People
Dr. Nicholas Vincent
Assistant Professor at SFU
Prof. Nick Vincent is a researcher in human-centered artificial intelligence. Much of his research focuses on understanding how data records — including works that we produce and logs of our behavior — provide value to AI systems such as search engines, recommender systems, and new "generative AI" systems, and how the benefits of data-dependent AI might flow back to the public.
Heila Precel
PhD Student at BU
Heila Precel is a PhD student at Boston University’s Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences advised by Allison McDonald. Previously, she worked at Microsoft as a Project Manager and earned her Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Brown University. Her research interests include computing ethics, algorithmic accountability & generative AI, information integrity, and usable security.
David Pham
MSc Student at SFU
David is interested in developing better benchmarks in AI, implementing ethical data policies, improving data literacy, advocating for public AI infrastructure, and is currently working with great teams at Aspen Digital and the Public AI Network towards these goals! For his side quests, he is also pursuing the integration of differential privacy methods with social media networks, and developing social simulations via agent-based models.
Patrick Zhao
MSc Student at SFU
Patrick is a MSc thesis student at Simon Fraser University, advised by Dr. Nicholas Vincent at the People and Data-Centric Computing Research Group. His primary interests lie in human-centered AI, AI safety, and computational social science. He is currently exploring the challenges that arise from using large language models as cognitive agents in simulations.
Vitor Hugo
MSc Student at SFU
Vitor has a deep interest in human-centric design, he specializes in studying user behavior, designing experiments, and developing solutions that address challenges in the interaction of humans and AI. His research often delves into effects of AI and machine learning on decision-making and human trust.
Ananya Singh
BSc Student at SFU
Ananya’s research focuses on interpretability and understanding how AI models work under the hood. She is interested in AI safety and model welfare, particularly what’s happening inside these systems, how they process information, and what their future might look like, including open questions around machine emotions.
Ayana Hussain
BSc Student at SFU
Ayana Hussain is interested in privacy-preserving machine learning and AI safety. Her work explores how individuals can influence algorithms and models, and how they can choose to opt in or out of sharing their data. Her projects examine both self-protective techniques, where people take steps to protect their own data before sharing or share it in stages, and centralized approaches, where a curator or tech company applies privacy-preserving methods on the aggregated data or during model training.
Siddhant Jain
BSc Student at SFU
Siddhant’s research focuses on using machine learning and quantitative coding techniques to extract actionable insights from large-scale text data. He is interested in uncovering emerging trends around data, labor markets, and generative AI, then translating those findings into clear, data-driven narratives. He also explores interactive data visualization, such as real-time dashboards that help users interpret complex information at a glance.