Research
We develop NLP and machine learning methods to uncover insights about health attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes — with a focus on health disparities and mental wellbeing. Our work spans social media, clinical language, and mobile sensing across diverse global populations.
Research Themes
Mental Health & Social Media
Using large-scale social media language to detect, monitor, and understand depression, anxiety, loneliness, and other mental health conditions at individual and community levels.
Global Health & Vaccine Acceptance
Developing computational models that capture health attitudes across cultures and languages — including vaccine hesitancy, health misinformation, and precision public health messaging.
Health Disparities & Equity
Investigating racial, geographic, and socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes and healthcare quality using online reviews, social media, and clinical data.
Firearms Safety & Public Health
Characterizing online discourse around firearms, suicide risk, and safety messaging to inform evidence-based public health policy.
Digital Phenotyping
Combining passive mobile sensing, language, and behavioral data to build richer models of individual health trajectories and intervention outcomes.
AI for Health Communication
Designing and evaluating LLM-based systems for patient education and health coaching — with a focus on preserving human agency and ensuring equitable outcomes.
Publications
2026
2025
Understanding gender and age differences in language use: cross-cultural insights from Weibo and Facebook
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
PAL: Designing Conversational Agents as Scalable, Cooperative Patient Simulators for Palliative‑Care Training
Companion Publication of the 2025 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
Exploring Socio-Cultural Challenges and Opportunities in Designing Mental Health Chatbots for Adolescents in India
Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Introduction to the Special Issue on Large Language Models, Conversational Systems, and Generative AI in Health—Part 1
ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
Exploring a language-based interest assessment: Predicting vocational interests on social media using natural language processing
Journal of Career Assessment 33 (4), 675-694, 2025
Language-based valence and arousal expressions between the United States and China: a cross-cultural examination
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, 5586-5600, 2025
Beyond the Strongest LLM: Multi-Turn Multi-Agent Orchestration vs. Single LLMs on Benchmarks
arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.23537, 2025
Herd behavior: Investigating peer influence in llm-based multi-agent systems
arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.21588, 2025
Multimodal explainable artificial intelligence for prognostic stratification of patients with glioblastoma
Modern Pathology 38 (9), 100797, 2025
Uncertainty-aware crime prediction with spatial temporal multivariate graph neural networks
ICASSP 2025-2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and …, 2025
Cross-cultural differences in mental health expressions on social media
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP …, 2025
Social norms in cinema: A cross-cultural analysis of shame, pride and prejudice
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of …, 2025
Exploring Socio-Cultural challenges and opportunities in designing mental health chatbots for adolescents in India
Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors …, 2025
2024
Historical patterns of rice farming explain modern-day language use in China and Japan more than modernization and urbanization
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Reply to Wang: Clarifying model performance and language markers of depression across races
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Reply to De Freitas: Social media language explains less of the variance in depression of Black individuals than of White individuals
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Reply to De Freitas: Social media language explains less of the variance in depression of Black individuals than of White individuals
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Key language markers of depression on social media depend on race
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Key language markers of depression on social media depend on race
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
A cross-cultural examination of temporal orientation through everyday language on social media
Plos one 19 (3), e0292963, 2024
Historical patterns of rice farming explain modern-day language use in China and Japan more than modernization and urbanization
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11 (1), 1724, 2024
Detecting and monitoring concerns against HPV vaccination on social media using large language models
Scientific Reports 14 (1), 14362, 2024
Building knowledge-guided lexica to model cultural variation
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the …, 2024
Key language markers of depression on social media depend on race
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121 (14), e2319837121, 2024
2023
Key language markers of depression on social media depend on race
Center for Open Science
Measuring Underwater Image Quality with Depthwise-Separable Convolutions and Global-Sparse Attention
2023 IEEE 25th International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP)
“That’s Interesting!”: Using Facebook Language to Predict Vocational Interests
Academy of Management Proceedings
Language on Reddit Reveals Differential Mental Health Markers for Individuals posting in Immigration Communities
Proceedings of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023
Detecting Symptoms of Depression on Reddit
Proceedings of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023
A Cross-Modal Study of Pain Across Communities in the United States
Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023
Multilingual Language Models are not Multicultural: A Case Study in Emotion
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Detecting histologic & clinical glioblastoma patterns of prognostic relevance
arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.00669, 2023
Multiscale encoder and omni-dimensional dynamic convolution enrichment in nnu-net for brain tumor segmentation
International Challenge on Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical …, 2023
Effect of integrating patient-generated digital data into mental health therapy: a randomized controlled trial
Psychiatric Services 74 (8), 876-879, 2023
Language on Reddit Reveals Differential Mental Health Markers for Individuals posting in Immigration Communities
Proceedings of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference, 2023
Investigating social media to evaluate emergency medicine physicians’ emotional well-being during COVID-19
JAMA Network Open 6 (5), e2312708, 2023
Different affordances on facebook and sms text messaging do not impede generalization of language-based predictive models
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 17 …, 2023
Detecting Symptoms of Depression on Reddit
Proceedings of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference, 2023
Reddit language indicates changes associated with diet, physical activity, substance use, and smoking during COVID-19
Plos one 18 (2), e0280337, 2023
Generative adversarial networks based skin lesion segmentation
Scientific Reports 13 (1), 13467, 2023
An integrative survey on mental health conversational agents to bridge computer science and medical perspectives
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language …, 2023
Multilingual Language Models are not Multicultural: A Case Study in Emotion
arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.01370, 2023
2022
Characterizing Responses to COVID-19 Vaccine Promotion on TikTok
American Journal of Health Promotion
Nonintrusive Perceptual Audio Quality Assessment for User-Generated Content Using Deep Learning
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
Head versus heart: social media reveals differential language of loneliness from depression
npj Mental Health Research
Stretching Artifacts Identification for Quality Assessment of 3D-Synthesized Views
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Perceptually Unimportant Information Reduction and Cosine Similarity-Based Quality Assessment of 3D-Synthesized Images
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Characterizing Responses to COVID-19 Vaccine Promotion on TikTok
American Journal of Health Promotion, 08901171221141974, 2022
Analyzing online reviews of substance use disorder treatment facilities in the USA using machine learning
Journal of General Internal Medicine 37 (4), 977-980, 2022
Patient experience and satisfaction in online reviews of obstetric care: observational study
JMIR Formative Research 6 (3), e28379, 2022
COVID-19 contact tracing app reviews reveal concerns and motivations around adoption
PLoS One 17 (9), e0273222, 2022
WWBP-SQT-lite: Multi-level models and difference embeddings for moments of change identification in mental health forums
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical …, 2022
Understanding the expression of loneliness on Twitter across age groups and genders
Plos one 17 (9), e0273636, 2022
Stretching artifacts identification for quality assessment of 3D-synthesized views
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 31, 1737-1750, 2022
Social media reveals urban-rural differences in stress across China
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 16 …, 2022
Head versus heart: social media reveals differential language of loneliness from depression
Npj Mental Health Research 1 (1), 16, 2022
Perceptually unimportant information reduction and cosine similarity-based quality assessment of 3D-synthesized images
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 31, 2027-2039, 2022
Twitter corpus of the# blacklivesmatter movement and counter protests: 2013 to 2021
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 16 …, 2022
2021
Perceptual Quality Evaluation of Hazy Natural Images
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
Correction for Eichstaedt et al., The emotional and mental health impact of the murder of George Floyd on the US population
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Correction for Eichstaedt et al., The emotional and mental health impact of the murder of George Floyd on the US population
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Social Media Reveals Urban-Rural Differences in Stress across China
Center for Open Science
The emotional and mental health impact of the murder of George Floyd on the US population
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Localizing Features with Masking for Satellite and Debris Classification
2021 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing Challenges (ICIPC)
Detecting Covid-19 and Community Acquired Pneumonia Using Chest CT Scan Images With Deep Learning
ICASSP 2021 - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Partisan Differences in Twitter Language Among US Legislators During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-sectional Study
Journal of Medical Internet Research
The role of digital health technologies in COVID-19 surveillance and recovery: a specific case of long haulers
International Review of Psychiatry
Analyzing Online Reviews of Substance Use Disorder Treatment Facilities in the USA Using Machine Learning
Journal of General Internal Medicine
Analyzing Online Reviews of Substance Use Disorder Treatment Facilities in the USA Using Machine Learning
Journal of General Internal Medicine
The rural–urban stress divide: Obtaining geographical insights through Twitter
Computers in Human Behavior
The rural–urban stress divide: Obtaining geographical insights through Twitter
Computers in Human Behavior
Well-Being Depends on Social Comparison: Hierarchical Models of Twitter Language Suggest That Richer Neighbors Make You Less Happy
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2021
Understanding social support expressed in a COVID-19 online forum
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and …, 2021
Nonintrusive perceptual audio quality assessment for user-generated content using deep learning
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics 18 (11), 7780-7789, 2021
The rural–urban stress divide: Obtaining geographical insights through Twitter
Computers in Human Behavior 114, 106544, 2021
Partisan differences in twitter language among US legislators during the COVID-19 pandemic: Cross-sectional study
Journal of medical Internet research 23 (6), e27300, 2021
The role of digital health technologies in COVID-19 surveillance and recovery: a specific case of long haulers
International Review of Psychiatry 33 (4), 412-423, 2021
Predicting cardiovascular risk using social media data: performance evaluation of machine-learning models
JMIR cardio 5 (1), e24473, 2021
Perceptual quality evaluation of hazy natural images
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics 17 (12), 8046-8056, 2021
How Health Care Workers Wield Influence Through Twitter Hashtags: Retrospective Cross-sectional Study of the Gun Violence and COVID-19 Public Health Crises
JMIR Public Health and Surveillance 7 (1), e24562, 2021
Detecting Covid-19 and Community Acquired Pneumonia Using Chest CT Scan Images With Deep Learning
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing …, 2021
Twitter discourse reveals geographical and temporal variation in concerns about COVID-19 vaccines in the United States
Vaccine 39 (30), 4034-4038, 2021
Characterizing COVID-19 content posted to TikTok: public sentiment and response during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic
Journal of Adolescent Health 69 (2), 234-241, 2021
The emotional and mental health impact of the murder of George Floyd on the US population
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (39), e2109139118, 2021
2020
Political depression? A big-data, multimethod investigation of Americans’ emotional response to the Trump presidency.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Political depression? A big-data, multimethod investigation of Americans’ emotional response to the Trump presidency.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Studying Politeness across Cultures using English Twitter and Mandarin Weibo
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Tracking Mental Health and Symptom Mentions on Twitter During COVID-19
Journal of General Internal Medicine
Tracking Mental Health and Symptom Mentions on Twitter During COVID-19
Journal of General Internal Medicine
Public Priorities and Concerns Regarding COVID-19 in an Online Discussion Forum: Longitudinal Topic Modeling
Journal of General Internal Medicine
Public Priorities and Concerns Regarding COVID-19 in an Online Discussion Forum: Longitudinal Topic Modeling
Journal of General Internal Medicine
Does Social Support Expressed in Post Titles Elicit Comments in Online Substance Use Recovery Forums?
arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.05103, 2020
Detecting Emerging Symptoms of COVID-19 using Context-based Twitter Embeddings
EMNLP COVID Workshop, 2020
Explaining the Trump Gap in Social Distancing Using COVID discourse
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020, 2020
Interactive Data Visualization with Python: Present your data as an effective and compelling story
Packt Publishing Ltd, 2020
Online reviews of specialized drug treatment facilities—identifying potential drivers of high and low patient satisfaction
Journal of general internal medicine 35 (6), 1647-1653, 2020
Political depression? A big-data, multimethod investigation of Americans’ emotional response to the Trump presidency.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 149 (11), 2154, 2020
Variability in Language used on Social Media Prior to Hospital Visits
Scientific Reports 10 (1), 2020
Understanding weekly COVID-19 concerns through dynamic content-specific LDA topic modeling
Proceedings of the fourth workshop on natural language processing and …, 2020
Studying politeness across cultures using English Twitter and Mandarin Weibo
Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction 4 (CSCW2), 1-15, 2020
Examining the phenomenon of quarter-life crisis through artificial intelligence and the language of twitter
Frontiers in psychology 11, 341, 2020
Public priorities and concerns regarding COVID-19 in an online discussion forum: longitudinal topic modeling
Journal of general internal medicine 35 (7), 2244-2247, 2020
Tracking mental health and symptom mentions on Twitter during COVID-19
Journal of general internal medicine 35 (9), 2798-2800, 2020
2019
Machine Learning for Phone-Based Relationship Estimation
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Frequency-Domain Analysis Based Exploitation Of Color Channels For Color Image Demosaicking
2019 IEEE Visual Communications and Image Processing (VCIP)
Online Reviews of Specialized Drug Treatment Facilities—Identifying Potential Drivers of High and Low Patient Satisfaction
Journal of General Internal Medicine
Online Reviews of Specialized Drug Treatment Facilities—Identifying Potential Drivers of High and Low Patient Satisfaction
Journal of General Internal Medicine
Patients’ willingness to share digital health and non-health data for research: a cross-sectional study
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
Patients’ willingness to share digital health and non-health data for research: a cross-sectional study
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
A Highly Efficient Blind Image Quality Assessment Metric of 3-D Synthesized Images Using Outlier Detection
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
Exploring (Dis-)Similarities in Emoji-Emotion Association on Twitter and Weibo
Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference
Machine learning for phone-based relationship estimation: the need to consider population heterogeneity
Proceedings of the ACM on interactive, mobile, wearable and ubiquitous …, 2019
Exploring (dis-) similarities in emoji-emotion association on twitter and weibo
Companion proceedings of the 2019 world wide web conference, 461-467, 2019
Patients’ willingness to share digital health and non-health data for research: a cross-sectional study
BMC medical informatics and decision making 19 (1), 157, 2019
Evaluating the predictability of medical conditions from social media posts
PloS one 14 (6), e0215476, 2019
Language of ADHD in adults on social media
Journal of attention disorders 23 (12), 1475-1485, 2019
Studying expressions of loneliness in individuals using twitter: an observational study
BMJ open 9 (11), e030355, 2019
What twitter profile and posted images reveal about depression and anxiety
Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media 13 …, 2019
Studying cultural differences in emoji usage across the east and the west
Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media 13 …, 2019
Suicide risk assessment with multi-level dual-context language and BERT
Proceedings of the sixth workshop on computational linguistics and clinical …, 2019
Understanding and measuring psychological stress using social media
Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media 13 …, 2019
2018
To Retweet or Not to Retweet: Understanding What Features of Cardiovascular Tweets Influence Their Retransmission
Journal of Health Communication
Measuring Individual Video QoE
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
‘Who Likes What and, Why?’ Insights into Modeling Users’ Personality Based on Image ‘Likes’
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
Current and future psychological health prediction using language and socio-demographics of children for the CLPysch 2018 shared task
Proceedings of the fifth workshop on computational linguistics and clinical …, 2018
Just noticeable difference for natural images using RMS contrast and feed-back mechanism
Neurocomputing 275, 366-376, 2018
Measuring individual video QoE: A survey, and proposal for future directions using social media
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications …, 2018
To retweet or not to retweet: Understanding what features of cardiovascular tweets influence their retransmission
Journal of health communication 23 (12), 1026-1035, 2018
A highly efficient blind image quality assessment metric of 3-D synthesized images using outlier detection
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics 15 (7), 4120-4128, 2018
Cross-platform and cross-interaction study of user personality based on images on Twitter and Flickr
PloS one 13 (7), e0198660, 2018
Facebook versus Twitter: Differences in self-disclosure and trait prediction
Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media 12 (1), 2018
2017
Detecting depression and mental illness on social media: an integrative review
Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences
Detecting depression and mental illness on social media: an integrative review
Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences
Studying Personality through the Content of Posted and Liked Images on Twitter
Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference
Maximum a Posterior and Perceptually Motivated Reconstruction Algorithm: A Generic Framework
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
Controlling Human Perception of Basic User Traits
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing
Controlling human perception of basic user traits
Proceedings of the 2017 conference on empirical methods in natural language …, 2017
Studying Personality through the Content of Posted and Liked Images on Twitter
ACM Web Science, 2017
B-SHOT: a binary 3D feature descriptor for fast Keypoint matching on 3D point clouds
Autonomous Robots 41 (7), 1501-1520, 2017
Detecting depression and mental illness on social media: an integrative review
Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 18, 43-49, 2017
2016
Latent Factor Representations for Cold-Start Video Recommendation
Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
Do Personality and Culture Influence Perceived Video Quality and Enjoyment?
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
Understanding Deep Representations Learned in Modeling Users Likes
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Personalizing User Interfaces for improving quality of experience in VoD recommender systems
2016 Eighth International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX)
Personalizing User Interfaces for improving quality of experience in VoD recommender systems
2016 Eighth International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX)
Personality, culture, and system factors-impact on affective response to multimedia
arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.06873, 2016
Personalizing User Interfaces for improving Quality of Experience in VoD Recommender Systems
Quality of Multimedia Experience, 2016
Understanding Deep Representations Learned in Modeling User `Likes'
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2016
Maximum a posterior and perceptually motivated reconstruction algorithm: A generic framework
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 19 (1), 93-106, 2016
Who likes What, and Why? Insights into Personality Modeling based on Image Likes
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2016
Do Personality and Culture Influence Perceived Video Quality and Enjoyment?
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2016
Latent factor representations for cold-start video recommendation
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on recommender systems, 99-106, 2016
2015
Do Others Perceive You As You Want Them To?
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Affect & Sentiment in Multimedia
Modelling Human Factors in Perceptual Multimedia Quality
Proceedings of the 23rd ACM international conference on Multimedia
Modelling the influence of personality and culture on affect and enjoyment in multimedia
2015 International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII)
Observation model based perceptually motivated bilateral filter for image reconstruction
2015 IEEE International Conference on Digital Signal Processing (DSP)
Evaluating visual and textual features for predicting user ‘likes’
2015 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)
The CP-QAE-I: A video dataset for exploring the effect of personality and culture on perceived quality and affect in multimedia
2015 Seventh International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX)
The CP-QAE-I: A video dataset for exploring the effect of personality and culture on perceived quality and affect in multimedia
2015 Seventh International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX)
Evaluating visual and textual features for predicting user ‘likes’
2015 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 1-6, 2015
The CP-QAE-I: A video dataset for exploring the effect of personality and culture on perceived quality and affect in multimedia
2015 seventh international workshop on quality of multimedia experience …, 2015
Modelling the influence of personality and culture on affect and enjoyment in multimedia
2015 International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent …, 2015
Modelling human factors in perceptual multimedia quality: On the role of personality and culture
Proceedings of the 23rd ACM international conference on Multimedia, 481-490, 2015
Personality modeling based image recommendation
International conference on multimedia modeling, 171-182, 2015
Do others perceive you as you want them to? Modeling personality based on selfies
Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on affect & sentiment in …, 2015
Optimisation of turning parameters by integrating genetic algorithm with support vector regression and artificial neural networks
The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology 77 (1), 331-339, 2015
2014
Optimisation of turning parameters by integrating genetic algorithm with support vector regression and artificial neural networks
The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology
Optimisation of turning parameters by integrating genetic algorithm with support vector regression and artificial neural networks
The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology
Support vector regression based flow stress prediction in austenitic stainless steel 304
Procedia Materials Science 6, 368-375, 2014
Big data analytics framework for peer-to-peer botnet detection using random forests
Information Sciences 278, 488-497, 2014