Researchers

Jackson is a behavioral researcher in the computational social science-focused Morality and Language Lab. His research examines how individuals and groups form moral identities and behave amid cultural conflicts, the impact of digital technologies, and innovative methods for measuring and analyzing these dynamics, particularly regarding bias, prejudice, and violence. On the Everyday Respect project, 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). Additionally, 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 with technology on this project earned him the Dean’s Emblem Award for Outstanding Scholarship.

Georgios is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California and a graduate research assistant at the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, supervised by prof. Shrikanth Narayanan. His research is on multilingual emotion recognition from text. Previously, Georgios studied for a joint M.Eng. and B.Sc. in Electrical & Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens.

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.

José is a Ph.D. candidate in American politics and computational social science at the University of Southern California’s Department of Political Science and International Relations, where he also serves as a graduate researcher at the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab. His research examines how racial minority legislators navigate institutional marginalization and employ position-taking strategies to advocate for their constituents and influence policy. Methodologically, he focuses on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and statistical inference to study political institutions and elite behavior.

As a key researcher on the Everyday Respect project, José applies Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify verbal and nonverbal communication preferences that community members wish to see or avoid in interactions with police officers, based on large survey and interview data. He also uses causal inference and machine learning to analyze the impact of police behavior on minority communities using large-scale traffic stop data.

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.

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.