Yubo Kou
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Computer Science
Millions of people, many of them children and teenagers, spend time in online communities and user-built virtual worlds. These spaces can expose them to harm, from cyberbullying to designs that manipulate young players.
- Fields
Computer Science
Social Science
Psychology
- Topics
human-computer interaction
online communities
social media
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Investigate how users, especially teenagers, experience online interactions and learn community norms, and what community-based education resources they can access, using interviews and surveys.
- Explore, through participatory design with online communities, how community-based education for norms and anti-bullying could be built into online systems beyond punishments like account suspension.
- Identify and characterize harmful design in user-generated 3D virtual worlds, such as manipulative spending traps and violent role-play, and document how child users perceive it, using qualitative and quantitative methods.
- Develop moderation strategies and safety design guidelines for virtual worlds by working with children and design experts through cooperative inquiry.
More about the research
This research asks how online platforms can protect and support users through education and design, rather than relying only on punishment. Two projects use interviews, surveys and design work done together with users to study how people experience harm online and how systems could be built to reduce it.
Why it matters
Children and teens who use social platforms and user-built virtual worlds could benefit from safer online spaces, with less bullying, abusive content and manipulative spending traps. The findings and design guidelines could help platform designers and moderators move beyond suspensions toward community education. They could also help moderate harmful designs that current content moderation tools miss.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Prerna Juneja
Seattle University, WA·Computer Science
Build a taxonomy of user interactions with AI companion apps, covering motivations, challenges and values, by analyzing large-scale social media data and user interviews.
Bryan Semaan
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Computer Science
Identify the strategies that refugee-serving organizations, including refugee-led ones, use to stay resilient in their technology and data use, through interviews and focus groups.
Anita Sarma
Oregon State University, OR·Computer Science
Identify the needs and expectations of students and instructors for a chatbot that supports open source software contribution, using participatory design.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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