CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar   (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public
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Eugenia Rho
Virginia Tech
Design of Online Environments and the Quality of Democratic Discourse At-Scale
January 15, 2021

Facilitating democratic discourse, or people's ability to access factual information in service of thoughtful discussion of social issues, is critical for democracies to function properly. However, with the rise of online fake news, misinformation, and political extremism, it is becoming increasingly difficult to have civil conversations on the internet. As a first step to addressing this issue, scholars need to understand how the current design of online environments shapes the ability of people to respectfully engage across social and political differences. In this talk, I call upon two projects to demonstrate how common online design features and practices (such as the use of hashtags and unfiltered comments) directly impact the quality of democratic discourse at-scale. Using natural language processing, statistics, and experimental design, I find that the political reputation of a news platform and the presence of political hashtags in online news articles both affect the quality of discussion on race and gender equality topics. Collectively, these projects are motivated to understand how online spaces can be better designed to foster interaction and discourse that can bridge rather than sharpen social differences.

Eugenia Rho is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech Computer Science. Her research intersects computational social science and human-computer interaction with a focus on applying computational linguistics to understand and improve how people talk to each other.

By examining linguistic behavior at-scale through natural language processing (NLP) and experimental design, she demonstrates how technology contributes to the way people consume and discuss information with applications to news consumption, online communities, and institutional contexts. Her research has been published at ACM venues including Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Empirical insights from her research have been shared with the public audience through popular media (The Conversation, Yahoo Finance, Newsweek Japan, Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard, Quartz, CBS San Francisco Radio, and Radio New Zealand).

Currently, she is spending her time as a postdoc researcher at Stanford Computer Science as part of the NLP group where she applies computational techniques to predict linguistic patterns around escalation in police interactions captured through body-worn cameras. She received her PhD from the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California Irvine and her BA in Political Science from Columbia University.