About the Anti-AAPI Hate Speech Project
The Anti-AAPI Hate Speech and Incident Project aims to detect, monitor, and study anti-AAPI hate speech and incident and associated mental health issues on social media platform (i.e., Twitter) using advanced computational methods and online/field experiments. Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, we have witnessed the surge of anti-Asian attacks. Based on a report from stopaapihate.org, there were over 4000 self-reported hate incidents targeting AAPI communities. But we lack critical data on the scale and scope as well as the consequences of these incidents. This project aims to address these issues.
This project is funded by a seed grant from the Institute of Advanced Computational Social Science (IACS) at Stony Brook University. IACS is an interdisplinary institute advancing the intellectual foundations of computation and data, with high-impact applications in engineering and the physical, environmental, life sciences and the humanities.
The AAPI project is led by a research team from the Zhang Computational Social Science Lab (Zlab) and Dr. Yifan Sun’s lab at Stony Brook Unversity with collaborators from multiple universities.
Project Members
| Dr. Yongjun Zhang (PI) is an assistant professor of sociology and IACS at Stony Brook University. He received his Sociology PhD in 2020 from the University of Arizona. He is a computational sociologist studying politics, organizations, social movements, and inequality. |
| Dr. Yifan Sun (Co-PI) is an assistant professor of computer science at Stony Brook University. She received her PhD from UCLA, and her research focus is optimization and machine learning, in both theory and applications. |
| Hao Lin is a doctoral student in the deparment of sociology at Stony Brook University. She received a BA in sociology in 2017 from Central University of Finance and Economics, China and a MSc in sociology from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, in 2019. Her research interests center on social media, social contagion and social networks. Broadly, she is interested in applying computational methods to study social behavior. |
| Pradeep Nalluri is a graduate student in the department of computer science at Stony Brook University. He completed his undergrad at Mahindra Ecole Centrale, India in 2019.He likes to build intelligent, scalable, and reliable software. He is also interested in solving use cases that belong to the NLP and Scalable AI domains |
| Lantian Li recently obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the political economy of global health and biomedicine. She has published in World Development, Qualitative Research, Asian Journal of Law and Society, Frontiers in Sociology, and Journal of Chinese Governance. Her work has been funded by the Association for Asian Studies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the China Times Cultural Foundation, and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. |
| Ellen Sun is a high school student at Ward Melville High School. She is an active participant in student government and community service. She has also participated in sports such as cheerleading and track. |
ZLab Hiring
We are hiring undergraduate research assistants now. Feel free to contact Dr. Zhang.
