Dhiraj Murthy (Ph.D, University of Cambridge), Professor of Journalism and Media Studies(in the Moody College of Communication) and of Sociology, both at the University of Texas at Austin is founder and director of the CML. His research targets many of the same areas analyzed in this lab, including tobacco control on social media, misinformation/disinformation on social media, digital research methods, race/ethnicity, and computational social science. He wrote the book on Twitter. He has authored over 70 peer reviewed articles, papers and proceedings.
Constantine Caramanis (Ph.D, MIT) is a faculty fellow of CML and William H. Hartwig Fellowship Professor in Electrical Engineering in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests center on decision-making in large-scale complex systems, with a focus on learning and computation. Specifically, he is interested in robust and adaptable optimization, high dimensional statistics and machine learning, and applications to large-scale networks, including social networks, wireless networks, transportation networks, and energy networks.
Amelia Acker (Ph.D, University of California, Los Angeles) is a faculty fellow of CML and an Assistant Professor at the UT iSchool. Acker currently researches data literacy, mobile and social media metadata, and digital preservation infrastructures. Her CML work involves new methods for studying mobile payment technologies as social media.
Sungwon Jung is a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her M.S. in Digital Analytics and B.A. in Sociology from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Her research mainly focuses on analyzing social media user behavior and detecting misinformation using computational methods such as machine learning and deep learning. Apparently, she likes data science!
Ilo Aguiar Reginaldo Alexandre is a Researcher at iNOVA Media Lab in Lisbon, Portugal. His research in CML explores our political social media datasets using quantitative and qualitative methods.
Tejna Dasari is Computer Science student at UT Austin with an interest in Machine Learning/AI. More specifically she is interested in building products that use Computer Vision. She is passionate about understanding how we can use Artificially Intelligent systems and tools to further help everyday lifestyles. She has interned at Facebook and Microsoft as a Data Scientist and a Software Engineer and will be working at Apple as a SWE post-graduation.
Sonali Hornick is a Brumley Graduate Fellow with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, currently pursuing a M.S. in business analytics at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business. Her past research in the CML related to environmental data science, and she is currently working on a project that utilizes cloud computing to analyze the Indian social media platform Koo. She earned a B.S. in Informatics, with a concentration in Human-Centered Data Science, and a minor in Business and Public Policy from UT Austin.
Anjali Kanumuri (she/her) is a fourth-year Informatics major concentrating in data science pursuing minors in computer science and business. She is currently working on research involving the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Indian Microblogging Platform ‘Koo.’
Ian Blakley is an Informatics student at UT Austin with an interest in data science, computer programming, and machine learning. He is currently working on a project that utilizes cloud computing to analyze the Indian social media platform Koo.
Kellen Sharp is a Communication Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland at College Park. Prior to this, he earned his master’s in Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include toxic techno cultures and digital discourses surrounding race and health. He is currently working on a project examining the remediation warning labels for e-cigarette products across social media.
Rujula Singh is a Master’s student in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. She is passionate about building end-to-end systems to solve real-world problems, particularly leveraging computer vision to enhance everyday lifestyles. Her professional experience includes working as a Software Engineer at Cisco Systems, where she contributed to the development of Cisco’s Webex Contact Center. In addition to her professional experience, she has completed several personal projects in computer vision, further honing her skills and expertise in this field.
High School Interns:
Shaurya Pathania is a junior at Westwood High School in Austin, TX. He is working on a CML project involving the analysis of AI and Human sentiment scores regarding Trump-related Tweets and another project regarding the computational analysis of Twitter geospatial and demographic data on anti-asian tweets. Outside of CML, Shaurya loves to tinker on robots in his school’s maker space, play basketball with friends, and the ethical implementation of AI.
Vishist Iyengar is a junior at William P. Clements High School in Sugar Land, TX. He is working on a CML project involving qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Indian microblogging platform ‘Koo.’ Outside of CML, Vishist frequently participates in debate tournaments, works on programming side projects for fun, and enjoys spending time with his friends and family.
Rishul Bhuvanagiri is a junior at Lawrence E. Elkins High School in Missouri City, TX. He is working on a CML project involving the analysis of image-text models using open-source AI models such as BLIP-2 and LLaVA2. Outside of CML, Rishul enjoys playing basketball, biking with his friends, and spending time with his family.
LinFeng Zhao is a senior from The Peddie School in New Jersey and he is fascinated by social media and digital storytelling’s impact on civic spaces. At CML, he is working on the APH project in which he analyzes twitter data for misinformation regarding monkeypox. At school, he leads a club that facilitates small group conversations and interviews which seek to mend polarization caused by social media, promoting constructive dialogue. LinFeng is also a varsity swimmer and is passionate about writing and philosophy.
Elan Suttiratana is a sophomore at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY. He is working on two CML projects: a project involving speech-to-text analysis and Indian social media platform ‘Koo,’ and a computer vision project focused on vaping-related objects in TikTok posts. Outside of CML, Elan participates in Model United Nations conferences, plays squash tournaments, and enjoys spending time with his friends and family.