People
Lyle H. Ungar
Professor of Computer and Information Science
Principal Investigator
Dr. Lyle Ungar is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a B.S. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from MIT. Dr. Ungar directed Penn's Executive Masters of Technology Management (EMTM) Program for a decade, and served as Associate Director of the Penn Center for BioInformatics (PCBI). He has published over 400 articles and holds ten patents. His current research focuses on statistical natural language processing, deep learning, and the use of social media to understand the psychology of individuals and communities.
Lyle has consulted for companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies on strategic use of information technology in areas including data mining, business process automation, online auction design, and chatbots.
Johannes C. Eichstaedt
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Principal Investigator
Dr. Johannes Eichstaedt is a computational social scientist in psychology, an Assistant Professor in Psychology, and the Shriram Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
At Stanford, he directs the Computational Psychology and Well-Being Lab. In 2011, he co-founded the World Well-Being Project at the University of Pennsylvania, which is now a big data psychology consortium.
Over the last decade, his work has pioneered methods of psychological text analysis. Specifically, his lab uses social media (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, …) to measure the psychological states of populations and individuals. They use this to understand the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that drive physical illness (like heart disease), depression, or support psychological well-being.
H. Andrew Schwartz
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Principal Investigator
H. Andrew Schwartz is the Director of the Human Language Analysis Beings (HLAB), an interdisciplinary lab housed in Computer Science at Stony Brook University (SUNY) where he is an Associate Professor. Before that, he co-founded the World Well-Being Project, now a consortium of researchers from the UPenn, SBU, NYU, and Stanford focused on developing large-scale language analyses that reveal differences in health, personality, and well-being. He was a recipient of the Young Faculty Award from DARPA in 2020 and Outstanding Paper Award from Association for Computational Linguistics in 2023. Andrew is an active member in the fields of natural language processing, psychology, and health informatics as well as consultant in AI-Language Modeling. He is the co-creator of the new R-Text package as well as the creator and co-maintainer of the Differential Language Analysis ToolKit (DLATK), used in hundreds of studies.
João Sedoc
Assistant Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics
João Sedoc is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Technology, Operations and Statistics at New York University Stern School of Business. He is a faculty affiliate of the NYU Stern Fubon Center for Technology, Innovation, and Business. João is also affiliated with the Center for Data Science ML^2 Lab at NYU. His research areas are at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. His interests center around the methodologies for the evaluation of conversational agents. Before joining NYU Stern, he worked as an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. He received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Sharath Chandra Guntuku
Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science
Sharath Chandra Guntuku is an Assistant Professor in the research-track in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. His research focuses on building machine learning models using user-generated data for and uncovering insight into health outcomes and psychological states of individuals and communities. This research aims to supplement clinical diagnoses and facilitate early personalized interventions for improving treatments and well-being. His research has raised over $4.5 million from the National Institutes of Health, Penn Global, the World Bank Group, and other agencies. His work has been covered by the Times of India, American Psychological Association, WIRED, CBC, The Atlantic, US News, and other venues.
Ryan Boyd
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Principal Investigator
Dr. Ryan L. Boyd is a computational social scientist at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research explores how everyday language reflects and shapes our psychology, from individual personality to society-wide processes, including psychopathology, social cognition, and interpersonal dynamics. With a focus on computational methods, Dr. Boyd’s work spans a wide array of topics, such as mental health, human sexuality, storytelling, and emotions. He has also contributed extensively to the development of open-source text analysis applications for social scientists and is a leading scholar behind the widely used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC). In addition to his research, Dr. Boyd serves on the editorial boards of several interdisciplinary journals, and his work has been covered internationally by news outlets such as the Associated Press, CNN, BBC, The New Yorker, NPR, PBS, NBC, The Times, and more.
Oscar Kjell
Associate Professor of Psychology
Oscar Kjell is a Docent (Associate Professor) in the Department of Psychology at Lund University (Sweden) and a researcher in the H-LAB at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on conceptualizing and assessing mental health issues and well-being by analyzing individuals’ descriptions of their unique experiences and symptoms using robust and reproducible AI-driven methods. He co-created the text-package (www.r-text.org) and the topics-package (www.r-topics.org), which offers advanced tools for analyzing natural language data in R, designed specifically for testing research hypotheses in the social and behavioral sciences.
Elizabeth Stade, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford
Post-Docs
Jonas Paul Schöne, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford
Christopher Kelly, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford