Alejandro Ciuba

About Me

I am a third year PhD student in computer science at the University of Pittsburgh researching human-computer interaction (HCI) natural-language processing (NLP) systems. I am advised by Dr. Aakash Gautam and co-advised by Dr. Xiang (Lorraine) Li.

I received my B.S. in computer science at the University of Pittsburgh in 2023. During this time, I did educational NLP research with Dr. Diane Litman and developed a speaker segmentation pipeline for the APLS project under Dr. Dan Villarreal.

Research Interests

My research focus examines how community-focused practices within HCI (e.g., participatory design) can elevate NLP systems for participant benefit.

The big questions of my research are:

1. What can researchers do to center the participant(s) when developing NLP systems?
2. How can NLP systems be used to assist participants in their goals?
3. When should NLP technologies be considered and what are their long-term outcomes?

Major Updates

• I have just been accepted into the UR2PhD workshop series by the CRA. I will be mentoring an undergraduate student on a developing HCI project.
• Our research collaboration between STIW Lab and Sensify Lab (University of Delaware), Regulating Social Media: Surveying the Impact of Nepali Government's TikTok Ban, has been accepted to CSCW 2025!
• I was selected to teach for the NOUR Program, which is designed to give undergraduate students a first experience in research over the summer semester. I ran learning sessions on topics such as citation management, quantatative statistics, and poster design.
• Research with Joey Hou (first author) and Dr. Lorraine Li has been accepted as a workshop paper for the iRAISE workshop at AAAI, Improve LLM-based Automatic Essay Scoring with Linguistic Features