Building AI that centers community needs, studying how AI actually behaves in real-world use, and designing community-driven alternatives to extractive platforms
Lightweight, easy-to-train adapters that allow communities to customize LLMs can help decentralize AI use and help communities experiment with how to best use AI systems.
Through ethnographic and qualitative work, we are working to understand how and when marginalized groups like the LGBTQ+ community successfully develop community-driven platforms that are more aligned with their values and needs.
We are studying how online platforms' algorithms and policies shape the material conditions and labor of content creators and cultural workers.
We are building new crowdsourcing tools that will allow users of platforms, ranging from Instagram to TikTok to Doordash, donate data to researchers and advocates with minimal effort.
Investigating how users internally negotiate the use of AI in their daily lives to design more contextually appropriate systems.
Current approaches to understanding AI behavior are limited to short or few-shot interactions. We are building platforms and doing field work to understand how model behaviors like sycophancy and mimesis change in realistic, long-term interactions.
The Workers Algorithm Observatory (WAO) is a inter-institutional collaboration focused on developing tools and doing research to support labor organizing and advocacy in the algorithmic age.
Shomik Jain, Charlotte Park, Matt Viana, Ashia Wilson, D Calacci
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Varun Rao, Eesha Agarwal, Samantha Dalal, D Calacci, Andrés Monroy-Hernandez
Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Shomik Jain, D Calacci, Ashia Wilson
Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
Alex Berke, Robert Mahari, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Kent Larson, D Calacci
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Alex Berke, D Calacci, Robert Mahari, Takahiro Yabe, Kent Larson, Alex Pentland
Nature Scientific Data
Dana was an invited panelist at the AIAI Symposium at Georgia Tech, discussing the intersection of AI, culture, and democracy.
Dana was interviewed by The Washington Post about AI narratives in popular culture and their relationship to real-world AI deployment.
she / her
Affiliate
Asst. Professor, Brown University
he / him
PhD Student
Penn State IST
he / him
PhD Candidate
MIT IDSS
she / her
PhD Candidate
Penn State IST
she / her
Affiliate
Data & Society
he / him
Research Engineer
Penn State ICDS
he / him
Affiliate
PhD Candidate, Princeton University CITP
she / her
Undergraduate Researcher
Penn State IST
she / her
Affiliate
Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University CITP
