Researchers

Dr. José J. Alcocer is a Research Scientist at Harvard Law School. On the Everyday Respect project, Dr. Alcocer serves as both an ontological and methodological bridge between social scientists and computer scientists, aligning conceptual definitions, units of analysis, and data structures so that the project’s data are usable for causal social science research. His work combines causal inference with computational social science to examine how political institutions structure representation, with particular attention to electoral systems, legislative behavior, race and ethnicity, redistricting,  and voting rights.

Georgios is a PhD candidate and fellow at the University of Southern California, supervised by Shri Narayanan. His research is on complex subjective language tasks (i.e., problems where we can agree to disagree about the interpretation) and analyzing how the latest AI models perform on them.

Aarya Devnani is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. He is a Research Assistant at the Morality and Language Lab at USC. His academic interests primarily revolve around web development, game development, and distributed systems. As a platform developer for the CVAT-BWV on the ER project, he works on enhancing the platform for annotating and transcribing LAPD Body Cam footage. Outside of academia, Aarya has a strong interest in sports and technology.

Ameya Godbole is a fourth year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California advised by Prof. Robin Jia. He works on hallucination-free and faithful generation with retrieval augmentation. He’s worked on leveraging the planning capabilities of LLMs to guide retrieval. He also study the behavior of factuality detection systems and their reliability in model selection. In the past, he has worked on retrieval for open-domain question answering (ODQA), knowledge base completion (KBC), and semantic parsing for knowledge base QA (KBQA).

Preni is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department. She graduated from Sharif University of Technology with B.Sc. in Computer Engineering. Her research interests are in natural language processing and its intersection with the social sciences. She aims to investigate different social, cultural, and psychological phenomena by processing online texts and discourse. She also intends to analyze social networks to identify societal behavior patterns and study the drivers behind them.

Parsa Hejabi is a graduate NLP research assistant at the Morality and Language Lab. He is the technical lead and product manager of CVAT-BWV, the video annotation platform for the ER project. In addition to this role, he also works on ML pipeline development for the project.

Robin Jia is an assistant professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where he leads the AI, Language, Learning, Generalization, and Robustness (Allegro) Lab. His research seeks to understand modern deep learning systems for NLP and ensure their reliability.

Hong Nguyen is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California, where he conducts research at the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory. His work focuses on advancing computer vision models, human-centered explainable AI and generative models for visual data. On the Everyday Respect project, his main focus is police-civilian behavior analysis based on speech & visual data, reasoning and causal inference.

Sajjad is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California, advised by Prof. Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan in the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL). His research interests lie in computer vision and machine learning, with a focus on healthcare applications and long-form video understanding. In this project, his research centers on visual modality processing for long-video understanding and human interaction analysis.

Jackson is the lead PhD researcher overseeing the human aspects of human-centered AI. His responsibilities include the UX/UI design of the custom annotation platform (CVAT-BWC). He is developing the annotation manual that guides humans on how to measure objective and subjective psychological constructs of police-civilian interactions, training diverse annotators to capture the subjectivity of such stops, continuously evaluating data, and assessing annotator well-being concerning traumatic content exposure. His contributions to enhancing police accountability and integrating social science earned him the Dean’s Emblem Award for Outstanding Scholarship.