Making information useful for people and AI.

I study how information should be represented to support human sensemaking at scale and how those representations should be adapted when both people and computational systems become users of them.
On the 2026-27 academic job market · PhD Candidate, Syracuse University
Portrait of Una Joh

Research program.

01 / COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE

Making large-scale discourse legible.

I develop computational methods for interpreting social meaning in large-scale text data.

TEXT MININGTOPIC MODELINGCOMPUTATIONAL NARRATIVES
FIRST-AUTHOR WORK4
UNDER REVIEW (targeting ICWSM 2027)From message similarity to communicative repertoires in coordinated political advertising
AACL-IJCNLP · 2026Beyond top words: MonoTM for topic modeling with interpretable monosemantic featuresARXIV ↗
ICWSM · 2026How growing toxicity manifests: A topic trajectory analysis of U.S. immigration discourse on social mediaDOI ↗
INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY · 2025Climate communication in the stormy transition of Twitter to XDOI ↗
02 / HUMAN-CENTERED AI

When people and AI are both information users.

I study how AI systems represent information as memory and how that memory shapes their behavior.

AI AGENTSMEMORYPERSONALIZATION
FIRST-AUTHOR WORK3
UNDER REVIEW (targeting CHI 2027)Same personality setting, different assistance? Auditing personality controls in AI assistants
UNDER REVIEW (targeting EACL 2027)[Working title during blind review]Memory use and personalization in AI assistants
ASIS&T · 2026 FORTHCOMINGWhen AI memory fails: Reframing LLM agent memory as a knowledge organization problem

Hi, I’m Una.

I’m a PhD candidate in Information Science and Technology at Syracuse University. My work spans computational social science and human-centered AI, with a shared interest in how computational systems represent and use information.

I’m currently on the 2026-27 academic job market. If you’d like to talk about research, collaboration, or opportunities, I’d be happy to hear from you.

Google Scholar ↗