FASS Staff Profile

DR KOKIL JAIDKA
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATIONS AND NEW MEDIA

Appointment:
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Office:
AS6/03-20
Email:
jaidka@nus.edu.sg
Tel:
65161023
Fax:
Homepage:
https://kokiljaidka.wordpress.com
Tabs

Brief Introduction

I am an Assistant Professor in Computational Communication at the National University of Singapore. My research interests lie in developing computational models of persuasive and argumentative language and building social media platforms that better facilitate constructive conversations. My research has been published in Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Journal of Communication, among other venues.

Before joining NUS in 2020, I spent a year as a Presidential Postdoctoral fellow at Nanyang Technological University, and two years (2016-2018) as a CS postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. I was also a Senior Data Scientist at Adobe Research India for three years (2013-2016) where I was developing research and analytical capabilities for digital marketing tools. 

At NUS, I run the SMOL (Social Media, Online behavior, and Language) project. 

Updated CV here


Teaching Areas

2023/2024 Semester 1:

  • NMC5302: Digital Comms and Analytics
  • One Hons thesis students (BITS Pilani)
  • Two RAs (IIT Delhi)

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Previous years2022-2023:

  • NMC5302: Digital Comms and Analytics
  • NM2207: Computational Media Literacy
  • One UROP project
  • Two Master's by Research student
  • Two Hons thesis students (BITS Pilani, NUS)
  • Two RAs (IIT Delhi)

2021-2022:

  • NMC5302: Digital Comms and Analytics
  • NM4255: Computational Perspectives for Social Media
  • One UROP project
  • One Master's by Research student
  • Two Hons thesis students (BITS Pilani, NUS)
  • Two RAs (IIT Ropar, University of California Berkeley)

2020-2021:

  • NM4881A Topics in Media Studies: Social Media 
  • NM2207 Computational Media Literacy
  • One UROP project with two students
  • One Hons thesis student
  • One Master's student intern (EMCL program, University of Groningen)
  • Nine Temasek JC World of Work attachments

2019-2020 Semester 2:

  • NM4881A Topics in Media Studies: Social Media 
  • NM2207 Computational Media Literacy (Tutor)

Graduate Supervision

Ongoing research projects:

  • YiTing Chen (Now at UWM; earlier NUS, RA): Multimodal trust
  • Marc Riven Herrerra (NUS): Field experiments with apps
  • Nur Insyirah Bte Imam Mujtahid (NUS, RA): Social media user behavior and well-being

Ongoing graduate student supervision:

  • Graduated: Yifei Wang (Master's by Research)
  • PhD: Gerard Yeo, Purnima Kamath
  • Master's thesis: Taara Muthukumar

     

Ongoing adhoc undergrad research projects elsewhere:

  • Preetika Verma (BITS Pilani)
  • Shaz Furniturewala (BITS Pilani)
  • Ahmad Nasir (IIT Delhi)
  • Aadish Sharma (IIT Delhi)

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Completed postgraduate internships:

  • Swastika Bhattacharya (University of Groningen, NL): Internet language and intimacy in dyadic online communication

Completed undergrad Hons theses:

  • SenseUs, Practice-based hons thesis: Jeremiah Yee, Weibin Choo, Xinru Wang
  • Negotiation on Craigslist: Caleb Wong
  • Meghana Vinaitheerthan (CNM, NUS): The role of authenticity in mediating the effects of online writing on well-being.
  • Alexis Soh (CNM, NUS): The efficacy of influencer endorsements: A comparison of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations on customer purchase decisions in Singapore

Completed undergrad projects:

  • UROP projects: Jeremiah Yee (NUS; with Dr. Subhayan Mukerjee) and Charmayne Su (NUS): Experiments with a social media app
  • UROP project: Caleb Choy (NUS): Negotiation and persuasion on Craigslist
  • UROP project: Jun Han (NUS): Self-disclosure on Instagram
  • WOW attachment (Temasek Junior college): Use of emojis in dyadic online conversations
  • UROP project: Unice Chua: Experiments with a social media app
  • ISM: Shauna Tan Hui Shan and Cheryl Ng: Participatory cultures within YouTube communities

Completed adhoc undergrad research projects:

  • Xuan Liu (Nanjing University, China): Building a two-hop network from Twitter
  • Georgie Lee (SoC, NUS): Facebook misinformation dashboard
  • Suzanna Sia (Johns Hopkins University, USA): Modeling change in argumentative belief states 
  • Xuan Liu (University of California Berkeley, USA): The psychology of semantic spaces
  • Harsh Shah  (BITS India): A study of communication dynamics over email in professional settings
  • Lynnette Ng (CMU) and Kai Yuan (DSTA): Emsemble methods for language modeling
  • Hansin Ahuja (IIT Ropar, India): Graph-aware reinforcement learning approaches for online persuasion

 

 

 


Current Research

I'm hiring for multiple long- and short-term roles! I'm looking for Research Fellows, PhD students, and Master's by Research students on multi-year contracts, RAs for one-year contracts, and undergrads for six-month internships and co-curricular projects. Students can be at NUS/remote and would lead six-month research projects in computational linguistics and computational social science. Please email me if you're (really) keen, self-driven, organized, and goal-oriented with a couple of ideas you'd like to pursue.

  1. The role of affordances in computer-mediated communication: Affordances, as features of technological design, play an important role in terms of (a) their impact on cross-cutting exposure to news and news dissemination, and (b) in facilitating cross-talk and civil deliberation in political discourse. Data is  collected from online experiments.
  2. Psycholinguistic insights from social media use – Insights about the traits and well-being of regions and individuals, based on their online social media/searching behavior. Data is collected using surveys and social media APIs.
  3. Computational models of human interaction: To explore the relationship of language features with different phenomena related to human communication, interaction, and discussion. Data is analyzed using machine learning and deep learning approaches.

​P.S.: 

Prospective PhD students must first be admitted to NUS' PhD program before they can work with an individual advisor. If you are interested in working with me, please first apply to our program and then drop me an email. Undergraduate and Masters students who have already been admitted to the NUS and are interested in working on computational social science problems are welcome to contact me. Include your interests, degree, major, and resume in your email.

I'm always happy to mentor remote students on their own research projects or have them join one of mine. We work on research problems with an end goal in sight, such as a conference or a grad school application deadline.

Feel free to email me; but if you are unsure about how to email a professor, there are some reasonable tips here.

- Kokil

 


Research Interests

Computational linguistic and deep learning approaches to analyzing online behavior, with applications for

  • The design of social media platforms
  • Self-presentation and well-being
  • Online deliberation and cooperation

Publications

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

    • Mukerjee, S., Jaidka, K., & Lelkes, Y. (2022). The Political Landscape of the US Twitterverse. Political Communication, 1-31.
    • Jaidka, K. (2022). Cross-platform-and subgroup-differences in the well-being effects of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in the United States. Scientific reports, 12(1), 1-11.
    • Jaidka, K., Zhou, A., Lelkes, Y., Egelhofer, J., & Lecheler, S. (2022). Beyond anonymity: Network affordances, under deindividuation, improve social media discussion quality. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 27(1).
    • Bakker, B. N., Jaidka, K., Dörr, T., Fasching, N., & Lelkes, Y. (2021). Questionable and open research practices: attitudes and perceptions among quantitative communication researchers. Journal of Communication, 71(5), 715-738.
    • Ahmed, S., Chen, V. H. H., Jaidka, K., Hooi, R., & Chib, A. (2021). Social media use and anti-immigrant attitudes: evidence from a survey and automated linguistic analysis of Facebook posts. Asian Journal of Communication, 31(4), 276-298.
    • Jaidka, K., Eichstaedt, J., Giorgi, S., Schwartz, H. A., & Ungar, L. H. (2020, online first). Information-seeking vs. sharing: Which explains regional health? An analysis of Google Search and Twitter trends. Telematics and Informatics, 101540.
    • Jaidka, K., Guntuku, S. C., Lee, J. H., Luo, Z., Buffone, A., & Ungar, L. H. (2020, online first). The rural–urban stress divide: Obtaining geographical insights through Twitter. Computers in Human Behavior, 114, 106544.
    • Fischer, S., Jaidka, K., & Lelkes, Y. (2020). Auditing local news presence on Google News. Nature Human Behavior, 4(12), 1236-1244.
    • Jaidka, K., Giorgi, S., Schwartz, H. A., Kern, M. L., Ungar, L. H., & Eichstaedt, J. C. (2020). Estimating geographic subjective well-being from Twitter: A comparison of dictionary and data-driven language methods. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(19), 10165-10171.
    • Skoric, M. M., Liu, J., & Jaidka, K. (2020). Electoral and Public Opinion Forecasts with Social Media Data: A Meta-Analysis. Information, 11(4), 187.
    • Ahmed, S., Cho, J., Jaidka, K., Eichstaedt, J. C., & Ungar, L. H. (2020). The Internet and Participation Inequality: A Multilevel Examination of 108 Countries. International Journal of Communication, 14, 22.
    • Jaidka, K., Khoo, C., & Na, J.-C. (2019). Characterizing Human Summarization Strategies for Text Reuse and Transformation in Literature Review Writing. Scientometrics, 121(3).
    • Jaidka, K., Zhou, A., & Lelkes, Y. (2019). Brevity is the soul of Twitter: The constraint affordance and political discussion. Journal of Communication, 69(4), 345-372.
    • Jaidka, K., Ahmed, S., Skoric, M., & Hilbert, M. (2018). Predicting Elections from Social Media: A Three-Country, Three-Method Comparative Study. Asian Journal of Communication, 29(3), 252-273.
    • Ahmed, S., Jaidka, K., & Cho, J. (2018). Do birds of a different feather flock together? Analyzing the political use of social media through a language-based approach in a multi-lingual context. Computers in Human Behavior, 86, 299-310.
    • Ahmed, S., Cho, J., & Jaidka, K. (2018). Framing social conflicts in news coverage and social media: a multi-country comparative study. International Communication Gazette.
    • Ahmed, S., Jaidka, K., & Cho, J. (2017). Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya protest: a study of emotional dynamics in an online social movement. Social Movement
    • Studies, 16(4), 447-465.
    • Jaidka, K., Chandrasekaran, M. K., Rustagi, S., & Kan, M. Y. (2017). Insights from CL- SciSumm 2016: the faceted scientific document summarization Shared Task. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 1-9.
    • Ahmed, S. Cho, J., & Jaidka, K. (2017). Leveling the Playing Field: The Use of Twitter by Politicians during the 2014 Indian General Election Campaign. Telematics and Informatics, 34(7), 1377-1386.
    • Ahmed, S., Jaidka, K., & Cho, J. (2016). The 2014 Indian elections on Twitter: A comparison of campaign strategies of political parties. Telematics and Informatics, 33(4), 1071-1087.
    • Ahmed, S., & Jaidka, K. (2013). Protest against #delhigangrape on Twitter: Analyzing India’s Arab Spring. eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 5(1), 28-58.
    • Jaidka, K., Khoo, C. S., & Na, J. C. (2013). Literature review writing: how information is selected and transformed. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 65 (3), 303-325.
    • Khoo, C., Na, J.-C., & Jaidka, K. (2011). Analysis of the Macro-Level Discourse Structure of Literature Reviews. Online Information Review, 35(2), 255-271.
       

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