Jane Im

Below is a list of updates, which admittedly focuses on the good news. I think it's important to share bad news as well, to normalize struggles, vulnerabilities, rejections, and failures. While it's far from perfect, you can glimpse more of my honest thoughts on this page. If you are a student who wants to discuss struggles in academia, feel free to reach out via email. Other PhD students helped me when I felt devastated during my PhD, and I want to pay it forward.

03/01/2024: Excited that a panel proposal and a Late-Breaking Work—both related to improving advising relationships between PhD students and faculty—are accepted to CHI 2024! The panel is with Kentaro Toyama, Himanshu Zade, Pamela Wisniewski, and Steve Oney, and the LBW is with Kentaro. A big thank you to Kentaro for mentoring and collaborating with me on both! Please come to the hybrid panel (updates coming soon) and find me at the poster session (I'm attending in-person)! 😊
02/24/2024: This week, I visited Hyejin Youn's group at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management to give a presentation. The visit experience was thought-provoking, especially as I switched from Business to HCI/Information/CS. I genuinely enjoyed meeting researchers in the group—many thanks for the invite, Professor Youn!
02/07/2024: Our CHI paper on designing findable ad controls was selected to present at PrivacyCon 2024. Huge thanks to Florian Schaub for the nudge to apply!
01/31/2024: January and December were hectic professionally and personally. But, professional good news is that I managed to submit some work I'm excited about. And... I proposed! Huge thanks to my committee—especially Kentaro Toyama!! 😄 Looking forward to finishing my dissertation based on the insightful feedback.
01/19/2024: Huge congrats to Sumit Asthana, for his conditional CHI 2024 paper acceptance! I learned a lot by collaborating as the second author.
11/29/2023: This Friday, I'm visiting NYC to attend a workshop organized by Google Jigsaw and Prosocial Design Network on behalf of Shubham Atreja, who was invited for his awesome work, but couldn't make it.
11/04/2023: I recently presented some of my recent work at the Cornell IS PhD Seminar. I'm also attending EECS Rising Stars at Georgia Tech from 11/8 to 11/10.
10/13/2023: I was able to get my visa on time! I will be attending CSCW in person to present a paper on behalf of the first author, Dr. Lia Bozarth. It's about uncovering Reddit mods' workflows for leveraging crowd wisdom to tackle misinformation, as well as exploring potential designs for improving their workflows. (Update: slides are here.)
09/27/2023: The Wall Street Journal covered our CHI 2023 paper on findability of platforms' ad controls. (Update: UMSI also wrote about it here.)
06/09/2023: I recently completed attending the Preparing Future Faculty seminar series organized by the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching's (CRLT) at UMich. It was a great program, and it especially helped me to think deeply about teaching. I am also attending the Human Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC) from 6/11 to 6/15.
04/06/2023: I feel thankful and lucky to receive the Meta PhD Fellowship (Privacy & Data Practices)! Immensely grateful for the support of my family, mentors, and friends! And to be transparent about rejections: this was my fourth time applying. I was also rejected from other fellowships multiple times. ;)
04/02/2023: A paper led by Paul Resnick (of which I co-authored as the third author) was accepted to Collective Intelligence.
03/10/2023: In March, I am giving a talk at CMU's Current Topics in Privacy Seminar and also at a panel organized by Yale Law School's Social Media Governance Initiative.
01/13/2023: Our paper on improving online behavioral advertisement controls' findability and studying findable controls' impact on users got conditionally accepted to CHI 2023. Huge thanks to my collaborators!
11/13/2022: Recognized as one of the five finalists of the nineteenth annual CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition. Congrats to the winners! And it was super interesting to listen to other PhD students' work that isn't in HCI. (This log was edited on 12/26.)
11/08/2022: A paper on understanding how to leverage crowd wisdom for tackling misinformation in online communities, which Lia Bozarth led (and I assisted on), got accepted to CSCW 2023. Congrats Lia and team!
11/08/2022: I'm co-organizing a CSCW 2022 panel on using consent as a research and design lens. Co-panelists are: Douglas Zytko, Jonathan Zong, Tomomi Tanaka, Elissa M. Redmiles, Amy A. Hasinof. Join us! I'd especially love to see folks from non-U.S. regions join and ask thought-provoking questions.
10/09/2022: Some updates on the past seven months. Remotely worked in South Korea for about 2.5 months (felt great to spend time with family ❤️), received Special Recognition for Outstanding Review for UIST 2022 (I always thought I wasn't good at reviewing, so I guess I improved!), assisted on a CSCW 2023 paper led by Lia Bozarth (under minor revision right now). I also worked on and submitted a paper to CHI 2023 and while it was a super memorable experience, I got very burned out and took a vacation. Also attended Trust and Safety Research Conference to present a poster (got useful feedback on what will hopefully be my dissertation, and more importantly, I was able to reconnect with old friends living in the area 😊).
03/14/2022: I'm selected as a Barbour Scholar! Barbour Scholarship supports "students working on dissertations that are unusually creative, ambitious, and impactful" who are women from the Middle East and Asia. I'm very excited and grateful for my advisors' support. And as an Asian woman, this means a lot to me.
02/17/2022: I'm invited to give a talk in March at Expertise@Scale, a research group led by professor Chinmay Kulkarni at CMU.
02/10/2022: An exciting paper Hari Subraimonyam led and I contributed to was conditionally accepted to CHI 2022. Congratulations Hari and team!
02/02/2022: I am one of the finalists for the Meta PhD Research Fellowship (Privacy and Data Use).
01/11/2022: I am officially a Ph.D. candidate. It personally feels like I passed a huge milestone, considering the long road I took to be part of both SI and CSE.
01/07/2022: Our paper on understanding women's perspectives on online harm and platforms' remedies was recommended for acceptance (with minor revisions) to CSCW 2022.
10/04/2021: I passed both Information and CSE prelim exams! Huge thanks to my committee (Florian Schaub, Nikola Banovic, Tawanna Dillahunt, and Mark Ackerman), family, friends, peers, and mentors.❤️
09/01/2021: Felt.coop built a fun and interactive onboarding system demo based on my work on principles of affirmative consent!
07/23/2021: I'm invited to give a DUB Shorts talk on 8/11 about my recent CHI 2021 paper on social systems grounded in affirmative consent.
06/04/2021: I wrapped up my first week at Facebook as a UX Researcher Intern.
05/14/2021: Weikun Lyu, an undergraduate student who I mentored, won the Blue Ribbon Certificate for his presentation on consentful messaging system during UROP’s Virtual Research Symposium! Huge congrats!😊🎉
04/05/2021: With my wonderful colleagues, Heeryung Choi, Cindy Lin, and Yixin Zou, I wrote a Michigan Daily op-ed regarding anti-Asian racism in the U.S. (and academia).
03/14/2021: Our CHI 2021 paper on reimagining social platforms using the concept of affirmative consent received Best Paper Honorable Mention!
01/22/2021: Gave a seminar talk at Seoul National University "Reimagining and building social platforms grounded in consent," hosted by Professor Hwajung Hong. :)
12/12/2020: Our paper on understanding and reimagining social platforms using a feminist theory of affirmative consent got accepted to CHI 2021! So excited! 😄
12/11/2020: I have been accepted to UMich's CSE department. I will be combining Information and Computer Science & Engineering for my PhD.
11/02/2020: I will be working as a research intern at Facebook next summer!
10/22/2020: Gave a guest lecture in CS 598 (CS course at UIUC) about building social platforms grounded on consent. It was super fun! :)
07/10/2020: Our WebSci 2020 paper on identifying Russian trolls on Twitter won the Best Paper Runner Up Award!
06/01/2020: Safely submitted a full paper to CSCW 2020 and started my internship with Dr. Jill Dimond at Sassafras Tech Collective!
05/01/2020: I wrote a blog post about our recent CHI 2020 paper which was also featured in The Startup.
04/18/2020: My Airbnb research internship is deferred due to COVID-19. :[ If there's any exciting intern opportunities, please send them my way!
04/10/2020: Our paper on detecting Russian trolls on Twitter got accepted to WebSci 2020. Shoutout to my wonderful collaborators! :-)
04/04/2020: I'll start my research internship at Airbnb in May.
02/28/2020: Our position paper "Building Social Platforms around Affirmative Consent" got accepted to CHI 2020 workshop Moving Forward Together: Effective Activism For Change.
01/24/2020: I passed the pre-candidacy milestone.
12/09/2019: Our paper on synthesized social signals (S3s) got conditionally accepted to CHI 2020. Huge thanks to my collaborators!
11/13/2019: Accepted a research position intership offer! Super excited for next summer. :-)
11/09/2019: SVed for the first time at CSCW 2019 :) My paper got rejected so I didn't present anything, but still had fun talking about research!
03/01/2019: My position paper got accepted to CHI 2019 workshop "Sensitive Research, Practice and Design in HCI".
11/07/2018: Motherboard covered our work on Wikipedia's Request for Comments.
11/07/2018: Attended and gave my first talk at CSCW! Slides are here.
11/02/2018: Check out our blog post on catching Russian Trolls using machine learning.
09/19/2018: I gave my first research talk at Wikimedia Research Showcase.
08/09/2018: Our paper on improving dispute resolution on Wikipedia's Requests for Comment got accepted to CSCW 2018.
04/02/2018: Decide to pursue my Ph.D. at University of Michigan, School of Information!
02/19/2018: Got accepted to University of Washington HCDE, University of Michigan SI, & University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign CS PhD programs.