Hi, I'm Regina! I'm a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) department at University of Washington (UW), advised by Dr. Benjamin Mako Hill and Dr. Jennifer Turns and closely working with Dr. Sayamindu Dasgupta. I am part of the Community Data Science Collective research group.
I'm on the job market! I'm looking for industry/non-profit research scientist, tenure-track faculty, and postdoc positions in HCI. I'm also open to UX researcher positions. Please reach out if you know any opportunities!
My research, at the intersection of human-computer interaction, social computing, and learning science, strives to understand and support rising data scientists and programmers by combining the power of online community and AI. Specifically, I use mixed method approaches to understand how users learn computational skills in communities such as Scratch and Kaggle. I also develop prototypes and conducts design-based research to study human-AI collaboration in programming and data tasks. My work has generated design guidelines for community platform design and regulation, as well as human factors in AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, and has been published in various academic venues such as CHI, CSCW, and NAACL. More generally, I'm interested in research topics about online community, computational literacies, human-AI collaboration, and creativity support.
I received my Bachelor of Science degrees in Cognitive Science and Mathematics from University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where I did research in the Design Lab. I received a Master of Science degree in Human-centered Design and Engineering from University of Washington.
In my free time, I enjoy creating digital fanarts and illustrations and cuddling with my cat, Hime. I also like reading, cooking, hiking, and researching the evolution of languages around the world, especially the Wu variety of Chinese (or rather, its own language, but that's a longer conversation).
10/2022
I gave a guest speaker talk at the Expertise@scale Salon at Emory University! I shared about my work on understanding and designing for informal learning in online communities.
09/2022
I hosted a Science of Community Dialogues webinar on "All Communities Are Learning Communities"! Along with Dr. Denae Ford, I shared my work on informal learning in online commnities with community leaders, designers, and other practitioners. It was an enlightening conversation!
09/2022
Wrapped up my research internship with the SAINTES team at Microsoft Research! I worked with my awesome mentors Dr. Denae Ford and Dr. Tom Zimmermann and many others! I designed and conducted projects related to online developer communities and AI-powered code generation systems. More about the papers from these projects will be posted soon! What a summer of learning and fun!
07/2022
Presented my paper "Mapping the Design Space of Human-AI Interaction in Text Summarization" at the NAACL2022 conference! Here are links to the paper and the Twitter thread. This was also my first time attending an NLP conference and it was eyeopening to see research at the intersection of language technology and AI! Hope to work in this space more in the future!
05/2022
Attended CHI'22 in-person! It was so fun to meet old and new friends and learn about cool research! I presented our paper "How Interest-Driven Content Creation Shapes Opportunities for Informal Learning in Scratch: A Case Study on Novices' Use of Data Structures" that received the Best Paper Honorable Mention award! Check out the slides and the live recording of my talk!
04/2022
I passed my dissertation proposal on Understanding and Designing for Data Literacies in Online Communities! Now I'm ABD!
04/2022
Happy to announce that 2 new papers have been accepted to NAACL'22 with the special track theme of human-centered NLP! These papers are based on works that I did during my internship at Dataminr with Dr. Alison Smith-Renner and Dr. Ke Zhang.
03/2022
Happy to announce that 2 new papers - "Many Destinations, Many Pathways: A Quantitative Analysis of Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Scratch" with Dr. Benjamin Mako Hill and "Feedback Exchange and Online Affinity: A Case Study of Online Fanfiction Writers" with Jenna Frens - have been accepted to CSCW'22!
03/2022
Thrilled to announce that my paper with Dr. Benjamin Mako Hill and Dr. Sayamindu Dasgupta titled "How Interest-Driven Content Creation Shapes Opportunities for Informal Learning in Scratch: A Case Study on Novices’ Use of Data Structures" has received the Best Paper Honorable Mention award at CHI'22! See this blog post to learn more about the paper!