Zachary Levonian
Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, and Researcher
PhD in Computer Science
zacharylevonian at gmail dot com
My research lies at the intersection of social computing and natural language processing.
I am interested in the way humans communicate with and support one another online.
I completed my PhD with GroupLens at the University of Minnesota in October 2022.
I was advised by Professors
Lana Yarosh
and Loren Terveen.
My current research is in the domains of education and human-AI interaction.
Quick links:
LinkedIn
| GitHub
| Mastodon
| Twitter
| Bluesky
| Blog
| Google Scholar
Google Scholar profile
Star (*) indicates students I mentored.
-
"Some other poor soul's problems": a peer
recommendation intervention for health-related social support
[preprint]
[code]
Zachary Levonian, Matthew Zent, Ngan Nguyen*, Matthew McNamara*, Loren Terveen, Svetlana
Yarosh
Accepted to CSCW. 2025.
-
Retrieval-augmented Generation to Improve Math Question-Answering: Trade-offs Between Groundedness and Human Preference
[preprint]
[code]
[blog]
[poster]
[video]
[slides]
[demo]
Zachary Levonian, Chenglu Li, Wangda Zhu, Anoushka Gade, Owen Henkel, Millie-Ellen Postle, Wanli Xing
Educational Data Mining (EDM). 2024. Best Student Short Paper Award.
NeurIPS'23 Workshop on Generative AI for Education (GAIED) (non-archival). 2023.
-
"Thoughts
& Prayers" or "❤️ & 🙏": How the Release of New Reactions on CaringBridge Reshapes
Supportive Communication During Health Crises
[preprint]
[blog]
C. Estelle Smith, Hannah Miller Hillberg, Zachary Levonian
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW. 2023.
-
Trade-offs in Sampling and Search for
Early-stage Interactive Text Classification
[pdf]
[code]
[video]
[blog]
Zachary Levonian, Chia-Jung Lee, Vanessa Murdock, F. Maxwell Harper
27th Annual Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces - IUI. 2022.
-
Patterns of Patient and Caregiver Mutual
Support Connections in an Online Health Community
[preprint]
[code]
[video]
Zachary Levonian, Marco Dow*, Drew Erikson*, Sourojit Ghosh*, Hannah Miller Hillberg, Saumik Narayanan*,
Loren Terveen, Svetlana Yarosh
23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing - CSCW.
2020.
-
Bridging Qualitative and Quantitative Methods
for User Modeling: Tracing Cancer Patient Behavior in an Online Health Community
[preprint] [code] [video] [slides] [summary]
Zachary Levonian, Drew Erikson*, Wenqi Luo*, Saumik Narayanan*, Sabirat Rubya, Prateek Vachher*,
Loren Terveen, Svetlana Yarosh
Proceedings of the 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media - ICWSM.
2020.
-
"I Cannot Do All of This Alone": Exploring
Instrumental and Prayer Support in Online Health Communities
[preprint]
[video]
C. Estelle Smith, Zachary Levonian, Haiwei Ma, Robert Giaquinto, Gemma Lein-Mcdonough, Zixuan Li,
Susan O'Conner-Von, Svetlana Yarosh
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI). 2020.
-
What I See is What You Don't Get: The Effects
of (Not) Seeing Emoji Rendering Differences across Platforms
[preprint]
Hannah Miller Hillberg, Zachary Levonian, Daniel Kluver, Loren Terveen, Brent Hecht
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction - CSCW. Volume 2 Issue CSCW, November
2018
-
Readback
Error Detection using Automatic Speech Recognition
[slides]
Shuo Chen, Hunter Kopald, Ronald Chong, Yuan-Jun Wei, Zachary Levonian
Air Traffic Management Research & Development Seminar 2017
-
Speech Inputs to Surface Safety Logic
Systems
Shuo Chen, Hunter Kopald, Adel Elessawy, Zachary Levonian, Robert Tarakan
Digital Avionics Systems Conference 2015
Publications in this section received peer review for non-archival venues. See my blog for self-published writing.
Star (*) indicates students I mentored.
-
Safe Generative Chats in a WhatsApp Intelligent Tutoring System
[preprint]
[code]
Zachary Levonian, Owen Henkel
Educational Data Mining (EDM) Workshop: Leveraging Large Language Models for Next Generation Educational Technologies. 2024.
-
Can Large Language Models Make the Grade? An Empirical Study Evaluating LLMs Ability To Mark Short Answer Questions in K-12 Education
Owen Henkel, Libby Hills, Adam Boxer, Bill Roberts, Zachary Levonian
Learning @ Scale (L@S). 2024.
-
ORES-Inspect: A technology probe for machine learning audits on enwiki
[preprint]
[code]
[video]
[demo]
Zachary Levonian, Lauren Hagen*, Lu Li*, Jada Lilleboe*, Solvejg Wastvedt, Aaron Halfaker, Loren Terveen
Wiki Workshop. 2024.
-
Digital
Trial Solutions eScreening: a software solution that ranks patients by their predicted
clinical trial eligibility using Real-World Data and Machine Learning
[pdf]
Sudip Bhandari, Zachary Levonian, Robert Annand, Jo-Zahn Baxter, Jericho Cain, Jen Flach, Jiby
Joseph-Thomas, Judith Mueller
American Society of Clinical Oncology - ASCO (Abstract). 2023.
-
How much is a "like" worth? Engagement and
retention in an online health community
Ruyuan Wan*, Zachary Levonian, Svetlana Yarosh
Companion of the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing,
CSCW 2020
-
Grandtotem: Supporting International and
Intergenerational Relationships
[preprint]
[video]
Mark Butzer, Zachary Levonian, Yangyang Luo, Kathleen Watson, Ye Yuan, C. Estelle Smith, Svetlana
Yarosh
Companion of the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing,
CSCW 2020
-
Understanding Community-Level Conflicts
Through Reddit r/place [code] [demo video]
Prateek Vachher*, Zachary Levonian, Hao-Fei Cheng, Svetlana Yarosh
Companion of the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing,
CSCW 2020
-
Condition Unknown: Predicting Patients' Health
Conditions in an Online Health Community
Changye Li*, Zachary Levonian, Haiwei Ma, Svetlana Yarosh
Companion of the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing,
CSCW 2018
View all of my self-published writing here.
Most of my blog-style writings are on GitHub or Medium.
Recent research updates. I keep my professional updates
on my LinkedIn.
-
November 2023, paper accepted to the NeurIPS'23 Workshop on Generative AI for Education (GAIED). View here.
-
May 2023, I joined Digital Harbor Foundation as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer.
-
March 2023, paper accepted to CSCW 2023! View here.
- December 2022, my dissertation is now available on
ProQuest. (available open-access via the UMN
Conservancy and hosted here [pdf])
- November 2022, I was officially awarded my degree and started an industry job. I am a Senior Machine
Learning Engineer at ConcertAI.
- July 2022, I defended my dissertation
[pdf].
- May 2021, I attended CHI 2021! Check out my colleague Estelle Smith's video presentation of our TOCHI paper.
- April 2021, I received the University of Minnesota's Doctoral
Dissertation Fellowship for Fall 2021 and Spring 2022.
- October 2020, my advisee Ruyuan Wan's CSCW2020 poster received an Outstanding Poster award. Check it out here.
- August 2020, a Master's student I mentored, Marco Dow, successfully defended his thesis, which is
now available
online!
- July 2020, I had 1 full paper (preprint) and 3
posters accepted to CSCW 2020! You can
watch my pre-recorded presentation here.
- June 2020, I (virtually) attended ICWSM 2020. You can
watch my pre-recorded presentation here.
- July 2019, my first paper was accepted to ICWSM 2020. Preprint link.
- June 2019, I gave a guest lecture on "Why NLP matters to HCI researchers" in CS322: Natural Language Processing at Carleton
College. Slides here.
- March 2019, I presented a workshop on NLP for social computing
researchers.
- June 2018, Attended HCIC 2018 on AI + HCI! I presented a poster
on some of my current work.
- April 2018, Attended CHI'18, my first conference!
- August 2017, I joined the GroupLens lab at the University of
Minnesota.
In my spare time I visit breweries, see weird indie shows, and try to predict the outcome of The
Bachelor.
I have competed in exactly one curling tournament, where I was laughed at by a former Olympian.
I am an occasional editor on English Wikipedia (2000 edits and counting).
I go by Zach or Zachary and my preferred pronouns are he/his/him.
I am on Mastodon, Twitter,
Bluesky,
LinkedIn,
and GitHub.
This website is hosted on GitHub.