This space is curated to archive my research projects. My motivation for studying them, presentations, published proceedings, and papers can be found under each project.
Anyone pursuing a PhD must have abundant curiosity—and my curiosity led me to study how people learn together in groups. While I can't speak for others, most of my brilliant ideas emerge from conversations with friends and colleagues. My research is deeply rooted in my own learning experiences, and fortunately, they all converge on one theme: collaboration.
My research ideas emerge from observations of everyday phenomena. For instance, when I was assigned to review two short papers and one long paper for ICLS 2022, I felt unprepared. While reading other scholars' work, I merely agreed and learned from them, struggling to provide constructive feedback and critical suggestions. This experience sparked my interest in peer review research. I recognized that novice scholars need better support to participate effectively in scholarly conversations and academic communities. To understand best practices, I analyzed peer review documents published alongside articles in Nature journals, examining how experienced scientists approach this task. However, I realized that simply understanding expert practices wasn't enough to guide novice scholars. This led me to conduct a systematic review of peer review training across organizations, publishers, universities, and conferences. Through this investigation, I developed my dissertation topic: creating more authentic peer review training experiences.
Academic peer review is a collaborative process, though many scholars might disagree due to their painful experiences with it. However, I'd argue that peer review is more than just collaborative—it's a collaborative learning process. Peer reviewers expand their knowledge of the state of the art, while authors learn from suggestions and improve their manuscripts. This same principle applies to classroom settings: peer review has equivalent value for students. Even when students create local knowledge, peers offer constructive feedback, and authors enhance their work through these interactions.
However, collaboration rarely figures itself out automatically. In peer review, editors must match authors with reviewers. Similarly, participants need to determine suitable teammates in classrooms and crowdsourcing competitions. During my undergraduate years, I disliked group work because team members often had different goals and contributed unequally to projects. Later, as a teacher, I observed these same challenges in my classroom. This pattern extends to crowdsourcing platforms like Kaggle, where teams frequently form but struggle to succeed. These observations made me question why such collaborations often fail and how we might address these challenges. To explore these questions, I collaborated with colleagues to study team formation mechanisms on crowdsourcing platforms.
Online communities fascinate me, particularly the role of informal learning in people's digital lives. I am passionate about advancing public technology literacy. My research explores how the general public engages with technology and how scholars and educators can support this engagement. Despite not having a technical background myself, I study how people interact with technology, teach themselves new skills, and tackle AI and data science challenges. Reddit serves as an excellent example—I regularly use it for learning and asking questions. I learned about Stable Diffusion through the platform when AI art generation became popular. I've witnessed the community's diverse dynamics, from constructive debates to contentious arguments and inappropriate content. Captivated by this "wild learning" environment, I conducted an analysis of week-long discussions to understand AI literacy in these natural online settings.
Most of my work is based on interdisciplinary work. While interdisciplinary collaboration can be philosophically complex, I believe that people from different disciplines share a fundamental understanding of science, whether natural or social. This is why I enjoy discussing ideas with friends from the natural sciences and collaborating with them on various projects.