Research Publications

Man, a child in understanding of himself, has placed in his hands... tools of incalculable power. He plays with them like a child, and whether they work harm or good is largely a matter of accident.

—"The Public and its Problems" by John Dewey

Half a century after the invention of the Internet, society still struggles with a fundamental problem for the fate of humanity: how to match the capacity to create communication technologies with the capacity to ensure their uses are beneficial. As a social scientist and computer scientist, I study feedback loops of collective behavior between humans and software algorithms that escalate violence, undermine civic discourse, and sometimes expand the common good.

I do this by working in three areas:

• Human-AI behavior in digital environments
• Research Methods and Ethics
• Diversity/Equity/Inclusion in Science

I work on these three challenges through the Citizens and Technology Lab (CAT Lab), a research organization I founded and merged into Cornell in 2019. We fill in unanswered questions on digital governance by collaborating with communities to answer scientific, pragmatic, and policy questions about digital life. We grow the pace of knowledge creation through innovations in research infrastructures that often involve novel contributions to computer science. Finally, we broaden leadership in science inside and outside of academia through community science and scientific research on diversity in knowledge creation.

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles & Conference Publications

• Le Quéré, M. A., Matias, J.N. (2024) When Curiosity Gaps Backfire: Effects of Headline Concreteness on Information Selection Decisions. Scientific Reports Scientific Reports (Nature)(forthcoming)
• Wright, L., Muenster, R., Vecchione, B., Qu, T., Cai, S., Smith, A., Student Investigators, Metcalf, J., Matias, J.N. (Jan 22, 2024) Null Compliance: NYC Local Law 144 and the Challenges of Algorithm Accountability. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/UPFDK
• Zong, J., & Matias, J. N. (2023). Data Refusal From Below: A Framework for Understanding, Evaluating, and Envisioning Refusal as Design. ACM Journal on Responsible Computing.
• Matias, J.N. (2023) Influencing Recommendation Algorithms to Reduce the Spread of Unreliable News by Encouraging Humans to Fact-Check Articles, in a Field Experiment. Scientific Reports.
• Matias, J.N. (2023) Humans and algorithms work together — so study them together. Nature.
• Matias, J.N., Lewis, N. A., Hope, E. (2022) U.S. Universities Are Not Succeeding in Diversifying Faculty. Nature Human Behavior.
• Matias, J.N., Pennington, E., Chan, Z.T. (2022). Testing Concerns about Technology’s Behavioral Impacts with N-of-one Trials. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.
• Matias, J.N., Wright, L. (2022) Impact Assessment of Human-Algorithm Feedback Loops Just Tech. Social Science Research Council. March 1, 2022
• Zong, J., Matias, J.N. (2022) Bartleby: Procedural and Substantive Ethics in the Design of Research Ethics Systems. Social Media + Society.
• Matias, J. N., Hounsel, A., Feamster, N., (2022) Software-Supported Audits of Decision-Making Systems: Testing Google and Facebook’s Political Advertising policies. The 25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
  • Blog post: Crowdsourced Audits of Algorithmic Decision-Makers
• Matias, J., Munger, K., Aubin Le Quere, M.A., Ebersole, C. (2021) The Upworthy Research Archive, a time series of experiments in U.S. media. Nature Scientific Data
  • Upworthy Archive website
• Kaiser, B., Wei, J., Lucherini, E,. Lee, K., Matias, J.N., Mayer, J. (2020) Adapting Security Warnings to Counter Misinformation. 30th USENIX Security Symposium.
• Zuckerman, E., Matias, J. N., Bhargava, R., Bermejo, F., & Ko, A. (2019). Whose Death Matters? A Quantitative Analysis of Media Attention to Deaths of Black Americans in Police Confrontations, 2013–2016. International Journal of Communication, 13, 27.
• Matias, J. N. (2019). Preventing harassment and increasing group participation through social norms in 2,190 online science discussions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(20), 9785-9789.
• Matias, J. N. (2019). The civic labor of volunteer moderators online. Social Media+ Society, 5(2), 2056305119836778.
• Matias, J. N., Mou, M. (2018) CivilServant: Community-Led Experiments in Platform Governance. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI). ACM Press.
• Gaffney D., Matias J.N. (2018) Caveat Emptor, Computational Social Science: Large-scale missing data in a widely-published Reddit corpus. PLoS ONE 13(7): e0200162.
• Gantman, A., Gomila, R., Martinez, J.E., Matias, J.N., Paluck, E.L., Starck, J., Wu, S. &; Yaffe, N. (2018). A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science and its implications for replication: Commentary on Zwaan et al. Brain and Behavioral Sciences.
• Matias, J. N., Szalavitz, S., Zuckerman, E. (2017) FollowBias: Supporting Behavior Change Toward Gender Equality by Networked Gatekeepers on Social Media. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work &; Social Computing. ACM Press.
• Matias, J. N. (2016) Going Dark: Social Factors In Collective Action Against Online Platforms in the Reddit Blackout. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI). ACM Press. Best Paper Honorable Mention
• Matias, J. N., Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Mako Hill. (2016) Skill Progression in Scratch Revisited. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI). ACM Press.
• Spiro, E. S., Matias, J. N., &; Monroy-Hernández, (2016) A. Networks of Gratitude: Structures of Thanks and User Expectations in Workplace Appreciation Systems. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
• Matias, J. N., Johnson, A., Boesel, W. E., Keegan, B., Freedman, J., and DeTar, C. (2015) Reporting, reviewing, and responding to harassment on Twitter. Double-blind peer review chaired by Zeynep Tufekci. SSRN 2602018.
• Rzeszotarski, J. M., Spiro, E., Matias, J.N., Monroy-Hernández, A. (2014) Is anyone out there?: unpacking Q&;A hashtags on twitter. Proceedings of the annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM press.
• Matias, J. N., and Cheung, F. (2010) Emberlight: share and publish spatial hypertext to the web. Proceedings of the ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. ACM press. [short paper]
• Matias, J. N., and Williams, D.P. (2009) Comparing spatial hypertext collections. Proceedings of the ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. ACM press.
• Matias, J. N. (2005) Philadelphia fullerine: a case study in three-dimensional Hypermedia. Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. ACM press. (ACM Nelson Award) (best paper runner-up)

Workshop & Conference Publications

• Zong, J., Matias, J. N. (2018) Automated Debriefing: Interface for Large-Scale Research Ethics. Demo:ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. ACM Press.
• Matias, J. N. (2018) Community-Led Platform Governance Experiments. The Conference on Digital Experimentation @ MIT.
• Matias, J. N. (2017) Authoritarian and Democratic Theories of Social Experimentation in 20th Century US Industry and Policymaking. Society for Social Studies of Science annual conference, Boston MA.
• Matias, J. N. (2017) Citizen Experiments in Moderation. CCCCCCCR Workshop, ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
• Matias, J. N. (2016) The Cost of Solidarity: The Effect of Strike Participation on Community Participation in the reddit Blackout. The Conference on Digital Experimentation @ MIT.
• Matias, J.N. (2016) Evidence-Based Policy in Large-Scale Online Communities. What Works Global Summit. Campbell Collaboration, London, UK.
• Matias, J. N. (2016) Work In Progress: Mass Replication of Policy Evaluation Through Citizen-Led Randomized Trials (Poster). Data for Policy Conference, Cambridge, UK.
• Matias, J. Nathan (2016) Participatory Field Experiments and Causal Inference For Monitoring and Advancing Social Justice. CHI 2016 Workshop: Design, Social Justice, & HCI.
• Keegan, B. and Matias, J.N. (2016) Actually, It’s About Ethics in Computational Social Science: The Ethics of Causal Research Design in Community Governance. AAAI Spring Symp. on Observational Studies in Social Media 2016
• Matias, J. N. and Wallach, H. (2015) Working Paper: Modeling Gender Discrimination by Online News Audiences. Computation + Journalism Symposium, Columbia University.
• Matias, J. N., Diehl, S., and Zuckerman, E. (2015) Passing On: Reader-Sourcing Gender Diversity in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2015
• Bavitz, C., Barabas, C., Matias, J. N., Xie, C., Xu, J. (2015) Legal and Ethical Issues In the Use of Telepresent Robots. WeRobot 2015 Conference on Legal and Policy Issues Relating to Robotics, Seattle WA.
• Graeff, Erhardt. J. Nathan Matias. (2015) Making Drones Civic: Values and Design Principles for Civic Technology. International Studies Association 2015.
• Matias, J. N., and Monroy-Hernandez, A. (2014) NewsPad: designing for collaborative storytelling in neighborhoods. CHI’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM press.
• Matias, J. N., Agapie, E., D’Ignazio, C., and Graeff, E. (2014) Challenges for Personal Behavior Change Research on Information Diversity. Workshop on Personalized Behavior Change, at The 32nd ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’14).
• Matias, J. N. and Geiger, S. (2014) Defining, Designing, and Evaluating Civic Activity in Collective Action Systems. Citizen-X workshop at The Second AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing.

Other Publications

• Matias, J. N., Benesch, S., Earley, P., Gillespie, T., Keegan, B., Levy, N., Maher, E. (2015) Online Harassment Resource Guide. Wikimedia Meta-Wiki. Coordinated over 20 scholars to create an open access resource of online harassment research.

Theses

• Governing Humans and Machines in an Experimenting Society. (2017) PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Networked Tactics for Gender Representation in the News. (2013) M.S. dissertation, MIT Media Lab
• Moral Choice in Interactive Fiction. (2008) B.A. Cantab dissertation, University of Cambridge
• Breakthrough African Novelists: Plaatje & Achebe. (2008) B.A. Cantab dissertation, University of Cambridge
• Philadelphia Fullerine. (2005) B.A. senior dissertation and interactive media installation, Elizabethtown College Honors Program