Tessa Masis, a fourth year Computer Science PhD student from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was selected as one of ten 2024 New England Computing & Data Science Rising Stars. The ten Rising Stars are a diverse group of exceptional young academic professionals making significant contributions to their fields. These innovative thinkers are recognized for pushing boundaries, inspiring change, and demonstrating remarkable promise in research and education. Their research shares a common focus on advancing public interest technology for the benefit of society.
The Rising Starts program is aimed at supporting doctoral students and postdocs from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds who will be entering the academic job market within 1-2 years. It was launched April 2024 and hosted by Boston University’s Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences in collaboration with BU’s Department of Math and Statistics, College of Engineering, Department of Computer Sciences, and members of the Public Interest Technology Network of New England (PIT-NE). It culminated with an in-person workshop at Boston University in the Fall of 2024.
Tessa Masis is a fourth year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their research is in the domain of natural language processing and computational social science with a focus on using computational methods to investigate linguistic or social phenomena, especially ones relevant to marginalized groups, in multilingual social media data. Some of their previous work has explored the evolution of transnational online activist movements, understanding noisy self-identified locations from global social media users, and detecting linguistic features in low-resource Englishes. Tessa is passionate about developing low-resource and multilingual language tools and collaborating with social scientists to conduct meaningful research at the intersection of language, society, and identity.