I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information and Division of Computer Science & Engineering. I am fortunate to be advised by Dr. Kentaro Toyama and Dr. Nikola Banovic. I am also part of the Human-Centered Computing Lab. My work is supported by the Barbour Scholarship and Meta Research PhD Fellowship.

I design and build consentful systems—social computing systems (e.g., social media, workplace software) that are grounded in affirmative consent, an idea that someone must ask for, and earn, enthusiastic approval before interacting with an individual or a system. Existing social platforms enable two classes of problems that negatively impact society: 1) interpersonal harm people cause one another, such as online harassment, and 2) institutional exploitation of users, such as companies’ invasive data tracking of users. Both are closely related to people’s consent (e.g., "Do I decide to interact with this person online?", "Do I opt into tracking for targeted ads?"). Thus, consent is an important concept to define when it comes to software design. In particular, it is critical to define it in a way so that the consent boundaries of even the most marginalized groups (e.g., women of color) are protected. My research provides theoretical ideas about defining affirmative consent and encoding it into social software by drawing from feminist literature. Based on the ideas, I build systems to enable consentful interactions. Furthermore, because there is a power imbalance between companies and users, I design privacy interfaces to give users more agency, and investigate how users perceive social media’s business models—which are a basis for companies’ power over users.

Pronouns

she/her

Areas of Interest

HCI, social media, consent, digital safety, privacy, data ownership

Honors and Awards

Meta PhD Research Fellowship 2023-2025

Finalist for University of Michigan CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition 2022 

Barbour Scholar 2022-2023

Finalist for Meta PhD Research Fellowship 2022

Best Paper Honorable Mention Award 2021
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021)

Best Paper Runner Up Award 2020
ACM Conference on Web Science (WebSci 2020)

Education

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Sept. 2018 - Present
Ph.D. in Information & Computer Science and Engineering
School of Information
Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering

Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Mar. 2013 - Aug. 2018
B.B.A. in Business Administration
B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering