Welcome to my personal website! My name is Maggie Zhang 张梦情. I am a PhD candidate in Institute of Communications Research (ICR) at University of Illinois-Urabna Champaign (UIUC), advised by Prof. Margaret Yee Man Ng and Harsh Taneja.

Research Interests

My scholarship is at the intersection of computational social science, social computing and political communication. My research combines natural language processing and computer vision methods as well as experiments to look into the media effect on people’s opinion and behavior. My dissertation (ongoing) aims to make advances on the problem of coordinated inauthentic behavior online.

My previous projects have focused on information operations including examining the strategies used by China’s foreign propaganda campaigns. I have also explored how Russian Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) troll accounts successfully employed visual techniques to disturb the public discussion during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

I am also curious about collective opinions are influenced by social cues on social media platforms. For example, I have investigated how people’s agendas were impacted by the trending list on Twitter and how the removal of YouTube’s dislike counts lead to biased public opinion.

My work have been published (or are forthcoming) in peer-reviewed journals including International Journal of Communication, Social Science Computer Review, and Journal of Marketing Communications. I have also received top student paper awards from the International Communication Association.

Education Background

I am concurrently a Master’s student in Computer Science in the department of computer science and a Ph.D. candidate in communication at UIUC. Prior to joining UIUC, I received my M.Phil degree in Communication from School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where I was supervised by Prof. Hai Liang and B.A. degree in Journalism from Tsinghua University in China.