Stevie Chancellor

About

I’m an Assistant Professor in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. I’m also currently a Senior Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google Research. I work with other HCI faculty in the GroupLens lab. Our group builds and develops human-centered AI (HCAI) for mental health and well-being in online interactions. HCAI (or human-centered ML) deliberately balances CS contributions with the needs and values of humans, communities, and stakeholders. This area is rich with use-inspired problems that lead us to improved AI infrastructure for user behavior modeling/prediction, such as measurement, multimodal feature engineering, and developing accurate and robust models with small datasets. However, I also think (and do) a lot about how peoples’ preferences and concerns about AI can inform this design process and intervention strategies. Finally, I critically evaluate these AI systems to develop more ethical research practices and policy for ML and computer science. My domai

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Psychology
• Computer Security
• Political Science
• Psychiatry
• World Wide Web
• Applied psychology
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• “I See Me Here”: Mental Health Content, Community, and Algorithmic Curation on TikTok

  2023 · 105 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Social media platforms are a place where people look for information and social support for mental health, resulting in both positive and negative effects on users. TikTok has gained notoriety for an abundance of mental health content and discourse. We present findings from a semi-structured interview study with 16 participants about mental health content and participants’ perceptions of community on TikTok. We find that TikTok’s community structure is permeable, allowing for self-discovery and…

  DOI

• Secondary Stakeholders in AI: Fighting for, Brokering, and Navigating Agency

  2025-06-23 · 6 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  As AI technologies become more human-facing, there have been numerous calls to adapt participatory approaches to AI development -- spurring the idea of participatory AI. However, these calls often focus only on primary stakeholders, such as end-users, and not secondary stakeholders. This paper seeks to translate the ideals of participatory AI to a broader population of secondary AI stakeholders through semi-structured interviews. We theorize that meaningful participation involves three participa…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Characterizing Delusional Spirals through Human-LLM Chat Logs

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-03-17 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access

  As large language models (LLMs) have proliferated, disturbing anecdotal reports of negative psychological effects, such as delusions, self-harm, and ``AI psychosis,'' have emerged in global media and legal discourse. However, it remains unclear how users and chatbots interact over the course of lengthy delusional ``spirals,'' limiting our ability to understand and mitigate the harm. In our work, we analyze logs of conversations with LLM chatbots from 19 users who report having experienced psycho…

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond the Individual: A Community-Engaged Framework for Ethical Online Community Research

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-10-16 · 2 citations

  article

  Online community research routinely poses minimal risk to individuals, but does the same hold true for online communities? In response to high-profile breaches of online community trust and increased debate in the social computing research community on the ethics of online community research, this paper investigates community-level harms and benefits of research. Through 9 participatory-inspired workshops with four critical online communities (Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/AskHistor…

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Content Exposure: Systemic Factors Driving Moderators' Mental Health Crisis in Africa

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Content moderators review disturbing content to protect social media users, often at significant cost to their mental health. Recent reports document the mental health conditions of African moderators as notably problematic. Beyond the content itself, what factors contribute to the deteriorating mental health of these workers? We surveyed 134 moderators across Africa to understand their mental health and interviewed 15 moderators to contextualize their experiences. We found that African moderato…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Munmun De Choudhury

  24 shared

• Hanlin Li

  The University of Texas at Austin

  12 shared

• Brent Hecht

  Northwestern University

  10 shared

• Steven A. Sumner

  National Center for Injury Prevention and Control

  8 shared

• Eshwar Chandrasekharan

  6 shared

• Loren Terveen

  University of Minnesota

  6 shared

• Nicholas Vincent

  University of East Anglia

  5 shared

• Joseph A. Konstan

  University of Minnesota

  4 shared

Labs

• GroupLensPI

  Not provided

Education

• Ph.D., Human Centered Computing

  Georgia Tech

• Other

  Northwestern University

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Northwestern’s Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intell…
• Cisco Research
• Google
• Amazon Research Award

Similar researchers at University of Minnesota

• Dan Knightsh-97
• Yousef Saadh-81
• Joseph Konstanh-74