Christopher M. Danforth
Sharing health and behavioral data raises significant privacy concerns, as conventional de-identification methods are susceptible to privacy attacks. Differential Privacy (DP) provides formal guarantees against re-identification risks, but…
Fictional character representations reflect social norms and biases. For example, women are relatively underrepresented in television and film, irrespective of genre, and are frequently stereotyped in these media. Here, we draw on a…
Since 2016, the term "misinformation" has become associated with a scientific paradigm that studies, at its core, people making, reading, and sharing false statements, usually on social media, and often warning of the harm to society…
This study explores the relationship between body composition metrics, self-compassion, and social support among college students. Using seasonal body composition data from the InBody770 system and psychometric measures from the Lived…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
This study investigates ``us versus them'' bias, as described by Social Identity Theory, in large language models (LLMs) under both default and persona-conditioned settings across multiple architectures (GPT-4.1, DeepSeek-3.1, Gemma-2.0,…
Recent advances enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate AI personas, yet their lack of deep contextual, cultural, and emotional understanding poses a significant limitation. This study quantitatively compared human responses with…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong translation abilities through prompting, even without task-specific training. However, their effectiveness in dialectal and low-resource contexts remains underexplored. This study…
Tokenization is a necessary component within the current architecture of many language mod-els, including the transformer-based large language models (LLMs) of Generative AI, yet its impact on the model's cognition is often overlooked. We…
News media serves a crucial role in disseminating information and shaping public perception, especially during periods of political unrest. Using over 50,0000 YouTube comments on news coverage from July 16 to August 6, 2024, we investigate…
Parental stress is a nationwide health crisis according to the U.S. Surgeon General's 2024 advisory. To allay stress, expecting parents seek advice and share experiences in a variety of venues, from in-person birth education classes and…
The common phrase 'representation matters' asserts that media has a measurable and important impact on civic society's perception of self and others. The representation of health in media, in particular, may reflect and perpetuate a…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have tremendous potential to play a key role in supporting mathematical reasoning, with growing use in education and AI research. However, most existing benchmarks are limited to English, creating a significant…
Describing and comparing complex systems requires principled, theoretically grounded tools. Built around the phenomenon of type turbulence, allotaxonographs provide map-and-list visual comparisons of pairs of heavy-tailed distributions.…
Epidemic forecasting tools embrace the stochasticity and heterogeneity of disease spread to predict the growth and size of outbreaks. Conceptually, stochasticity and heterogeneity are often modeled as branching processes or as percolation…
Well curated, large-scale corpora of social media posts containing broad public opinion offer an alternative data source to complement traditional surveys. While surveys are effective at collecting representative samples and are capable of…
To optimize interventions for improving wellness, it is essential to understand habits, which wearable devices can measure with greater precision. Using high temporal resolution biometric data taken from the Oura Gen3 ring, we examine daily…
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT reflect profound changes in the field of Artificial Intelligence, achieving a linguistic fluency that is impressively, even shockingly, human-like. The extent of their current and potential…
Over the past decade, the gender pay gap has remained steady with women earning 84 cents for every dollar earned by men on average. Many studies explain this gap through demand-side bias in the labor market represented through employers'…
A large and growing body of research demonstrates the value of local parks to mental and physical well-being. Recently, researchers have begun using passive digital data sources to investigate equity in usage; exactly who is benefiting from…