Education

• MS in Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University
• BS in Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University

About Me

• Hometown:  China
• Field of Study: Computational social science, algorithm auditing, and applied machine learning
• PhD Advisor:  Christo Wilson

Biography

Desheng Hu is a PhD student advised by Prof. Christo Wilson at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Desheng is from JiangXi Province, in the southeast of China, and went to Northwestern Polytechnical University where he got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Engineering. During his undergraduate, Desheng Hu spent a semester studying in Universidad Del Valencia (Spain) as an exchange student. During his master’s program, Desheng Hu acquired some industrial experience in consulting working as an intern for Deloitte and Pricewatercoopers. Desheng’s research focuses on social computing, algorithm auditing, and applied machine learning, with a particular interest in researching fairness, accountability, and transparency issues related to intelligent systems and social media.

What are the specifics of your graduate education (thus far)?

I am doing my PhD at Khoury under the supervision of Professor Christo Wilson.

What are your research interests in a bit more detail? Is your current academic/research path what you always had in mind for yourself, or has it evolved somewhat? If so, how/why?

Broadly, I research topics in computational social science, algorithm auditing, and applied machine learning. By using natural language processing techniques and data-driven methods, I research fairness, accountability, and transparency issues related to intelligent systems and social media.

What’s one problem you’d like to solve with your research/work?

I am currently studying the change in language usage over different platforms and throughout time. My most recent project is to measure linguistic biases embedded in Google’s snippet generation system.

What aspect of what you do is most interesting/fascinating to you? What aspects of your research (findings, angles, problems you’re solving) might surprise others?

The research projects I am involved with are very interdisciplinary and require perspectives from different disciplines, and it is very exciting to work with people from different backgrounds in that case. Meanwhile, the measurements conducted in our projects can offer real world guidance for system designers or policy-makers to help make intelligent systems fairer, more transparent, and accountable.

What are your research/career goals, going forward?

I would like to be part of the effort to help make intelligent systems more fair, transparent and accountable by leveraging tools from natural language processing, data mining and applied machine learning.

Where did you grow up/spend the most defining years of your childhood/young adulthood?

I was originally born and raised in a beautiful mountainous area with a lot of trees, in JiangXi Province in southeast China.