Tag: Interns

Announcing our SMC PhD interns for 2016!!

On By Mary L. GrayIn InternsLeave a comment

Well, it was another exciting season of reviewing a rich batch of applications for our 2016 PhD Internship Program. We love reading about all the great work out there but really, really, really hate that we have just a few seats for our intern program. Please spread the word about this program and throw your hat into the ring next year! We’ll put the call out for interns again in mid-October, 2016.

For this year, we are pleased to announce that the following emerging scholars will join us as our 2016 Microsoft Research SMC PhD intern cohort:

At Microsoft Research, New England

Update:
Ming Yin

MingYin_headshot

Ming Yin is a computer science Ph.D. student at Harvard University, supervised by Professor Yiling Chen. Her research interests lie in the emerging area of human computation and crowdsourcing, and her goal is to better understand crowdsourcing as both a new form of production and an exciting opportunity for online experimentation. Her work is published in top venues like AAAI, IJCAI and WWW, and she has received Best Paper Honorable Mention at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’16). Before graduate school, Ming obtained a bachelor degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

 

Stefanie Duguay StephDuguay

Stefanie Duguay is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and holds an M.Sc. in Social Science of the Internet from the Oxford Internet Institute. She has also worked professionally as a Strategic Advisor in Digital Services for the Canadian federal government. Her research focuses on the everyday identity performances and interactions of people with diverse sexual and gender identities on social media. Her doctoral thesis examines the way that same-sex attracted women’s identities are constructed, shaped, and received across platforms, such as Instagram, Vine, and Tinder, with attention to the influence of both user and platform dynamics. Stefanie is the recipient of a QUT Postgraduate Research Award and her work has been published in New Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication, Disability & Society, and the Canadian Review of Sociology. She will be working with Mary L. Gray, Nancy Baym, and Tarleton Gillespie to examine the off label uses and user-led economies of mobile apps.

 

Caroline JackCarolineJack

Caroline Jack is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication at Cornell University and an Exchange Scholar in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT. She also holds an M.B.A. and an M.A. from Saint Louis University. Caroline’s scholarly work focuses on: the public communication of economics and capitalism in the American past and present; social imaginaries of the American economy; and understandings of the economic self in networked culture. Her research on the public communication of science and economics in the United States during the Cold War era has been published in Enterprise & Society and The Appendix. Caroline will be working with Mary L. Gray, investigating social imaginaries of self, market, place and property that emerge in and around peer economy platforms.

 

Shannon McGregorShannonMcGregor

Shannon McGregor (M.A. University of Florida) is a third-year doctoral student (soon to be doctoral candidate!) in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas – Austin. Her research interests center on political communication, social media, gender, and public opinion. She has presented her work at International Communication Association (ICA), the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research (MAPOR). Her work has been published in the Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and Journal of Media Ethics. Twitter @shannimcg

 

At Microsoft Research, New York City

Aaron Plasekplasek.bio.pic

Aaron Plasek works at the intersection of the historyof science, new media, and computation, and is writing a history of machine learning that examines the ways in which algorithms have been deployed in (ethical) arguments. He is currently a doctoral student in History at Columbia University and an MA candidate in the Draper Interdisciplinary Masters Program at NYU, and holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and undergraduate degrees from Drake University in physics, astronomy, and writing.

 

Introducing the 2015 MSR SMC PhD Interns!

On By Mary L. GrayIn Interns, MSRLeave a comment

Well, after a truly exciting spell of reviewing an AMAZING set of applications for our 2015 PhD Internship Program, we had the absolutely excruciating task of selecting just a few from the pool (note: this is our Collective’s least favorite part of the process).

Without further ado, we are pleased to announce our 2015 Microsoft Research SMC PhD interns:

At MSR New England:

Aleena Chia

Aleena

Aleena Chia is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her ethnographic research investigates the affective politics and moral economics of participatory culture, in the context of digital and live-action game worlds. She is a recipient of the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork grant and has published work in American Behavioral Scientist. Aleena will be working with Mary L. Gray, researching connections between consumer protests, modularity of consumer labor, and portability of compensatory assets in digital and live-action gaming communities.

 

 

 

Stacy Blasiola

Stacy

Stacy Blasiola is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and also holds an M.A. in Media Studies from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Stacy uses a mixed methods approach to study the social impacts of algorithms. Using the methods of big data she examines how news events appear in newsfeeds, and using qualitative methods she investigates how the people that use digital technologies understand, negotiate, and challenge the algorithms that present digital information. As a recipient of a National Science Foundation IGERT Fellowship in Electronic Security and Privacy, her work includes approaching algorithms and the databases that enable them from a privacy perspective. Stacy will be working with Nancy Baym and Tarleton Gillespie on a project that analyzes the discursive work of Facebook in regards to its social newsfeed algorithm.

 

J. Nathan Matias

NathanNathan Matias is a Ph.D. Student at the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a DERP Institute fellow. Nathan researches technology for civic cooperation, activism, and expression through qualitative action research with communities, data analysis, software design, and field experiments.  Most recently, Nathan has been conducting large-scale studies and interventions on the effects of gender bias, online harassment, gratitude, and peer thanks in social media, corporations, and creative communities like Wikipedia. Nathan was a MSR Fuse Labs intern in 2013 with Andrés Monroy Hernández, where he designed NewsPad, a collaborative technology for neighborhood blogging. Winner of the ACM’s Nelson Prize, Nathan has published data journalism, technology criticism, and literary writing for the Atlantic, the Guardian, and PBS. Before MIT, he worked at technology startups Texperts and SwiftKey, whose products have reached over a hundred million people worldwide. At MSR, Nathan will be working with Tarleton Gillespie and Mary L. Gray, studying the professionalization of digital labor among community managers and safety teams in civic, microwork, and peer economy platforms. He will also be writing about ways that marginalized communities use data and code to respond and reshape their experience of harassment and hate speech online.

 

At MSR New York City:

Ifeoma Ajunwa

ajunwa

Ifeoma Ajunwa is a Paul F. Lazersfeld Fellow in the Sociology Department at the University of Columbia. She received her MPhil in Sociology from Columbia University in 2012. She was the recipient of the AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship in law school after which she practiced business law, international law, and intellectual property law. She has also conducted research for such organizations as the NAACP, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the ACLU of NY (the NYCLU), and UNESCO. Her prior independent research before graduate school include a pilot study at Stanford Law School where she interrogated the link between stereotype threat and the intersecting dynamics of gender, race, and economic class in relation to Bar exam preparation and passage. Ifeoma’s writing has also been published in the NY Times, the HuffingtonPost, and she has been interviewed for Uptown Radio in NYC. She will be working with Kate Crawford at MSR-NYC on data discrimination.