About Me
Jamell Dacon (Mell) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University (MSU).
I joined the Data Science and Engineering (DSE) Lab in Fall 2018. My current research focuses on Fairness and Bias in NLP. Why? Because, Inclusivity matters in all forms. My intent is to investigate, examine and mitigate societal biases in an attempt conceptualize the "isms" that plague our society via NLP technologies, to increase social justice and reduce feelings of disenfranchisement. Specifically, I focus on conceptualizing social harms arising from the advancements of language technologies highlighting both positive and negative societal impacts.
- Ph.D advisor: Dr. Jiliang Tang
- Research Area(s): Research area(s): Natural Language Processing, Fairness & Bias in NLP, Computational Social Science, and Interdisciplinary Data Science.
- Quick Look: RESUME
- A.S. in Computer Science at CUNY Medgar Evers College, 2017
- B.S. in Mathematical Sciences at CUNY Medgar Evers College, 2018
- M.S. in Computer Science at Michigan State University, 2020
- Ph.D. in Computer Science at Michigan State University, [loading... 😅]
News
Recent:
: To be added...
In the year 2022:
10, 2022: Awarded a full-time, on-site Research Scientist Internship at Google Research during Fall/Winter 2022.10, 2022: Won People's Choice Awards for Best Oral Presentation at the MSU AGEP Student Success Conference.
09, 2022: Our paper "The topological shape of gene expression across the evolution of flowering plants" is released on BioRxiv [PDF][BibTex].
08, 2022: Our paper "Evaluating and Mitigating Inherent Linguistic Bias of African American English through Inference" has been accepted to the 29th International Conferennce on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2022). [PDF][BibTex].
06, 2022: Our paper "Detecting Harmful Online Conversational Content towards LGBTQIA+ Individuals" has been accepted to the Queer in AI Workshop hosted by NAACL 2022 [Planned Schedule][PDF][Poster][BibTex].
06, 2022: Awarded an ACL membership for one year and a free registration award to attend NAACL 2022.
05, 2022: Awarded a Student Scholarship to attend IC2S2 2022.
05, 2022: Our paper "Towards a Deep Multi-layered Dialectal Language Analysis: A Case Study of African-American English" has been accepted to the Second Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (HCI+NLP) hosted by NAACL 2022. [Planned Schedule][PDF][BibTex].
05, 2022: I became a member of Black in AI, a Non-profit Organization for Black Professionals in Artificial Intelligence.
04, 2022: Our paper "Using Inference to Mitigate Linguistic Bias Against African American English" has been accepted to the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2022) as an oral presentation. [PDF].
04, 2022: Our paper "Examining Word Representations between #BlackLivesMatter Movement and its Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020" has been accepted to the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2022) as a poster presentation. [PDF][Poster].
04, 2022: Our paper "Understanding African American English on a Token-Level Beyond Accuracy" has been accepted to the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2022) as a poster presentation. [Poster].
02, 2022: Awarded a Supplemental University Fellowship award from MSU.
In the year 2021:
12, 2021: Our tutorial "Trustworthy AI" has been accepted by The 31st International Web Conference (WWW 2022). [Slides]
10, 2021: Selected to be a member of Team MSU for the QSIDE inaugural Datathon4Justice Workshop to collectively examine and analyze real-world criminal justice data to enhance our understanding of real-world social justice problems.
10, 2021: Invited to serve as a speaker at the Diversity and Inclusion (DIVE-IN) Talk Series at the University of North Florida to present our work titled - "What Truly Matters? Using Linguistic Cues for Analyzing the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and its Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020" [Flyer][Registration].
09, 2021: A preprint of our paper "What Truly Matters? Using Linguistic Cues for Analyzing the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and its Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020" is released on ArXiv [PDF] [BibTex].
09, 2021: Awarded a full-time, fully-remote IT & Data Analytics at Kimberly-Clark during the Summer of 2022.
08, 2021: Awarded a Michigan State University Graduate Teaching Assistantship for Fall 2021.
05, 2021: Awarded a Student Scholarship to attend the International Conference of Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2021).
05, 2021: Our paper "Does Gender Matter in the News? Detecting and Examining Gender Bias in News Articles" has been accepted to the 7th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2021) as a poster presentation. [Poster].
03, 2021: Awarded a Student Scholarship award to attend the 30th International Web Conference (WWW 2021).
02, 2021: Our paper "Does Gender Matter in the News? Detecting and Examining Gender Bias in News Articles" has been accepted to the 30th International Web Conference (WWW 2021) [Planned Schedule}[PDF][Slides][BibTex].
Before the year 2021:
09, 2020: Our paper "Does Gender Matter? Towards Fairness in Dialogue Systems" has been accepted to the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2020). [PDF][BibTex][Slides].
07, 2020: Awarded an NSF Research Traineeship IMPACTS fellowship for Fall 2020, Spring 2021 and Summer 2021.
07, 2020: Invited to serve as a panelist for the panel, ''Addressing Implicit Bias Towards the Black Community in Conversational Products'' hosted by Voice Tech Global.
05, 2020: Awarded a full-time, fully-remote Digital User Experience (UX) Research and Design internship during the Summer of 2020.
02, 2020: Our paper, "Link and Interaction Polarity Predictions in Signed Networks" has been accepted for publication in Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM 2020). [PDF][BibTex].
01, 2020: Awarded a Michigan State University Graduate Teaching Assistantship for SPR 2020.
10, 2019: A preprint of our paper "Does Gender Matter? Towards Fairness in Dialogue Systems" is released on Arxiv [PDF][BibTex].
09, 2019: Administered a Recommender System Dataset Repository on Github consisting of a list of compatible datasets, algorithms, tutorials, metrics and more. Note that this repository contains popular real-world datasets, and can be found [HERE].
08, 2019: Awarded a Michigan State University Graduate Teaching Assistantship for FALL 2019.
07, 2019: Awarded a travel grant to attend the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2020).
08, 2018: Awarded a Michigan State University Enrichment Fellowship (UEF) 2018-2023.
07, 2018: Presented a poster titled The Power of Data Visualization to examine the correlation between Air Quality and Health Disparities within the Five Boroughs of New York at the HCCP Program, New York Symposium.
06, 2018: Awarded a Data Analytics Undergraduate Research Assitantship at The City University of New York - Medgar Evers College (MEC) through the HCCP Program.
02, 2018: Awarded a NASA Space Grant Scholarship by Google Inc.