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A headshot of Jane Im

Jane Im

Biography

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information and Division of Computer Science & Engineering. I am very fortunate to be advised by Dr. Kentaro Toyama. 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 a person or a system must ask for, and earn, enthusiastic approval before interacting with an individual. 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. And 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.

Pronouns

she/her

Areas of Interest

Human-Computer Interaction, Social Computing

Honors and Awards

EECS Rising Stars 2023 

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

News about Jane Im

UMSI Research Roundup. Virtual Reality. Health Insurance. Screenshots. Check out UMSI faculty and PhD student publications.
Virtual Reality | Health Insurance | Screenshots: UMSI Research Roundup

Recent UMSI faculty and PhD student publications. 

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UMSI research roundup. 2024 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW). Check out UMSI faculty and PhD student publications.
UMSI at CSCW 2024: Awards, Workshops and Papers

UMSI research and workshops for the 27th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). 

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