People

Preni is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department. She graduated from Sharif University of Technology with B.Sc. in Computer Engineering. Her research interests are in natural language processing and its intersection with the social sciences. She aims to investigate different social, cultural, and psychological phenomena by processing online texts and discourse. She also intends to analyze social networks to identify societal behavior patterns and study the drivers behind them.

Farzan is a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the Department of Psychology. He received an M.A. in psychology and an M.Sc. in petroleum engineering in Iran. He combines a diverse set of methodologies ranging from advanced statistical techniques such as Bayesian Geospatial modeling to behavioral experiments to examine socio-psychological effects and their ecological manifestations in real-world behaviors such as vaccination behavior.

Alireza is a PhD student in the Computer Science department of University of Southern California. He received a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2020. His interests lie in Natural Language Processing, and their applications in social science. He is particularly interested in robustness and fairness in Natural Language Processing.

Jackson is a Ph.D. student in the Morality and Language Lab at USC, studying the moral psychology of conflict utilizing both novel machine learning tools and behavioral experiments. His work explores how individual and group moral beliefs and behaviors shape cultural conflicts and in turn how these conflicts shape our moral beliefs and behaviors. He earned his bachelor's degree in Psychology and Religious Studies from Cal State Northridge, his master’s degree in Cognitive Anthropology from Queen’s University Belfast, and has conducted field research on cultural conflicts in Israel, Armenia, Eastern Europe, and the U.K. Most recently, his research focuses on the moral language on online networks and the role it plays in our cultural polarization via both on and offline behavior.

Zhivar is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department. He earned his bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Tehran. His research interests and background lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing, with social sciences such as economics, psychology, and complex social networks. Throughout his Ph.D., he has focused on NLP benchmarks and models, with a particular emphasis on reasoning abilities inspired by cognitive psychology, including analogical reasoning, prototype-based reasoning, and case-based reasoning. Zhivar aims to continue exploring the reasoning capabilities of large language models and how they compare to human reasoning from a cognitive psychology perspective.

Suhaib is a Ph.D. student in the Psychology Department at USC. He received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Energy and Process Engineering from the Berlin Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Free University Berlin in Germany. His research interests focus on grounding natural language processing and computational modeling in psychological theory and applying it to problems in social psychology and social science. His main interest lies in understanding how morality and values manifest in language and how these insights can help us understand the dynamics of bias, prejudice, and hate in different contexts, such as inter-group dynamics, mental health/well-being, and more.

Yalda is a Ph.D. student in Social Psychology at USC. She received a bachelor's and master's degree in psychology from the University of Tehran. Most of her work centers on how moral values and cultural forces shape our judgment and decision-making on large and minor scales. More specifically, she is interested in how endorsing some moral beliefs can lead to violence, prejudice, and discrimination.

Parsa Hejabi is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California and a graduate research assistant at the Morality and Language Lab under the supervision of Prof. Morteza Dehghani. He has worked on enhancing NLP models within multiple instance learning environments, developing multimodal annotation platforms for AI in policing, and improving NLP models for under-resourced languages such as Farsi. Previously, Parsa earned an M.S. in Computer Science from USC and a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Shahid Beheshti University. He also has experience working as a software engineer at one of the largest e-commerce companies in the Middle East.

Elnaz is an incoming Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department of the University of Southern California. She received a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology (2021) and an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (2023). Her research interests lie in Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science. She is especially interested in studying cultures and social phenomena through text.

Samin is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at USC. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering and a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, both from University of Tehran. She is interested in understanding model limitations and developing NLP models that are more aligned with human values by leveraging techniques drawn from psychological frameworks. Moreover, she is eager to analyze the behavior of these models and explore similarities between them and brain functions.

Akshay is a master’s student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. He has interests in distributed systems, software security, and natural language processing. He is a developer in the Morality and Languages Lab. Outside of academia, he enjoys traveling and reading books.