Stephen Yang

Stephen Yang is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he is supported by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. His research reimagines desirable futures with technologies amidst ongoing innovations, shifting policies, and social change. He works toward anticipatory foresight to guide the responsible design and development of nascent technologies like AI. He does so by scrutinizing contestations during early adoption, as well as by convening publics to envision collective futures.

With an eye on temporality, Yang’s primary research examines the rhythms of automation and the timescales of techno-futures. By studying how people embrace (as well as reject) automated technologies, he foregrounds controversies on the role of automation, human agency, and the sociotechnical assemblage for such configuration. Looking past hype cycles, he ruminates on how we can shape our long-term futures with emerging technologies that are rapidly changing and marked by uncertainties.

To bridge research and practice, Yang also works as an expert consultant for Partnership on AI, where he develops learning modules on equity-centered approaches to AI design and development. In Summer 2024, he will conducy policy research at the Center for Democracy & Technology as part of the AI Governance Lab. Previously, Yang interned at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research, where he examined emerging trends in creator culture, content moderation, and the future of work. He holds a B.S. in Communication and Information Science from Cornell University.

Yang’s research has been presented at the annual conferences of the International Communication Association (ICA), the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), among others.

Read more about Yang here: www.stephen-yang.com