Koustuv Saha

Koustuv Saha
  • PhD
  • Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

About

120
Publications
44,935
Reads
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2,664
Citations
Introduction
I am interested in the interdisciplinary area of computational social science to study individual and collective wellbeing using social media. By complementing multimodal datastreams with social media, I adopt methods from machine learning, statistics, natural language, and causal inference analysis to sense, predict, and examine psychosocial wellbeing and dynamics of individuals and collectives, particularly those in situated contexts, such as college campuses and workplaces. www.koustuv.com
Current institution
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Current position
  • Assistant Professor
Additional affiliations
October 2021 - February 2023
Microsoft Research
Position
  • Senior Researcher
May 2020 - August 2020
Snap inc.
Position
  • Research Intern
May 2017 - July 2017
Fred Hutch Cancer Center
Position
  • Research Intern
Education
July 2008 - April 2012
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
Field of study
  • Computer Science and Engineering

Publications

Publications (120)
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Background. Hateful speech bears negative repercussions and is particularly damaging in college communities. The efforts to regulate hateful speech on college campuses pose vexing socio-political problems, and the interventions to mitigate the effects require evaluating the pervasiveness of the phenomenon on campuses as well the impacts on students...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The growing excitement around generative AI (and LLMs) is fueling a heightened interest in the development of AI-assisted writing tools. One popular context is AI-assisted email writing, and this paper explores how AI-generated emails compare to human-written emails. We obtained human-written emails from the W3C corpus and generated analogous AI-ge...
Preprint
The ubiquity and widespread use of digital and online technologies have transformed mental health support, with online mental health communities (OMHCs) providing safe spaces for peer support. More recently, generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have introduced new possibilities for scalable, around-the-clock mental health assistance that...
Preprint
Platforms are increasingly relying on algorithms to curate the content within users' social media feeds. However, the growing prominence of proprietary, algorithmically curated feeds has concealed what factors influence the presentation of content on social media feeds and how that presentation affects user behavior. This lack of transparency can b...
Article
AI chatbots are increasingly integrated into various sectors, including healthcare. We examine their role in responding to queries related to Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (AD/ADRD). We obtained real-world queries from AD/ADRD online communities (OC)—Reddit (r/Alzheimers) and ALZConnected. First, we conducted a small-scale qualitative e...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the leading type of dementia, demanding comprehensive understanding and intervention strategies. In the United States, where over 6 million people are impacted, the prevalence of AD and related dementias (ADRD) presents a growing public health challenge. However, individuals living with AD/ADRD and their careg...
Preprint
Full-text available
Client-Service Representatives (CSRs) are vital to organizations. Frequent interactions with disgruntled clients, however, disrupt their mental well-being. To help CSRs regulate their emotions while interacting with uncivil clients, we designed Pro-Pilot, an LLM-powered assistant, and evaluated its efficacy, perception, and use. Our comparative ana...
Preprint
Full-text available
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in many natural language understanding tasks, including content moderation. However, these models can be expensive to query in real-time and do not allow for a community-specific approach to content moderation. To address these challenges, we explore the use of open-source small language models (SLMs)...
Preprint
Full-text available
Social media platform design often incorporates explicit signals of positive feedback. Some moderators provide positive feedback with the goal of positive reinforcement, but are often unsure of their ability to actually influence user behavior. Despite its widespread use and theory touting positive feedback as crucial for user motivation, its effec...
Preprint
Full-text available
Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, play a pivotal role in shaping public perceptions and opinions on global and national issues. Unlike traditional news media, Telegram allows for the proliferation of user-generated content with minimal oversight, making it a significant venue for the spread of controversial and misinformative content....
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The increasing integration of computing technologies in the workplace has also seen the conceptualization and development of data-driven and algorithmic tools that aim to improve workers' wellbe-ing and performance. However, both research and practice have revealed several gaps in the effectiveness and deployment of these tools. Meanwhile, the rece...
Article
Minority stress is the leading theoretical construct for understanding LGBTQ+ health disparities. As such, there is an urgent need to develop innovative policies and technologies to reduce minority stress. To spur technological innovation, we created the largest labeled datasets on minority stress using natural language from subreddits related to s...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
While social media data is a valuable source for inferring human behavior, its in-practice utility hinges on extraneous factors. Notable is the “observer effect,” where awareness of being monitored can alter people’s social media use. We present a causal-inference study to examine this phenomenon on the longitudinal Facebook use of 300+ participant...
Article
Full-text available
Work-nonwork balance is an important aspect of workplace well-being with associations to improved physical and mental health, job performance, and quality of life. However, realizing work-nonwork balance goals is challenging due to competing demands and limited resources within organizational and interpersonal contexts. These challenges are compoun...
Article
With the heightened digitization of the workplace, alongside the rise of remote and hybrid work prompted by the pandemic, there is growing corporate interest in using passive sensing technologies for workplace wellbeing. Existing research on these technologies often focus on understanding or improving interactions between an individual user and the...
Preprint
Full-text available
Machine learning algorithms can sometimes exacerbate health disparities based on ethnicity, gender, and other factors. There has been limited work at exploring potential biases within algorithms deployed on a small scale, and/or within minoritized communities. Understanding the nature of potential biases may improve the prediction of various health...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, the concept of "misogynistic extremism" has emerged as a subject of interest among scholars, governments, law enforcement personnel, and the media. Yet a consistent understanding of how misogynistic extremism is defined and conceptualized has not yet emerged. Varying epistemological orientations may contribute to the current concep...
Article
Full-text available
We investigate how representations of Syrian refugees (2011-2021) differ across US partisan news outlets. We analyze 47,388 articles from the online US media about Syrian refugees to detail differences in reporting between left- and right-leaning media. We use various NLP techniques to understand these differences. Our polarization and question ans...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Globally, approximately 700,000 people fall victim to suicide each year. The Papageno effect concerns how media can play a positive role in preventing and mitigating suicidal ideation and behaviors [1]. This means that individuals with suicidal ideation are assumed to be positively impacted by seeing how others are coping or have overcome their sui...
Article
Full-text available
Background Integrating stress-reduction interventions into the workplace may improve the health and well-being of employees, and there is an opportunity to leverage ubiquitous everyday work technologies to understand dynamic work contexts and facilitate stress reduction wherever work happens. Sensing-powered just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITA...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Integrating stress-reduction interventions into the workplace may improve the health and well-being of employees, and there is an opportunity to leverage ubiquitous everyday work technologies to understand dynamic work contexts and facilitate stress reduction wherever work happens. Sensing-powered just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITA...
Article
Social support or peer support in mental health has successfully settled down in online spaces by reducing the potential risk of critical mental illness (e.g., suicidal thoughts) of support-seekers. While the prior work has mostly focused on support-seekers, particularly investigating their behavioral characteristics and the effects of online socia...
Article
Full-text available
Explainable AI (XAI) systems are sociotechnical in nature; thus, they are subject to the sociotechnical gap-divide between the technical affordances and the social needs. However, charting this gap is challenging. In the context of XAI, we argue that charting the gap improves our problem understanding, which can reflexively provide actionable insig...
Preprint
Full-text available
BACKGROUND Many transgender and nonbinary (TNB) people face significant treatment barriers (e.g., healthcare discrimination) when seeking help for gender dysphoria. Technology-delivered interventions for TNB people can be used discretely, safely, and flexibly, thereby reducing such treatment barriers. Technology-delivered interventions are beginnin...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The optimal treatment for gender dysphoria is medical intervention, but many transgender and nonbinary people face significant treatment barriers when seeking help for gender dysphoria. When untreated, gender dysphoria is associated with depression, anxiety, suicidality, and substance misuse. Technology-delivered interventions for tran...
Preprint
Full-text available
With the heightened digitization of the workplace, alongside the rise of remote and hybrid work prompted by the pandemic, there is growing corporate interest in using passive sensing technologies for workplace wellbeing. Existing research on these technologies often focus on understanding or improving interactions between an individual user and the...
Preprint
Full-text available
The Papageno effect concerns how media can play a positive role in preventing and mitigating suicidal ideation and behaviors. With the increasing ubiquity and widespread use of social media, individuals often express and share lived experiences and struggles with mental health. However, there is a gap in our understanding about the existence and ef...
Chapter
The Russian disinformation campaign uses pro-Russia memes to polarize Americans, and increase support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Thus, it is critical for governments and similar stakeholders to identify pro-Russia memes, countering them with evidence-based information. Identifying broad meme themes is crucial for developing a targeted and...
Preprint
Full-text available
Explainable AI (XAI) systems are sociotechnical in nature; thus, they are subject to the sociotechnical gap--divide between the technical affordances and the social needs. However, charting this gap is challenging. In the context of XAI, we argue that charting the gap improves our problem understanding, which can reflexively provide actionable insi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Research has revealed the potential of social media as a source of large-scale, verbal, and naturalistic data for human behavior both in real-time and longitudinally. However, the in-practice utility of social media to assess and support wellbeing will only be realized when we account for extraneous factors. A factor that might confound our ability...
Preprint
Full-text available
While social media data is a valuable source for inferring human behavior, its in-practice utility hinges on extraneous factors. Notable is the ``observer effect,'' where awareness of being monitored can alter people's social media use. We present a causal-inference study to examine this phenomenon on the longitudinal Facebook use of 300+ participa...
Preprint
Full-text available
While social media data is a valuable source for inferring human behavior, its in-practice utility hinges on extraneous factors. Notable is the ``observer effect,'' where awareness of being monitored can alter people's social media use. We present a causal-inference study to examine this phenomenon on the longitudinal Facebook use of 300+ participa...
Article
Full-text available
Deviant eating behavior such as skipping meals and consuming unhealthy meals has a significant association with mental well-being in college students. However, there is more to what an individual eats. While eating patterns form a critical component of their mental well-being, insights and assessments related to the interplay of eating patterns and...
Article
Full-text available
Because of their stigmatized social status, sexual and gender minority (SGM; e.g., gay, transgender) people experience minority stress (i.e., identity-based stress arising from adverse social conditions). Given that minority stress is the leading framework for understanding health inequity among SGM people, researchers and clinicians need accurate...
Article
Full-text available
Veterans are a unique marginalized group facing multiple vulnerabilities. Current assessments of veteran needs and support largely come from first-person accounts guided by researchers' prompts. Social media platforms not only enable veterans to connect with each other, but also to self-disclose experiences and seek support. This paper addresses th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Because of their stigmatized social status, sexual and gender minority (SGM; e.g., gay, transgender) people experience minority stress (i.e., identity-based stress arising from adverse social conditions). Given that minority stress is the leading framework for understanding health inequity among SGM people, researchers and clinicians need accurate...
Article
Full-text available
Background Open online forums like Reddit provide an opportunity to quantitatively examine COVID-19 vaccine perceptions early in the vaccine timeline. We examine COVID-19 misinformation on Reddit following vaccine scientific announcements, in the initial phases of the vaccine timeline. Methods We collected all posts on Reddit (reddit.com) from Jan...
Preprint
Full-text available
As new technology inches into every aspect of our lives, there is no place more likely to dramatically change in the future than the workplace. New passive sensing technology is emerging capable of assessing human behavior with the goal of promoting better cognitive and physical capabilities at work. In this article, we survey recent research on th...
Article
Full-text available
The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. To address this gap, researchers and practitioners have encouraged the use of passive technologies. Social media is one such "passive sensor" that has shown potential as a viable "pass...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: Open online forums like Reddit provide an opportunity to quantitatively examine COVID-19 vaccine perceptions early in the vaccine timeline. We examine COVID-19 misinformation on Reddit following vaccine scientific announcements, in the initial phases of the vaccine timeline. Methods: We collected all posts on Reddit from January 1 2020...
Article
Full-text available
The toll from gun violence in American K-12 schools has escalated over the past 20 years. School administrators face pressure to prepare for possible active shootings, and often do so through drills, which can range from general lockdowns to simulations, involving masked “shooters” and simulated gunfire, and many variations in between. However, the...
Article
We hypothesize that behavioral patterns of people are reflected in how they interact with their mobile devices and that continuous sensor data passively collected from their phones and wearables can infer their job performance. Specifically, we study day-today job performance (improvement, no change, decline) of N=298 information workers using mobi...
Article
Full-text available
The post-college transition is a critical period where individuals experience unique challenges and stress before, during, and after graduation. Individuals often use social media to discuss and share information, advice, and support related to post-college challenges in online communities. These communities are important as they fill gaps in insti...
Article
Full-text available
The mental health of college students is a growing concern and gauging the mental health needs of this group is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. The ubiquity and widespread use of social media, particularly among young adults, provides opportunities for various stakeholders to proactively assess the mental health of college students a...
Article
To improve the user experience as well as business outcomes, social platforms aim to predict user behavior. To this end, recurrent models are often used to predict a user's next behavior based on their most recent behavior. However, people have habits and routines, making it plausible to predict their behavior from more than just their most recent...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Showing ads delivers revenue for online content distributors, but ad exposure can compromise user experience and cause user fatigue and frustration. Correctly balancing ads with other content is imperative. Currently, ad allocation relies primarily on demographics and inferred user interests, which are treated as static features and can be privacy-...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Social media platforms continue to evolve as archival platforms, where important milestones in an individual's life are socially disclosed for support, solidarity, maintaining and gaining social capital, or to meet therapeutic needs. However, a limited understanding of how and what life events are disclosed (or not) prevents designing platforms to...
Article
Assessment of individuals' job performance, personalized health and psychometric measures are domains where data-driven ubiquitous computing will have a profound impact in the near future. Existing work in these domains focus on techniques that use data extracted from questionnaires, sensors (wearable, computer, etc.), or other traits to assess wel...
Preprint
Full-text available
Objectives: As COVID-19 vaccinations accelerate in many countries, narratives skeptical of vaccination have also spread through social media. Open online forums like Reddit provide an opportunity to quantitatively examine COVID-19 vaccine perceptions over time. We examine COVID-19 misinformation on Reddit following vaccine scientific announcements....
Article
Full-text available
Effective ways to measure employee job satisfaction are fraught with problems of scale, misrepresentation, and timeliness. Current methodologies are limited in capturing subjective differences in expectations, needs, and values at work, and they do not lay emphasis on demographic differences, which may impact people's perceptions of job satisfactio...
Article
Full-text available
Background Antidepressants are known to show heterogeneous effects across individuals and conditions, posing challenges to understanding their efficacy in mental health treatment. Social media platforms enable individuals to share their day-to-day concerns with others and thereby can function as unobtrusive, large-scale, and naturalistic data sourc...
Article
Full-text available
Personalized predictions have shown promises in various disciplines but they are fundamentally constrained in their ability to generalize across individuals. These models are often trained on limited datasets which do not represent the fluidity of human functioning. In contrast, generalized models capture normative behaviors between individuals but...
Preprint
Full-text available
The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. While social media has shown potential as a viable "passive sensor" of mental health, the construct validity and in-practice reliability of such computational assessments remain largel...
Preprint
Full-text available
The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. While social media has shown potential as a viable “passive sensor” of mental health, the construct validity and in-practice reliability of such computational assessments remain largel...
Preprint
Full-text available
Online social media enables mass-level, transparent, and democratized discussion on numerous socio-political issues. Due to such openness, these platforms often endure manipulation and misinformation - leading to negative impacts. To prevent such harmful activities, platform moderators employ countermeasures to safeguard against actors violating th...
Preprint
Full-text available
BACKGROUND Antidepressants are known to show heterogeneous effects across individuals and conditions, posing challenges to understanding their efficacy in mental health treatment. OBJECTIVE We aim to understand the side effects of antidepressants from naturalistic expressions of individuals on social media. METHODS On a large-scale Twitter datase...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Eating behavior has a high impact on the well-being of an individual. Such behavior involves not only when an individual is eating, but also various contextual factors such as with whom and where an individual is eating and what kind of food the individual is eating. Despite the relevance of such factors, most automated eating detection...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Longitudinal studies using wearable sensors to track numerous attributes such as physical activity, sleep, and heart rate can benefit from reductions in missing data. Maximizing compliance through participant engagement is one method to reduce missing data and poor compliance can reduce the return on the heavy investment of time and mone...
Article
Full-text available
Background Studies that use ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) or wearable sensors to track numerous attributes, such as physical activity, sleep, and heart rate, can benefit from reductions in missing data. Maximizing compliance is one method of reducing missing data to increase the return on the heavy investment of time and money into large-...
Article
Full-text available
Background The COVID-19 pandemic has caused several disruptions in personal and collective lives worldwide. The uncertainties surrounding the pandemic have also led to multifaceted mental health concerns, which can be exacerbated with precautionary measures such as social distancing and self-quarantining, as well as societal impacts such as economi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Self-esteem encompasses how individuals evaluate themselves and is an important contributor to their success. Self-esteem has been traditionally measured using survey-based methodologies. However , surveys suffer from limitations such as retrospective recall and reporting biases, leading to a need for proactive measurement approaches. Our work uses...
Preprint
Full-text available
Online mental health communities enable people to seek and provide support, and growing evidence shows the efficacy of community participation to cope with mental health distress. However, what factors of peer support lead to favorable psychosocial outcomes for individuals is less clear. Using a dataset of over 300K posts by ∼39K individuals on an...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused several disruptions in personal and collective lives worldwide. The uncertainties surrounding the pandemic have also led to multi-faceted mental health concerns, which can be exacerbated with precautionary measures such as social distancing and self-quarantining, as well...
Preprint
BACKGROUND The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused several disruptions in personal and collective lives worldwide. The uncertainties surrounding the pandemic have also led to multi-faceted mental health concerns, which can be exacerbated with precautionary measures such as social distancing and self-quarantining, as well a...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Online Mental Health Communities (OMHCs) enable individuals to seek and provide support, and serve as a safe haven to disclose and share stigmatizing and sensitive experiences. Like other online communities, OMHCs are not immune to bad behavior and antisocial activities such as trolling, spamming, and harassment. Therefore, these communities are of...
Chapter
Full-text available
Online Mental Health Communities (OMHCs) enable individuals to seek and provide support, and serve as a safe haven to disclose and share stigmatizing and sensitive experiences. Like other online communities, OMHCs are not immune to bad behavior and antisocial activities such as trolling, spamming, and harassment. Therefore, these communities are of...
Preprint
Full-text available
Assessment of job performance, personalized health and psychometric measures are domains where data-driven and ubiquitous computing exhibits the potential of a profound impact in the future. Existing techniques use data extracted from questionnaires, sensors (wearable, computer, etc.), or other traits, to assess well-being and cognitive attributes...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Online mental health communities enable people to seek and provide support, and growing evidence shows the efficacy of community participation to cope with mental health distress. However, what factors of peer support lead to favorable psychosocial outcomes for individuals is less clear. Using a dataset of over 300K posts by ∼39K individuals on an...
Article
Online mental health communities enable people to seek and provide support, and growing evidence shows the efficacy of community participation to cope with mental health distress. However, what factors of peer support lead to favorable psychosocial outcomes for individuals is less clear. Using a dataset of over 300K posts by ∼39K individuals on an...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Eating behavior has a significant impact on the wellbeing of an individual. Such behavior comprises not only when an individual is eating, but also various contextual factors such as with whom and where an individual is eating, what kind of food they are having, to name but a few. Despite the significance of such factors, most automated...
Article
Full-text available
Background Eating behavior has a high impact on the well-being of an individual. Such behavior involves not only when an individual is eating, but also various contextual factors such as with whom and where an individual is eating and what kind of food the individual is eating. Despite the relevance of such factors, most automated eating detection...
Preprint
BACKGROUND This paper describes a semi-automated eating detection system that leverages Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) questions to capture contextual factors upon detecting when an individual is eating. Our validation study demonstrates the efficacy of the system by deploying it in-the-wild among college students. OBJECTIVE This study buil...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Organizational culture (OC) encompasses the underlying beliefs, values, and practices that are unique to organizations. However, OC is inherently subjective and a coarse construct, and therefore challenging to quantify. Alternatively, self-initiated workplace reviews on online platforms like Glassdoor provide the opportunity to leverage the richnes...
Article
Full-text available
Several psychologists posit that performance is not only a function of personality but also of situational contexts, such as day-level activities. Yet in practice, since only personality assessments are used to infer job performance, they provide a limited perspective by ignoring activity. However, multi-modal sensing has the potential to character...
Article
Full-text available
LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) individuals are at significantly higher risk for mental health challenges than the general population. Social media and online communities provide avenues for LGBTQ+ individuals to have safe, candid, semi-anonymous discussions about their struggles and experiences. We study minority stress through...

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