New directions 2021

The fifth annual “New Directions in Research on the Psychology of Technology” conference will be held in Santa Barbara on November 12-13, and is organized and sponsored by UC Santa Barbara’s Technology Management Program.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS
Matthew Beane, Technology Management, UC Santa Barbara
Jessica Santana, Technology Management, UC Santa Barbara

HOTEL ACCOMMODATIONS A block of rooms has been reserved at a few different hotels in the area. Please note, due to Covid, hotels are currently not running shuttle services.

Check- in: November 11, 2021

Check-out: November 14, 2021

• Best Western: This is a beautiful two-star hotel in Goleta. A link to the hotel block can be found HERE

  • Check-in time: 3pm

  • Check-out time: 12pm

  • Alternatively, reservations may be made by calling 1-805-967-3200 and ask for “Psych of Tech” group when booking.

  • Please NOTE! If you want to edit the days in the reservation, you need to call the hotel rather than booking online

  • Guests have until October 20th at Midnight to make their reservations

• Courtyard Marriott: This is a three-star hotel within 2 miles from UC Santa Barbara. A link to the hotel block can be found HERE.

  • Check-in time: 3pm

  • Check-out time: 11am

  • Alternatively, reservations may be made by calling 1-800-228-9290. Ask for “Psych of Tech” group when booking.

  • Guests have until October 11th to make their reservations

TRAVEL FROM/TO LAX AIRPORT (UCSB is closer to the Goleta stops)

Santa Barbara Airbus: daily scheduled shuttles directly between LAX airport and Santa Barbara/Goleta.

Pacific Surfliner: Scenic train ride along the coast from Union Station in LA to Santa Barbara or Goleta Train Station. (Note: Amtrak does not have a station at the airport. The LAX Flyaway Bus provides service between LAX airport and Union Station.)

Schedule

Thursday, November 11

6-8p Speakers’ Dinner

Friday, November 12

9:30-10:15 - Continental Breakfast

10:15-10:45a - Welcome from conference organizers

11a-12p - Research Presentations

• Paolo Parigi, Stanford University; Facebook

• Maarten Bos, Snap

• Sandrine Müller, Google

• Svitlana Volkova, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

12-1p - LUNCH

1:15-2p - Research Presentations

• Xuan Zhao, Stanford University

• Jonathan Gratch, University of Southern California

• Hatim Rahman, Northwestern University

2-3p - Table discussions

3-3:45p - Research Presentations

• Molly Crockett, Yale University

• Sydney Levine, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department and the Harvard Psychology Department

• Azim Shariff, University of British Columbia

3:45-4p - BREAK

4-5 - PhD Data Blitz

• Bing Bai, Washington University in St. Louis

• Chunchen Xu, Stanford University

• Angela Lee, Stanford University

• Rumela Sengupta, University of Chicago

• Jonathan Bogard, UCLA

• Anouk Bergner, University of St. Gallen

• Matthew Leitao, Georgetown University

• Eileen McGivney, Harvard School of Education

5-5:30 - BREAK and WALK to UCSB Quantum Computing Lab

5:30-6:30 - Wine tasting and Quantum Computing Lab guided tour

6:30 - Dinner on your own

Saturday, November 13

10-10:45 Brunch and Posters

• Shir Etgar, Columbia University

• Sonja Lyubomirsky, UC Riverside

• Aner Sela, University of Florida

• Daniel Shank, Missouri University of Science and Technology

• Stephanie Torres, CSUN

• Ying Zhu, University of British Columbia

• Laura Zimmermann, IE University

10:45-11a - Welcome back from conference organizers

11-12p - Research Presentations (ethics and AI at UCSB)

• Jessica Santana, UC Santa Barbara

• Kyle Lewis, UC Santa Barbara

• Joe Walther, UC Santa Barbara

• William Wang, UC Santa Barbara

12-1p - LUNCH BREAK

1-2p - Beyond Ut/Dystopia - Reflections on our Quantum Experience

2-2:15 - Conference Wrap-up

2:30-8 - OPTIONAL Vineyard Tour in the Santa Ynez Valley (including Los Olivos, the town

featured in the movie “Sideways”) - you must RSVP and pay here by Oct 18th. $80/person.

* Due to space limitations, the conference is invitation only.

**Poster presenters will have a max poster size of 4x6ft.

Molly Crockett, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Yale University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. Prior to joining Yale, Dr Crockett was an Associate Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College. She holds a BSc in Psychobiology from UCLA and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge, and completed a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship with economists and neuroscientists at the University of Zürich and University College London.

Jonathan Gratch, Ph.D., is a distinguished scholar trained in psychology and computer science, who studies the communication of emotion, that is, “on social emotions, emphasizing the role of contingent nonverbal behavior in the co-construction of emotional trajectories between interaction partners.” His rigorously theoretical research has been applied in the development of digital agents who garner rapport with human partners (among other settings), leading to persuasive and therapeutic results. He holds appointments in the University of Southern California’s departments of computer science, psychology, and media arts. He is Director of Virtual Human Research in the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, and the Director of the USC Affective Computing Groups. The editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, his work has been supported by the NSF, DARPA, and others.

Sydney Levine, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral scholar working jointly with Joshua Tenenbaum (MIT, Brain and Cognitive Sciences) and Fiery Cushman (Harvard, Psychology) on the moral judgment and decision-making processes of adults, children, and artificial intelligence systems. Her experimental approach integrates behavioral, developmental, cross-cultural, computational, and philosophical methods and ranges from theoretical to applied.

Kyle Lewis, Ph.D., studies how organizations leverage individual and collective knowledge. She examines the performance of teams, especially those teams engaged in knowledge work such as professional services, new product development, science and engineering, and project-based tasks. She has published articles in Management Science, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Group Dynamics. Lewis served as a Division Chair in the Academy of Management, Senior Editor for Organization Science and Associate Editor for Management Science. Lewis has professional experience in technology strategy, designing and implementing information systems, AI product management and human resources management.

Sandrine Müller, Ph.D., is a Quantitative User Experience Researcher at Google in NYC. She has experience in studying the relationship between digital footprints (e.g., smartphone sensor data) and human psychology. In particular, she examined how mobility patterns (e.g., the places people visit, their daily routines, distance traveled, etc.) can inform our understanding of personality and mental health. Her research aims to provide a deeper theoretical understanding of these psychological phenomena, while fostering the development of personalized interventions to promote well-being.

Paolo Parigi, Ph.D., is a Research Manager at Facebook, and a social scientist studying interpersonal trust and social networks. He is interested in the institutions, products and artifacts that individuals and society use and create to make sense of uncertainty.  His work investigates how technology is deployed for building trust in the online marketplaces of the sharing economy. Further, he studies the social consequences of the processes that technology has unleashed. His intellectual trajectory suggests that social scientists may have a new role, one in which they produce a knowledge that is applicable in building online spaces where individuals interact.

Hatim A. Rahman, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. His research investigates how artificial intelligence, undergirded by algorithms, is impacting the nature of work and employment relationships in organizations and labor markets. His current research uses field data collected through participant observation, interviews, and archival sources to study how sophisticated algorithms are being used by digital platform organizations to disrupt the way people work and are evaluated. His research uses both qualitative field methods and computational social science techniques.

Jessica Santana, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Program at UC Santa Barbara, where she studies the role of networks in innovation and entrepreneurship. Her recent research explored how entrepreneurs use peers and rhetoric to navigate sensemaking and stigma following startup failure. She also investigates the relationship between innovation and ethics in contexts such as synthetic biology and cryptocurrency crowdfunding. Her work is driven by insights from organizational theory, economic sociology, social psychology, and network science. She relies on a variety of methodological approaches, including experimental, statistical, and computational analyses. Her research is informed by her prior experience working in the types of organizations she studies, from Silicon Valley startups to Nicaraguan farming cooperatives.

Azim Shariff, Ph.D., is a social psychologist whose research focuses on where morality intersects with religion, cultural attitudes and economics. Another rapidly expanding part of his research looks at human-technology interactions and the ethics of automation, including self-driving cars.

Svitlana Volkova, Ph.D., is a recognized leader in the field of computational social science and computational linguistics. Her scientific contributions and publication profile cover a range of topics on applied machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and social media analytics. Her research focuses on understanding, predicting, and explaining human behavior, interactions, and real-world events from open-source social data. Approaches developed by Dr. Volkova advance effective decision making and reasoning about extreme volumes of dynamic, multilingual, multimodal, and diverse real-world unstructured data.

Joe Walther, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor in Communication, the Mark and Susan Bertelsen Presidential Chair in Technology and Society, and the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at UCSB. His teaching and research focus on computer-mediated communication and social media in personal relationships, groups, educational settings, and inter-ethnic conflict, topics on which he has contributed several original theories and numerous experiments and surveys. Prior to joining UCSB, Prof Walther was the Wee Kim Wee Professor in Communication Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and previously at Michigan State University, Cornell, RPI, and Northwestern. He is a fellow at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He’s also a Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA) and a Distinguished Scholar in the National Communication Association (NCA). He’s received the NCA’s Woolbert Award for articles that have stood the test of time and changed thinking in the communication discipline for more than ten years, and the ICA’s Chaffee Award for career productivity and influence.

William Wang, Ph.D., is the Director of UC Santa Barbara's Natural Language Processing Group and the Center for Responsible Machine Learning. He is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Designs, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD from School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. He has broad interests in machine learning approaches to data science, including statistical relational learning, information extraction, computational social science, speech, and vision. He has published more than 80 papers at leading NLP/AI/ML conferences and journals, and received best paper awards (or nominations) at ASRU 2013, CIKM 2013, EMNLP 2015, and CVPR 2019, a DARPA Young Faculty Award (Class of 2018), a Google Faculty Research Award (2018), three IBM Faculty Awards (2017-2019), two Facebook Research Awards (2018, 2019), an Adobe Research Award in 2018, and the Richard King Mellon Presidential Fellowship in 2011. He frequently serves as an Area Chair for NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, and AAAI. He is an alumnus of Columbia University, and a former research scientist intern of Yahoo! Labs, Microsoft Research Redmond, and University of Southern California. In addition to research, William enjoys writing scientific articles that impact the broader online community: his microblog @王威廉 has 100,000+ followers and more than 2,000,000 views each month. His work and opinions appear at major tech media outlets such as Wired, VICE, Scientific American, Fast Company, NASDAQ, The Next Web, Law.com, and Mental Floss.

Xuan Zhao, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist at Stanford SPARQ. She studies how to help people connect, offer and appreciate different perspectives, foster meaningful conversations and positive interactions, and create inclusive environments. She also works on how people interact with/via humanlike technologies and their downstream consequences. At SPARQ, she works with industry partners such as Nextdoor to design and evaluate initiatives to foster respectful and inclusive online conversation, and Illumen Capital to foster diversity and inclusion in the investment world. Prior to SPARQ, Dr. Zhao was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where she also collaborated with The Second City to design communication and inclusion workshops using improv techniques. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University.