Julie Jiang

PhD Student @ USC
(she/her/hers)

ABOUT

Hi! My name is Julie and I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Southern California (USC), Information Sciences Institute (ISI), advised by Dr. Emilio Ferrara. I am also part of the Annenberg Game Lab. I study computational social science, developing ML techniques to empirically study human behavior on large-scale online platforms for social good . I have had the pleasure to intern at Spotify Research, Snap Research, TikTok/ByteDance, Google, and Bose. Prior to USC, I obtained my B.S. from Tufts University in 2019, where I double-majored in CS and Math.

I am honored to be on the 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30 (Science) list. I am also a recipient of the 2024 USC PhD Fellowship and a 2022 Snap Research Fellow .

Outside of work/school, I love playing the piano :)

Looking for full-time industry opportunities starting 2024.

Publications
2024

* indicates equal contribution

  • Susceptibility to Unreliable Information Sources: Swift Adoption with Minimal Exposure

    Jinyi Ye, Luca Luceri, Julie Jiang, and Emilio Ferrara
    To appear at The Web Conference (TheWebConf), 2024.
    Preprint

  • A Genre-Based Analysis of New Music Streaming at Scale.

    Julie Jiang, Aditiya Ponnada, Ang Li, Ben Lacker, and Samuel F. Way.
    To appear at the ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci), 2024.

2023

  • Retweet-BERT: Political Leaning Detection Using Language Features and Information Diffusion on Social Networks

    Julie Jiang, Xiang Ren, and Emilio Ferrara
    17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2023.
    Preprint

  • Reciprocity, Homophily, and Social Network Effects in Pictorial Communication: A Case Study of Bitmoji Stickers

    Julie Jiang, Ron Dotsch, Mireia Triguero Roura, Yozen Liu, Vítor Silva, Maarten W. Bos, and Francesco Barbieri
    Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023.
    Paper

  • Zero-Shot Meta-Learning for Small-Scale Data from Human Subjects

    Julie Jiang, Kristina Lerman, and Emilio Ferrara
    The 11th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI), 2023.
    Paper arXiv

  • What are Your Pronouns? Examining Gender Pronoun Usage on Twitter

    Julie Jiang, Emily Chen, Luca Luceri, Goran Murić, Francesco Pierri, Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, and Emilio Ferrara
    The 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Workshop on the Data for the Wellbeing of the Most Vulnerable, 2023.
    Paper arXiv

  • Geolocated Social Media Posts are Happier: Understanding the Characteristics of Check-in Posts on Twitter

    Julie Jiang, Jesse Thomason, Francesco Barbieri, and Emilio Ferrara
    The 15th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci), 2023.
    Paper arXiv

2022

  • The Gift That Keeps on Giving: Generosity is Contagious in Multiplayer Online Games

    Alexander J. Bisberg*, Julie Jiang*, Yilei Zeng, Emily Chen, and Emilio Ferrara
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW2 (PACM HCI), 2022.
    Paper arXiv

  • Sunshine with a Chance of Smiles: Weather Impacts Expressed Sentiment on Social Media

    Julie Jiang, Nils Murrugarra-Llerena, Maarten W. Bos, Yozen Liu, Neil Shah, Leonardo Neves, and Francesco Barbieri
    The 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2022.
    Paper

  • Charting the Information and Misinformation Landscape to Characterize Misinfodemics on Social Media: COVID-19 Infodemiology Study at a Planetary Scale

    Emily Chen*, Julie Jiang*, Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Goran Muric, and Emilio Ferrara
    JMIR Infodemiology, 2022.
    Paper

2021

  • Social Media Polarization and Echo Chambers: A Case Study of COVID-19

    Julie Jiang, Xiang Ren, and Emilio Ferrara
    JMIRx Med, 2021.
    Paper

  • The Wide, the Deep, and the Maverick: Types of Players in Team-based Online Games

    Julie Jiang, Danaja Maldeniya, Kristina Lerman, and Emilio Ferrara
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW (PACM HCI), 2021.
    Paper Video

  • Heterogeneous Effects of Software Patches in a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena Game.

    Yuzi He, Christopher Tran, Julie Jiang, Keith Burghadt, Emilio Ferrara, Elena Zheleva, and Kristina Lerman
    The 16th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG), 2021.
    Paper

  • Learning Graph Representations of Biochemical Networks and Its Application to Enzymatic Link Prediction

    Julie Jiang, Li-Ping Liu, and Soha Hassoun
    Bioinformatics, 2021
    Paper Code

2020

  • Political Polarization Drives Online Conversations About COVID-19 in the United States

    Julie Jiang, Emily Chen, Shen Yan, Kristina Lerman, and Emilio Ferrara
    Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 2020
    Paper Media Coverage

  • Individualized Context-Aware Embeddings for Online Games Predictions

    Julie Jiang, Kristina Lerman, and Emilio Ferrara
    The 20th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Workshop on High Dimensional Data Mining, 2020.
    Paper arXiv

Presentations

  • Non-Binary Gender Expression in Online Interactions.

    Rebecca Dorn, Negar Mokhberian, Julie Jiang, Jeremy Abramson, Fred Morstatter, and Kristina Lerman
    SPB-BRiMS 2023

  • Sunshine with a Chance of Smiles: Weather Impacts Expressed Sentiment on Social Media
    Julie Jiang, Nils Murrugarra-Llerena, Maarten W. Bos, Yozen Liu, Neil Shah, Leonardo Neves, Francesco Barbieri.
    2022 International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE), oral presentation.
    Slides

  • Ageism in Traffic Policing

    Emiliy Chen*, Julie Jiang*, Fred Morstatter, Kristina Lerman, and Emilio Ferrara
    The 6th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), 2020, oral presentation.
    Extended Abstract

  • Enzymatic Link Prediction for Biochemical Route Synthesis

    Julie Jiang, Li-Ping Liu, Soha Hassoun
    2020 MIT AI Powered Drug Discovery and Manufacturing (AIDM), poster presentation.
    Poster

  • Predicting Reactions for Biochemical Networks Using Graph Embeddings

    Julie Jiang, Li-Ping Liu, Soha Hassoun
    2019 Machine Learning in Computation Biology (MLCB), poster presentation.
    Poster

Education

University of Southern California

2023 MS in CS
2019 - Present Ph.D. in CS
Phi Kappa Phi (Honor Society)

Tufts University

2015 - 2019
BS in CS and Math (magna cum laude)

Teaching

University of Southern California

  • CSCI591 CS Research Colloquium

    Teaching Assistant
    Fall 2022, Spring 2023

    • Tufts University

      • COMP11 Intro to Computer Science

        Teaching Fellow (Head Teaching Assistant)
        Spring 2018, Fall 2018, and Spring 2019

      • COMP105 Programming Languages

        Teaching Assistant
        Spring 2018

      • COMP15 Data Structures

        Teaching Assistant
        Spring 2017 and Fall 2017

Fun Stuff

  • Image Segmentation with Graph Cuts

    A fun algorithm class project back when I was an undergrad at Tufts that has 21 stars on github now!
    Write-up Github