I am an assistant professor in applied consumer analytics and strategic communication in the Department of Financial Planning, Housing and Consumer Economics at the University of Georgia. I received my Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

My scholarship is at the intersection of computational social science, visual communication, AI, science communication, and social media. My research integrates computer vision methods, surveys, and experiments to study visual messages across different communication contexts. Examples include visual portrayals of politicians, visuals in social movements, visual misinformation, and climate change images. I co-directed the Computational Multimodal Communication Lab, a multi-institutional initiative designed to deepen our understanding of visual media in our information landscape. A recent project of ours, supported by the National Science Foundation, examines how attributes of misinformation claims in visual formats (e.g., photographs, visualizations, and AI-generated media) influence viewers’ credibility perceptions.

My scholarship in computational social science investigates how digital technologies shape news consumption and engagement in the attention economy. I examine the strategies media outlets and political actors adopt to pursue audience attention, and the subsequent impact on journalistic standards, information integrity, and the health of democratic discourse. I use diverse analytical approaches, including natural language processing, time series modeling, and social network analysis.

I also study science communication, with a focus on public perceptions of AI technologies, such as facial recognition and self-driving cars. I am particularly interested in how emerging AI technologies are connected to debates about inequality and social justice and how these factors affect public opinion. Additionally, I have developed a line of research on the political polarization of science, which demonstrates the importance of ideologies and worldviews in shaping our responses to issues such as Covid-19, vaccination, and AI applications.

My works have appeared in leading venues in multiple social science disciplines, including the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, New Media & Society, Political Communication, the Journal of Advertising, Sociological Methods & Research, Risk Analysis, and the Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. I have received multiple top paper awards from the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association.

I received my M.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and B.S. degree from Peking University. In my spare time, I enjoy photography, hiking, biking, museums, movies, and open-world video games.

Recent updates

2024

  • Our paper “Convergence or divergence? A cross-platform analysis of climate change visual content categories, features, and social media engagement on Twitter and Instagram” (co-authored with Sijia Qian, Yingdan Lu, Cuihua (Cindy) Shen, and Huacen Xu) is online at Public Relations Review!
  • Our paper “‘Letter to my future self’ as a device for assessing health education effectiveness” (co-authored with Dee Warmath and Andrew P. Winterstein) is online at Patient Education and Counseling!
  • Our paper titled “The mobilizing power of visual media across stages of social-mediated protests,” co-authored with Yingdan Lu, has been published by Political Communication!
  • Three papers and two panels accepted to ICA24 in Gold Coast! My collaborators and I will present works on many exciting topics such as AI-generated images, visuals in social movements, and the platformization of news. Stay tuned with our panel (co-organized with Subhayan Mukerjee and Tian Yang) titled “Computational communication research in the Global South: Unpacking theoretical, methodological, and professional challenges for an inclusive and globally informed future.” I will also serve as the discussant for panel “Image-as-data methods in the age of Generative Artificial Intelligence.”
  • Keep an eye out for the two pre-conferences we are organizing for ICA24! The first preconference “A computational turn in journalism: Opportunities and challenges in a cross-disciplinary field” (with Subhayan Mukerjee, Tian Yang, Wu Shangyuan, Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, and Thorsten Quandt) is scheduled to take place in June 2024 in Singapore. Please check our Call for Papers for more information (deadline 26 January, 2024). The second preconference, titled “The future of computational message science: Theoretical advances, computational frontiers, and grand societal challenges” (with Kaiping Chen, Sijia Yang, and Yingdan Lu), is scheduled for June 2024 in Brisbane. Please stay tuned for more updates.

2023

  • Our paper “The dark side of entertainment? How viral entertaining media build an attention base for the far-right politics of The Epoch Times” (with Tian Yang and Kecheng Fang) is online at New Media & Society. Check this X thread for a quick summary.
  • Our paper “A computer vision methodology to predict brand personality from image features” (with Taylor Jing Wen and Jing Yang) is online at the Journal of Advertising!
  • Thrilled to learn that our paper “The mobilizing power of visual media across cycles of social movements” (with Yingdan Lu) received a Top Student Paper at ICA!
  • Our paper “Metrics in action: How social media metrics shape news production on Facebook” (with Subhayan Mukerjee and Tian Yang) is online at the Journal of Communication!
  • Two papers accepted by IC2S2 2023! We will be discussing the impact of social media metrics on news coverage as well as the prevalence and effects of toxicity in social media discourses.
  • Our paper “How visual aesthetics and calorie density predict food image popularity on Instagram: A computer vision analysis” (with Muna Sharma) was featured by various news outlets including UGA Today, Atlanta News First, and the Washington Post.
  • Two papers/abstracts accepted for APSA23 in L.A.! My collaborators and I will talk about how visual messages mobilize participation in online activism as well as how we can investigate misinformation perceptions using computer vision methods.
  • Our forum article “An agenda for studying credibility perceptions of visual misinformation” (coauthored with Yingdan Lu and Cindy Shen) is online at Political Communication. Check this thread.
  • Our paper “How visual aesthetics and calorie density predict food image popularity on Instagram: A computer vision analysis” (coauthored with Muna Sharma) is online at Health Communication. For a quick overview, check out this Twitter thread.
  • Our book chapter “Computational visual analysis in political communication” (with Yingdan Lu), included in the Research Handbook on Visual Politics, is out now!
  • Seven papers/abstracts accepted to ICA23 in Toronto! My collaborators and I will present works on many exciting topics such as social media metrics, visual misinformation, morality in pandemics, and political memes. Also, stay tuned with our panel (co-organized with Subhayan Mukerjee and Tian Yang) titled “Modeling time: Computational approaches for the analysis of longitudinal, temporal, and time-dynamic data.” I will also serve as the discussant for panel “Video-as-data in computational communication: Toward a mixed-method pathway.”