Amy X. Zhang - UW CSE

Lower-res cropped headshot

Bio

Amy X. Zhang is an assistant professor at University of Washington's Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. Previously, she was a 2019-20 postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University's Computer Science Department after completing her Ph.D. at MIT CSAIL in 2019, where she received the George Sprowls Best Ph.D. Thesis Award at MIT in computer science. During her Ph.D., she was an affiliate and 2018-19 Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, a Google Ph.D. Fellow, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Her work has received a best paper award at ACM CSCW, a best paper honorable mention award at ACM CHI, and has been profiled on BBC's Click television program, CBC radio, and featured in articles by ABC News, The Verge, New Scientist, and Poynter. She is a founding member of the Credibility Coalition, a group dedicated to research and standards for information credibility online. She has interned at Microsoft Research and Google Research. She received an M.Phil. in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship and a B.S. in Computer Science at Rutgers University, where she was captain of the Division I Women's tennis team.

Profiles

Here are some interviews I've done or profiles written about me:
- Interview with the Harvard Berkman Klein Center
- Interview with Gates Cambridge
- Interview with the Heidelberg Laureate Forum
- I'm in a profile of academics on the frontlines of fake news research

Research Timeline

2020: I started a professorship at UW CSE. My initial lab consisted of one postdoc (Shagun Jhaver), two graduate students (Jim Chen and Ruotong Wang), and several undergraduates.

2019: I went on the job market and accepted a position at UW CSE, deferring for one year. I also defended my thesis on systems for collective human curation, graduated, and started a 1-year postdoc at Stanford.

2018: I started a fellowship at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for 2018-19, thinking and writing about online content moderation, particularly in the context of online harassment and misinformation. I also got married!

2017: I spent my summer at Microsoft Research in Redmond, MA and worked with Justin Cranshaw on building a Slack chat app to annotate and summarize chat conversations for people who need to catch up. I worked with an MEng student, Kaitlin Mahar, on a tool to help people facing harassment get help from friends. And I started as a founding member of the Credibility Coalition, an international organization for standards around news credibility and information quality online.

2016: I spent my summer at Google Research in San Francisco, CA and worked with Bryan Culbertson and Praveen Paritosh on classifying back-and-forth posts within forums like Reddit with their discourse act towards improving applications such as search. I also built out and conducted user studies for Wikum, a tool for summarizing long discussion threads.

2015: I spent my summer at Google Research in Mountain View, CA and worked with Jilin Chen and Ed Chi on using crowdsourcing to evaluate and refine search clusters for a mobile app store. I continued the work I started in the previous summer with Scott Counts, now looking at anti-abortion policy. And I built and conducted a user study on Eyebrowse, a tool for social web browsing, along with MIT student Josh Blum.

2014: I started my PhD program in January! My first project was on mailing lists, and I began with interviews and surveys of mailing list users. I spent my summer at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA and worked with Scott Counts on modeling and predicting policy change using Twitter.

2013: I worked as a software engineer at NewsCred, a startup in the news aggregation, syndication, and management business, in NYC. In my free time, I collaborated with Nick Diakopoulos on visualizing framing in news.

2012: After my undergrad, I pursued an MPhil at Cambridge University as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and resident of Trinity College, for an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science from the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. My research was in the NetOS group and supervised by Cecilia Mascolo, where I worked on algorithms to determine geographical neighborhoods from Foursquare data.

2011: I worked with Rutgers Social Media Lab and also spent a summer at Yahoo! Research Lab NY. My research was conducted under the guidance of Mor Naaman of Rutgers and Jake Hofman of Yahoo! Research, where I worked on determining diurnal urban routines using Twitter.

2007-11: As an undergraduate, I graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University with a major in Computer Science and minors in Economics and Mathematics. My senior thesis, advised by Mor Naaman, focused on creating a framework to analyze large quantities of Twitter messages using Apache Hadoop. I was also president of Women in Computer Science at Rutgers and spearheaded two years of fundraising for the Women's Technology Empowerment Centre, an organization that teaches computer topics to young girls in Nigeria.

Tennis

Besides being a student and researcher, I was formerly a competitive tennis player in college, having played tennis since the age of 5.

In my Ph.D., I was a volunteer assistant tennis coach for the DIII MIT Women's Tennis Team.

In my Masters, I played for the Cambridge University Women's Blues Varsity Squad, competed in the BUCS (British Universities and Colleges Sport) Championship, played at Wimbledon in a fixture against the All England Club, and earned a Blue for defeating Oxford University in the annual varsity match.

In my undergraduate years, I was a Division-I athlete, participating in the Rutgers Women's Tennis Team as part of the Big East Conference. Over four years, I was voted Captain and MVP, compiled a 67-18 singles record and 62-24 doubles record, mostly all at 1st position. Highlights include being named an Academic All-American (third team), winning the 2011 National Arthur Ashe Award for Scholarship and Leadership, maintaining an undefeated singles record in home matches at Rutgers, and becoming nationally ranked in the U.S. for doubles.

Here's an embarassing interview I did in college:

Photography and Travel

One of my hobbies is film photography. Nowadays I shoot with a Nikon F100 film camera as well as a D7100 DSLR on occasion. Previously I shot with a Nikon FM-10 as well as a Canon XSi. I also enjoy traveling and take many photos when I travel. See below for some photos (though this is really out of date now unfortunately)!