SCUBA: The Social Computing Laboratory

The Social Computing Laboratory (SCUBA) studies how digital environments shape human behavior and builds systems to make them healthier, safer, and more welcoming. SCUBA’s current research spans three threads:

• Digital Governance Understanding what governance interventions actually work in online spaces.
• Healthy Online Behavior Proactively cultivating desirable behavior through positive reinforcement.
• Algorithmic & AI Audits Auditing how algorithms and AI systems shape attention, information exposure, and user wellbeing.

Our work broadly intersects with social computing, human-centered AI, natural language processing, and computational social science. SCUBA researchers have worked with large-scale platforms including Reddit, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, and Discord, and our research has impacted their efforts to foster healthier online spaces.

SCUBA is a part of the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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Ongoing projects

• Models to Foster Healthy Conversations

  Measuring what drives positive feedback, surfacing community-valued behavior, and predicting prosocial conversation outcomes.

  Language of approval · Hidden values · Prosocial outcomes

• Context-Aware AI for Online Governance

  Small and large language models for community-specific moderation, with transparent expert-style architectures for cross-community governance.

  MoMoE · SLM-Mod · LLM-Mod

• Tools for Curating Social Feeds

  Benchmarks and models for value-aligned content curation (VASTU), expressive end-user controls for personalized feeds (Pilot on Bluesky), and moderation tooling that helps volunteers find and reward good contributions (Positive Queue).

  VASTU · Pilot · Positive Queue

• Human-AI Systems for Online Safety

  Interactive visualization for threaded discussions, ML-guided panel review when moderators disagree, and AI-augmented interfaces for moderators on large-scale chat platforms.

  Needle · Venire · ConvEx

• Causal Evidence for Behavior Change

  Randomized experiments isolating how feed rank steers attention, plus large-scale causal work on positive feedback from moderators and creators on Reddit and YouTube.

  Ranking effect · Positive reinforcement · Creator hearts

• Audits of Algorithms and AI Systems

  Quasi-experimental studies of news and wellbeing on Bluesky, empirical audits of Reddit’s trending feed, and analyses of how algorithmic visibility shocks community activity.

  Hidden toll of news · Trending feed audit · Answer Bubbles

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People