Overview: My lab's research spans artificial Intelligence (AI) modeling and human-computer interaction (HCI) design. We create novel datasets, build AI models, and evaluate model performance and end-user impacts. When automated AI falls short, we design human-in-the-loop approaches supported by AI model explanations and creative user interfaces. To promote fair AI, we design better ways to annotate data without bias and modeling techniques to mitigate dataset biases. We conduct fundamental research, applied to real-world problems that matter, as part of UT Austin's Good Systems Grand Challenge to design responsible AI technologies. A theme of ongoing work is content moderation: automated, human-in-the-loop, and human-safe practices to curb disinformation, hate speech, and polarization online.

Research Areas: Crowdsourcing & Human Computation (HCOMP) • Fair & Explainable AI • Information Retrieval (IR) • Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Brief Biography. Lease's research integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques across the fields of crowdsourcing and human computation (HCOMP), information retrieval (IR), and natural language processing (NLP). Lease is a faculty founder and leader of UT Austin's Good Systems, an eight-year, university-wide "moonshot" Grand Challenge to design responsible AI technologies. As part of Good Systems, Lease is leading a six-year, seven-member faculty project developing explainable AI techniques to curb disinformation. Lease is the recipient of three Early Career awards: from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS). Recent research awards include Best Student Paper at the 2022 The Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST), Best Student Paper at the 2019 European Conference for Information Retrieval (ECIR), and Best Paper at the 2016 AAAI Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) conference. Lease received degrees in Computer Science from Brown University (PhD, MSc) and the University of Washington (BSc).

HCOMP 2014 Doctoral Consortium (with Loren Terveen)
TREC 2011-2013 Crowdsourcing Track (with Gabriella Kazai & Mark Smucker)
HCOMP 2013 Workshop: CrowdScale: accepted papers & shared task challenge (with Tatiana Josephy & Praveen Paritosh)
CrowdConf 2013 Research Track (with Paul Bennett) -- see brief interview
Springer Information Retrieval: April 2013 Special Issue on Crowdsourcing (volume 16 no. 2)
SWIRL 2012: Second Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval in Lorne
SIGIR 2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing for Information Retrieval (July 28, 2011)
WSDM 2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing for Search and Data Mining (CSDM 2011), with Vitor Carvalho and Emine Yilmaz (February 9, 2011)
TREC 2010 Relevance Feeback Track, with Chris Buckley and Mark Smucker (November 17-19, 2010)
SIGIR 2010 Workshop on Crowdsourcing for Search Evaluation (CSE2010), with Vitor Carvalho and Emine Yilmaz (July 23, 2010)

Panel Talk at Microsoft Faculty Summit: Video · Abstract (July 15, 2014)
Tutorial at SIAM 2013 Data Mining Conference on Crowdsourcing & Human Computation (May 3)
Invited Talk at ID360 Conference: Amazon's Mechanical Turk is Not Anonymous (May 1, 2013)
2012 Frontiers of Information Science and Technology (FIST) Invited Talk (December 12)
MetroCon 2012 (IEEE) Invited Talk: The Rise of Crowd Computing (October 11)
SIGIR 2012 Tutorial: Crowdsourcing for Search Evaluation and Social-Algorithmic Search (with Omar Alonso)
SBP 2012 Invited Talk for Challenge Award (April 3, slides)
IJCNLP 2011 Invited Keynote Crowd Computing: Opportunities and Challenges (Nov 10, slides)
CrowdConf 2011 Tutorial: Crowdsourcing for Research & Engineering (with Omar Alonso, Nov 1, press, slides)
SIGIR 2011 Tutorial on Crowdsourcing for Information Retrieval: Principles, Methods, and Applications (with Omar Alonso, July 24, slides)
UT Austin School of Information Advisory Council talk: Crowdsourcing & Human Computation (April 15, 2011)
UT Austin Linguistics Colloquium: Crowdsourcing for Natural Language Processing (February 28, 2011, slides)
WSDM 2011 Tutorial: Crowdsourcing 101: Putting the WSDM of Crowds to Work for You (with Omar Alonso, February 9, slides)

Two papers presented at ACL 2017; read the story (August 3, 2017)
Using Crowds to Teach AI How to Search Smarter (August 16, 2017)

Grant for developing Arabic Websearch technologies (November 4, 2015)
Version 2.0 released of SQUARE: benchmarking Software for aggregating crowd responses (October 26, 2015)
We have two papers appearing at AAAI HCOMP 2015 (June 17, 2015)
Hyun Joon Jung Receives 2015 Samsung Human-Tech Paper Award (Feburary 11, 2015)
Amazon's Mechanical Turk is Not Anonymous: Blog 3/6/13 · Paper 3/7/13 · TheVerge 3/7/13 · Press Release 3/27/13 · Talk 5/1/13
The Future of Crowd Work: Paper 12/12/12 · Blog 2/6/13 · Press Release 2/7/13 · New Scientist 2/7/13 · New York Times 3/18/13

Quoted in

IMLS LB21CL Early Career
ONR
Yahoo! Faculty Research Award
Amazon
New York Community Trust (August 2, 2012)
LIFT award: announcement (August 4, 2010) and follow-on article (March 11, 2011)
Amazon sponsorship for TREC Crowdsourcing Track (August 31, 2010)
Portugal FCT (July 26, 2010)
Android.edu (April 23, 2010)
Amazon (March 23, 2010)

Yahoo! - UT Austin iSchool Seminar Series
UT Austin iSchool Open House: 2013 · 2012 · 2011 · 2010
UT Austin Workshop on Student Research in Information Retrieval and Web Search (May 7 & 13, 2010)

Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing (BLLIP), Department of Computer Science, Brown University
Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst (lab reunion at SIGIR'09)
Spoken Language Systems Laboratory (LSV), Saarland University
Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL), Charles University
Intel Research Seattle at the University of Washington