Chenhao Tan is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. He obtained his PhD degree in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and bachelor’s degrees in computer science and in economics from Tsinghua University. Prior to joining UChicago, he spent a year at University of Washington as a postdoc and three years at CU Boulder as an assistant professor. His research interests include human-centered machine learning, natural language processing, and computational social science. He has published papers primarily at ACL and WWW, and also at KDD, WSDM, ICWSM, etc. His work has been covered by many news media outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He also won an NSF CAREER award, an NSF CRII award, a Salesforce research award, an Amazon research award, a Facebook fellowship, and a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges award.
Research
Focus Areas: Computational Social Science, Human-centered AI, Natural Language Processing
My main research interests include:
Language and social dynamics.
- The effect of wording, how language influences social interaction, e.g., persuasion, information sharing, media selection of highlights from presidential debates.
- The ecosystem of ideas, how ideas relate to each other and evolve over time, e.g., idea relations and lost in propagation.
Human-centered machine learning, how we can use machine learning to empower humans and augment human intelligence such as enhancing creativity and avoiding behavioral biases, e.g., human predictions along a spectrum between full human agency and full automation, creative writing with a machine in the loop, and the meta question of what tasks humans would like to delegate to AI systems, and to what extent.
Multi-community engagement, how a person interacts with multiple communities and how communities relate to each other, e.g., users’ life trajectories, community genealogy, and migrant integration in urbanization.
I am also broadly interested in natural language processing, computational social science, and artificial intelligence.
