Our Team


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.

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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.

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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.

 

Kami Vinton is a doctoral candidate and graduate research assistant. She assists Dhiraj Murthy, Ph.D., Founder and Director of the computational media lab (CML). She is in the School of Journalism and Media in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. Her personal research focuses on how mass media impacts public health behaviors, particularly vaccine hesitancy. She also works on several projects that investigates misinformation, racism, and social media. She earned a master’s degree in Communication from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2016.

 

Trisha Lobo is a third-year Psychology major with a minor in Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include humane technology, surveillance capitalism, behavioral economics, and virtual decision-making. She is currently working on the TikTok in India project which looks at the use of TikTok as a tool for political activism and the spread of misinformation and disinformation in India. She is also a part of CML’s social media outreach team.

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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!

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Ben PretzerBen Pretzer is is a senior Electrical and Computer Engineering student at the University of Texas concentrating on application of big data to identify inefficiencies, most recently working through an Austin FC soccer team dataset to improve play during the season. He is currently on an NIH R01 project studying electronic cigarettes in social media such as YouTube using computational methods. LOCK]

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Tanvi Anand

Tanvi Anand is a master’s student in the Operations Research program at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining UT, she worked with a leading AI analytics company in India as a Data Science Consultant. She has also worked with Meedan, a technology non-profit focused on strengthening digital literacy. She has published at various venues such as IEEE and ACL workshops. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering with a minor in Big Data Analytics.

 

Shuvam Keshari is a Graduate Research Assistant currently pursuing Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur in India. Prior to joining UT, he worked with Jaguar Land Rover as a Power Electronics Software Engineer. He is currently working on a Computer Vision research project. He envisions a greener tomorrow through sustainable transportation with autonomous and connected cars. He dreams of humanity reaching a type II Kardashev civilization soon where a Matrioshka brain would possibly become a reality!

 

River Terrell (she/they) is a fourth-year Biology Honors major pursuing minors in science communication and business. She is the Community Engagement Team Supervisor and works on blog posts, social media content, press releases, interviews, and handles media relations. They are passionate about expanding science literacy and plans to continue science communication in their career, making science fun and accessible to those outside the lab.

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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.

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Yunong LiuYunong Liu is an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh, majoring in Electronics and Computer Science. She studied at UT-Austin as an exchange student. Her interests are Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. In CML, she worked on COVID-19 misinformation detection using various deep learning models.

 

Pranav VenkateshPranav Venkatesh is a Computer Science and Mathematics student at the University of Texas at Austin. He employs machine learning and big data quantitative analysis techniques to tackle interesting problems. His work with CML involves identifying harmful content on social media platforms.

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Tejna Desari is a computer science student at the University of Texas at Austin. She has a strong interest in machine learning. She is currently working on a previously NSF-funded research project tackling big data scale text mining around Hurricane Florence.

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Grace Kim is a Computer Science student at UT Austin. Her interests are Data Science and Natural Language Processing. Her work with CML involves analyzing Twitter’s Information Operations dataset to find race-related features. She is currently working on research in Robot Learning through the Freshman Research Initiative. Outside the class, she enjoys volunteering with CS Roadshow, in which she serves as a president.

 

Srijith Radhakrishnan is a senior Information Technology student at Manipal Institute of Technology with a minor in Big Data. His research interests focuses on Computer Vision. He is currently working with CML to study e-cigarette content on social media.

 

 

Nikhil C Mohan is a senior Computer Engineering student at Manipal Institute of Technology. He has a specialization in Computational Mathematics. His main interests lie in Computer Vision, Core Deep Learning and Neural Architecture search. He is also invested in metaheuristic problems and optimization. He is currently working on a project tasked with studying e-cigarette content on social media for CML.

 

Gayoung Jeon is a Research and Theory Master’s student in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her B.A. in Communication. Her research interests include political communication, digital media, public opinion, and journalism. She has studied the effects of news and emerging technologies on global and political communication. She is also interested in analyzing media language using computational and quantitative methodologies.

 

Aditya Ojha is an undergraduate senior studying Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin, with a focus on data science and information processing. He is working on studying E-cigarette content on social media at CML through computer vision. His interests lie in Computer Vision, Deep learning, Reinforcement Learning, and Robotics. He is planning on pursuing a PhD after graduation.

 

Eliana Norton is an undergraduate student at the University of Oregon. She is majoring in media studies and humanities. She is working towards going to graduate school to become a professor. Her interests include anti-colonialism, conflict and intervention, and conflict through media.

 

 

Thaïs Thomas is majoring in multidisciplinary science at the University of Oregon. Her main areas of emphasis are in psychology and biology. She is currently working in a lab that studies the neural mechanisms of olfactory function in mice.

 

 

 

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.

 

High School Interns:

Akaash Kolluri is a senior at Clements High School in Sugar Land, TX, interested in data science and machine learning. He is currently working on a project for real-time classification of health-related videos. Outside of research, he enjoys competitive programming and also teaching computer science to younger students.

 

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Drishti Gupta is a junior at Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science in Denton, TX. She is currently working on a CML project which explores race-related posts on Twitter and evaluates their relationship to influence operations and social issues including BLM, police brutality, and LGBTQ. In her free time she enjoys running, reading, blogging, and baking.