1 Taha Hassan | Virginia Tech
Research Directions  



I. Human-centered data analytics for institutional support in higher education
CSCW'24 LDT'22 ITiCSE'20

Understanding the adoption and impact of learning management system (LMS) services is central to faculty, university administrators, and instructional designers in better designing and evaluating course content. However, it is challenging and expensive to (a) petition, store, combine, and analyze LMS data to identify meaningful use-contexts, and to (b) evaluate learning, design and support outcomes across departments. 


II. Protected editorial contexts: AI trust and explainability in higher education
UMAP'21

Editorial processes are a critical guardrail for a trustworthy user experience of novel information systems. An editorial process represents a consensus, formal or informal, of domain stakeholders’ beliefs about ability, authority, utility, safety, and responsibility. In domains of higher education and religio-spiritual storytelling, these editorial processes are often protected or informally negotiated


III. Protected editorial contexts: religiospiritual storytelling in sacred spaces
CHI'24

I'm investigating how institutions of spiritual storytelling, philanthropy, and community-engagement emerge, and assert their relationships with social strata in rural South Asian communities. More specifically, I'm investigating issues of

(a) story emergence and evolution, community loss
(b) story management and editorial process negotiation (community values of ownership, narration and preservation)
(c) facilitating shrine economies: donation and infrastructure grant management 



IV. Social computing: trust in digital communities
CHIPlay'22 WWW'19 WebSci'19 ASONAM'19

I examine social media signatures of how perceptions of competence, benevolence, and integrity affect technology use in communities like higher education (e.g., faculty-student trust signals on RateMyProfessors) and the outdoors (e.g., social mistrust in location-based gaming and hiking communities on Reddit). These beliefs can provide a nuanced look at how initial social relationships in online communities are preserved and disrupted by new information systems. 



V. Gamified psychometric assessments for self-evaluation of cognitive biases

I’m helping develop gamified self-assessments of key information processing biases, including herd instinct, framing, mental accounting, probability neglect, and present bias. These biases are known to affect human decision-making in the investing, borrowing, and spending arenas.