Publications

Group highlights

(For a full list see below)

Political Bias and Factualness in News Sharing across more than 100,000 Online Communities

Weld, Galen and Glenski, Maria and Althoff, Tim
ICWSM 2021 🏆 Best Paper (Outstanding Analysis)

Studying news shared online is challenging due to the massive volume of content which is shared. In this work, we conduct the largest study of news sharing to date, analyzing more than 550 million links to news articles posted on reddit over four years. Using non-partisan news source ratings of sources’ political bias and factualness, we find that up- and down-voting mechanisms generally decrease the visibility of biased and low factual content, and that such content is very concentrated, being mostly shared in only a small fraction of all communities.

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Gendered Mental Health Stigma in Masked Language Models

Lin, Inna and Njoo, Lucille and Field, Anjalie and Sharma, Ashish and Reinecke, Katharina and Althoff, Tim and Tsvetkov, Yulia
EMNLP 2022

If you have ever considered using NLP for Mental Health applications, it’s vital to know what the models have inadvertently learned about people with mental health issues. In our EMNLP 2022 paper, we find that masked LMs capture societal stigma about gender in mental health.

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Homekit2020: A Benchmark for Time Series Classification on a Large Mobile Sensing Dataset with Laboratory Tested Ground Truth of Influenza Infections

Merrill, Mike A and Safranchik, Esteban and Kolbeinsson, Arinbjorn and Gade, Piyusha and Ramirez, Ernesto and Schmidt, Ludwig and Foshchini, Luca and Althoff, Tim
Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning 2023

Despite increased interest in wearables as tools for detecting various health conditions, there are not as of yet any large public benchmarks for such mobile sensing data. Our dataset contains over 14 million hours of minute-level multimodal FitBit data, symptom reports, and ground-truth laboratory PCR influenza test results, along with an evaluation framework that mimics realistic model deployments and efficiently characterizes statistical uncertainty in model selection in the presence of extreme class imbalance.

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Human-AI Collaboration Enables More Empathic Conversations in Text-based Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Support

Sharma, Ashish and Lin, Inna W and Miner, Adam S and Atkins, David C and Althoff, Tim
Nature Machine Intelligence 2023

How can AI help improve access to mental health care? Our Nature Machine Intelligence paper shows that human-AI collaboration can empower people to respond more empathically in online peer-to-peer mental health support.

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Disparate impacts on online information access during the Covid-19 pandemic

Suh, Jina and Horvitz, Eric and White, Ryen W. and Althoff, Tim
Nature Communications 2022

The pandemic prompted increased digital engagement for health, economic, and educational resources. Analyzing 55 billion web searches across 25,150 US ZIP codes, we found differing use of digital resources based on socioeconomic and environmental factors. Lower-income areas accessed health information less than higher-income ones. ZIP codes with more Black or Hispanic residents used unemployment resources more, with unique patterns. These disparities raise important questions about the impact of information search behaviors on disadvantaged populations.

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Full List

Mapping User Engagement in Digital Psychotherapy: An Integrative Engagement Model

Zech, James M and Johnson, Morgan and Pullman, Michael D and Hull, Thomas D and Althoff, Tim and Munson, Sean A and Fridling, Nicole and Litvin, Boris and Wu, Jerilyn and Areán, Patricia A
JMIR Formative Research 2023

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GLOBEM: Cross-Dataset Generalization of Longitudinal Human Behavior Modeling

Xu, Xuhai and Liu, Xin and Zhang, Han and Wang, Weichen and Nepal, Subigya and Sefidgar, Yasaman and Seo, Woosuk and Kuehn, Kevin S and Huckins, Jeremy F and Morris, Margaret E and Nurius, Paula S. and Riskin, Eve A. and Patel, Shwetak and Althoff, Tim and Campell, Andrew and Dey, Anind K. and Mankoff, Jennifer C.
ACM IMWUT 2023

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Human-AI Collaboration Enables More Empathic Conversations in Text-based Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Support

Sharma, Ashish and Lin, Inna W and Miner, Adam S and Atkins, David C and Althoff, Tim
Nature Machine Intelligence 2023

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Self-Supervised Pretraining and Transfer Learning Enable Flu and COVID-19 Predictions in Small Mobile Sensing Datasets

Merrill, Mike A. and Althoff, Tim
Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning 2023

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Homekit2020: A Benchmark for Time Series Classification on a Large Mobile Sensing Dataset with Laboratory Tested Ground Truth of Influenza Infections

Merrill, Mike A and Safranchik, Esteban and Kolbeinsson, Arinbjorn and Gade, Piyusha and Ramirez, Ernesto and Schmidt, Ludwig and Foshchini, Luca and Althoff, Tim
Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning 2023

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Understanding and Supporting Debugging Workflows in Multiverse Analysis

Ken Gu, Eunice Jun and Tim Althoff
CHI 2023

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Globem dataset: Multi-year datasets for longitudinal human behavior modeling generalization

Xuhai Xu, Han Zhang, Yasaman Sefidgar, Yiyi Ren, Xin Liu, Woosuk Seo, Jennifer Brown, Kevin Kuehn, Mike A. Merrill, Paula Nurius, Shwetak Patel, Tim Althoff, Margaret E. Morris, Eve Riskin, Jennifer Mankoff, and Anind K. Dey
NeurIPS 2022

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What Makes Online Communities ‘Better’? Measuring Values, Consensus, and Conflict across Thousands of Subreddits

Weld, Galen and Zhang, Amy X. and Althoff, Tim
ICWSM 2022

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Adjusting for Confounders with Text: Challenges and an Empirical Evaluation Framework for Causal Inference

Galen Weld, Peter West, Maria Glenski, David Arbour, Ryan Rossi, and Tim Althoff
ICWSM 2022

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Disparate impacts on online information access during the Covid-19 pandemic

Suh, Jina and Horvitz, Eric and White, Ryen W. and Althoff, Tim
Nature Communications 2022

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A computational approach to measure the linguistic characteristics of psychotherapy timing, responsiveness, and consistency

Miner, Adam S and Fleming, Scott L and Haque, Albert and Fries, Jason A and Althoff, Tim and Wilfley, Denise E and Agras, W Stewart and Milstein, Arnold and Hancock, Jeff and Asch, Steven M and others
npj Mental Health Research 2022

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Estimating the Burden of Influenza on Daily Activity at Population Scale Using Commercial Wearable Sensors

Mezlini, Aziz and Shapiro, Allison and Daza, Eric J and Caddigan, Eamon and Ramirez, Ernesto and Althoff, Tim and Foschini, Luca
JAMA Network Open 2022

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Gendered Mental Health Stigma in Masked Language Models

Lin, Inna and Njoo, Lucille and Field, Anjalie and Sharma, Ashish and Reinecke, Katharina and Althoff, Tim and Tsvetkov, Yulia
EMNLP 2022

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Leveraging Mobile Technology for Public Health Promotion: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

Hicks, Jennifer L and Boswell, Melissa A and Althoff, Tim and Crum, Alia J and Ku, Joy P and Landay, James A and Moya, Paula ML and Murnane, Elizabeth L and Snyder, Michael P and King, Abby C and others
Annual Review of Public Health 2022

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Large-scale diet tracking data reveal disparate associations between food environment and diet

Althoff, Tim and Nilforoshan, Hamed and Hua, Jenna and Leskovec, Jure
Nature Communications 2022

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Population-Scale Study of Human Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis and Implications

Jina Suh and Eric Horvitz and Ryen W. White and Tim Althoff
WSDM 2021

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Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Sharma, Ashish and Lin, Inna W and Miner, Adam S and Atkins, David C and Althoff, Tim
WWW 2021 🏆 Best Paper (single award across all 1736 submissions)

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MULTIVERSE: Mining Collective Data Science Knowledge from Code on the Web to Suggest Alternative Analysis Approaches

Merrill, Mike A. and Zhang, Ge and Althoff, Tim
KDD 2021

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The Effect of Moderation on Online Mental Health Conversations

David Wadden and Tal August and Qisheng Li and Tim Althoff
ICWSM 2021 🏆 Best Paper (Outstanding Study Design)

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Political Bias and Factualness in News Sharing across more than 100,000 Online Communities

Weld, Galen and Glenski, Maria and Althoff, Tim
ICWSM 2021 🏆 Best Paper (Outstanding Analysis)

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A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support

Ashish Sharma and Adam S. Miner and David C. Atkins and Tim Althoff
EMNLP 2020

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Paths Explored, Paths Omitted, Paths Obscured: Decision Points & Selective Reporting in End-to-End Data Analysis

Liu, Yang and Althoff, Tim and Heer, Jeffrey
CHI 2020

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Engagement Patterns of Peer-to-Peer Interactions on Mental Health Platforms

Ashish Sharma and Monojit Choudhury and Tim Althoff and Amit Sharma
ICWSM 2020

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Data-Driven Implications for Translating Evidence-Based Psychotherapies into Technology-Delivered Interventions

Jessica Schroeder and Jina Suh and Chelsey Wilks and Mary Czerwinski and Sean Munson and James Fogarty and Tim Althoff
EAI Pervasive Health 2020

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Leveraging Routine Behavior and Contextually-Filtered Features for Depression Detection among College Students

Xu, Xuhai and Chikersal, Prerna and Doryab, Afsaneh and Villalba, Daniella K. and Dutcher, Janine M. and Tumminia, Michael J. and Althoff, Tim and Cohen, Sheldon and Creswell, Kasey G. and Creswell, J. David and Mankoff, Jennifer and Dey, Anind K.
IMWUT 2019

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Passively-Sensed Behavioral Correlates of Discrimination Events in College Students

Sefidgar, Yasaman S. and Seo, Woosuk and Kuehn, Kevin S. and Althoff, Tim and Browning, Anne and Riskin, Eve and Nurius, Paula S. and Dey, Anind K. and Mankoff, Jennifer
CSCW 2019

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Goal-Setting And Achievement In Activity Tracking Apps: A Case Study Of MyFitnessPal

Gordon, Mitchell and Althoff, Tim and Leskovec, Jure
2019

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Modeling Interdependent and Periodic Real-World Action Sequences

Kurashima, Takeshi and Althoff, Tim and Leskovec, Jure
WWW 2018

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Psychomotor function measured via online activity predicts motor vehicle fatality risk

Althoff, Tim and Horvitz, Eric and White, Ryen W
NPJ Digital Medicine 2018

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How gamification affects physical activity: Large-scale analysis of walking challenges in a mobile application

Shameli, Ali and Althoff, Tim and Saberi, Amin and Leskovec, Jure
WWW 2017

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Population-Scale Pervasive Health

Althoff, Tim
IEEE Pervasive Computing 2017

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Online Actions with Offline Impact: How Online Social Networks Influence Online and Offline User Behavior

Althoff, Tim and Jindal, Pranav and Leskovec, Jure
WSDM 2017

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Large-scale physical activity data reveal worldwide activity inequality

Althoff, Tim and Sosic, Rok and Hicks, Jennifer L and King, Abby C and Delp, Scott L and Leskovec, Jure
Nature 2017

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Harnessing the Web for Population-Scale Physiological Sensing: A Case Study of Sleep and Performance.

Althoff, Tim and Horvitz, Eric and White, Ryen W and Zeitzer, Jamie
WWW 2017

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Influence of Pokémon Go on Physical Activity

Althoff, Tim and White, Ryen W and Horvitz, Eric
JMIR 2016

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Large-scale Analysis of Counseling Conversations: {An} Application of Natural Language Processing to Mental Health

Althoff, Tim and Clark, Kevin and Leskovec, Jure
TACL 2016

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Donor retention in online crowdfunding communities: A case study of DonorsChoose.org

Althoff, Tim and Leskovec, Jure
WWW 2015

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How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests.

Althoff, Tim and Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cristian and Jurafsky, Dan
ICWSM 2014

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