dosono
Bryan Dosono is an Experience Researcher at Airbnb. His research interests broadly focus on understanding and negotiating collective action in the context of online identity work. He holds a PhD in Information Science and Technology from Syracuse University.
Brianna Dym
Brianna Dym is a PhD student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She works with Dr. Casey Fiesler as part of the Internet Rules Lab (IRL) and researches online communities for marginalized populations. As part of her work, she closely examines social norms around privacy and safety that work to govern community behavior. In her free time, she sometimes works as a volunteer moderator for online LGBTQ spaces.
Sarah Gilbert
Sarah Gilbert is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on participation in online communities and how cultural and technical constructs of online environments support and deter participation. She holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia.
Jialun "Aaron" Jiang
Jialun “Aaron” Jiang is a PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder. He studies governance and moderation in both small online communities and large platforms, especially how to empower moderators in these complex sociotechnical systems. He has studied rules made in online communities, challenges that volunteer community moderators face, and prioritization in large-scale platform moderation, using a variety of methods including large-scale data analysis, computational linguistics, interviews, and surveys.
Kat Lo
Kat Lo is the Content Moderation Program Lead at Meedan and visiting researcher at the University of California, Irvine, studying practices in online moderation, community management, and online harassment management. She has moderated online communities across Reddit, Facebook, IRC, Discord, and others for more than a decade, with a focus on supporting spaces for vulnerable and marginalized groups. Kat currently advises companies and nonprofits on challenges in Trust & Safety and content moderation.
Joseph Seering
Joseph Seering is a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University who studies the sociotechnical dynamics of volunteer online community moderation with a focus on understanding when and how technology can support moderators’ work. He has used a wide variety of methods from large-scale quantitative data analysis to interviews to development of systems.
Kenny Shores
Kenny Shores is a Data Scientist at Riot Games who develops policies and systems that reduce disruption and drive healthy and cohesive interactions. These policies and systems support League of Legends, one of the world’s most popular PC games, as well as all of Riot’s in-development games. Kenny also works with the Fair Play Alliance, a coalition of gaming companies dedicated to building healthy communities. Before joining Riot, Kenny completed his Masters with the Grouplens research lab studying social system affordances and disruptive behavior online.
D. Yvette Wohn
D. Yvette Wohn is an assistant professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology and director of the Social Interaction Lab (socialinteractionlab.com). Her research focuses on social provision and creation of safe spaces in social systems. Some of her recent projects include examination of content moderation in live streaming communities and understanding the human and AI aspects of moderation.