About Me

Hi there! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Morgan State University as of September 2023, and the Principal Investigator of the MINDS Lab, which conducts research in the areas of Trustworthy AI, FATE in AI, Data Science for Social Good and AI+X. I am also a Research Affiliate Faculty member of both the Center for Equitable Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems (CEAMLS) and Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS) Institute.

I earned my Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Michigan State University (MSU) in 2023 and 2020, respectively, where I was supported by both an MSU University Enrichment Fellowship and an NSF GRFP—all while being under the supervision of Dr. Jiliang Tang. Before that, I earned my B.S. degree in Mathematics and A.S. degree in Computer Science, from the City University of New York—Medgar Evers College in 2018.

My current research spans the areas of Trustworthy AI, Natural Language Processing, Computational Social Science, and Interdisciplinary Data Science. Specifically, he focuses on implementing empirical methods to conceptualize, examine, and mitigate socioethical implications (e.g., bias, stereotypes, and representational harms) of innovative AI technology by highlighting its negative social impacts. Moreover, I regularly serves as PC member and reviewer for multiple top-tier international conferences and journals in machine learning and data science such as ACL, ACL-IJCNLP, NAACL, AAAI, KDD, TheWebConf, and IJCAI.


Email: jamell dot dacon at morgan dot edu (jamell.dacon@morgan.edu)

More Information...

Organizations

I2DSR

I2DSR

I2DSR (or the Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science Research is a non-profit organization (NPO) founded to increase the participation and retention of underrepresented and historically excluded students in computing by providing training and research activities, I2DSR's goal is to reduce both technological inequality and marginalization.

Website


MINDS Lab

By leveraging advanced machine learning and data mining algorithms, the MINDS Lab focuses on the analysis, experimental evaluation, design and implementation of theory, logic and systems, with an emphasis on developing explainable, interpretable and theoretically sound tools to create new and innovative technology.

Website


ASEA Workshop

ASEA Workshop

ASEA (Addressing Socioethical Effects of Artificial Intelligence) [pronounced “ay-see”] is a free and open to all socioethical workshop to address disparities in AI by conducting plenary discussions of its societal effects in full, via end-to-end cutting-edge research.

Website

Research Projects

Trustworthy AI

Safety & Security, Robustness & Realiability, Responsibility, and Explainability

FATE in AI

Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics as they relate to AI, ML, and NLP

Data Science for Social Good

Information Disorder, Toxic Language Detection, and more.

AI+X

Education, Biology, Linguistics, Healthcare, Social Science and more.

News

Recent News

04, 2024: Awarded the 2024-2025 Faculty Research Initiative Grant by the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) and the Novartis US Foundation.

02, 2024: Founded and launched the Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science Research headquartered at Morgan State University.

02, 2024: Awarded a U.S. Army DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory 2024 U.S. Deparment of Defence (DOD) HBCU/MI Summer Faculty Research Fellowship Award.

02, 2024: Awarded an Office of Naval Research (ONR) Summer Faculty Research Program (SFRP) Award.

02, 2024: Invited and honored to be selected as 1 of 5 HBCU Faculty/ Research Professionals to serve as an in-person Technical Advisor for the Research Affinity Cohort (RAC) Program hosted at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia in June 2024.

01, 2024: Partnered with a NPO, the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE) to be a Research Lead for their Data for Accountability, Transparency, and Advancement to Lower Incarceration for Transformation (DATA2LIFT) Initiative.

11, 2023: Awarded a Capacity Building for Research at Minority-Serving Institutions: Infrastructure Research Readiness (CyBR-MSI: IRR) mini grant.

Older News



11, 2023: Attended the IOF Workshop: Statistical Challenges in the Analysis of Police Use of Force hosted by Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota.

10, 2023: Invited to serve as an in-person panelist at Morgan TechFest.

09, 2023: Invited by Mr. Steven Thomas to serve as a virtual panelist for the "How to Become a Super Scholar" panel at the 2023 Michigan State University AGEP Student Success Conference in November 2023.

09, 2023: Invited to serve as an in-person speaker at the SLOAN Series Spelman+MSU Bridge Program at Spelman College in October 2023.

09, 2023: A preprint of our paper, Are You Worthy of My Trust?: A Socioethical Perspective on the Impacts of Trustworthy AI Systems on the Environment and Human Society is released on arXiv.

09, 2023: Started a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science position at Morgan State University.

06, 2023: Invited by Dr. Marta Dark McNeese to serve as a virtual speaker at Spelman College for a seminar talk titled, "Bias and Discrimination in Natural Language Processing + Biological Data Science".

05, 2023: Started an Instructor position at Michigan State University in the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering.

04, 2023: Invited by Dr. Brendon O'Connor to serve as an in-person speaker at the University of Massachusetts, LSA Summer Institute for the workshop "Bridging methods to study sociolectal variation" in July 2023. [Planned Schedule].

04, 2023: Invited by Dr. Hamid Karimi to serve as a virtual speaker at Utah State University for a talk tiltled, "Bias and Discrimination in NLP: Race and Gender".

04, 2023: Our paper "Can We Identify and Dismantle “ISMs” that Plague Our Society: An Online Approach" has been accepted at the 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2023) (Non-archival).

04, 2023: Our paper "Beyond Race and Gender: A Look at Sociodemographic Biases Toward Persons with Disabilities" has been accepted at the 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2023) for a PARALLEL TALK.

10, 2022: Awarded a full-time, on-site Research Scientist Internship at Google Research during Fall/Winter 2022.

10, 2022: Won People's Choice Awards for Best Oral and Poster Presentation at the 2022 MSU AGEP Student Success Conference.

09, 2022: Our paper, The topological shape of gene expression across the evolution of flowering plants is released on BioRxiv.

08, 2022: Our paper, Evaluating and Mitigating Inherent Linguistic Bias of African American English through Inference has been accepted to the 29th International Conferennce on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2022).

06, 2022: Our paper, Detecting Harmful Online Conversational Content towards LGBTQIA+ Individuals" has been accepted to the Queer in AI Workshop hosted by NAACL 2022 [Planned Schedule].

05, 2022: Our paper, Towards a Deep Multi-layered Dialectal Language Analysis: A Case Study of African-American English has been accepted to the Second Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (HCI+NLP) hosted by NAACL 2022 [Planned Schedule].

04, 2022: Our paper, "Using Inference to Mitigate Linguistic Bias Against African American English" has been accepted to the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2022) (Non-archival).

04, 2022: Our paper, "Examining Word Representations between #BlackLivesMatter Movement and its Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020" has been accepted to the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2022) (Non-archival).

04, 2022: Our paper, "Understanding African American English on a Token-Level Beyond Accuracy" has been accepted to the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2022) as a poster presentation.

09, 2021: A preprint of our paper, What Truly Matters? Using Linguistic Cues for Analyzing the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and its Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020 is released on arXiv.

09, 2021: Awarded a full-time, fully-remote IT & Data Analytics internship at Kimberly-Clark during the Summer of 2022.

02, 2021: Our paper, "Does Gender Matter in the News? Detecting and Examining Gender Bias in News Articles" has been accepted to the 7th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2021) (Non-archival).

02, 2021: Our paper, Does Gender Matter in the News? Detecting and Examining Gender Bias in News Articles has been accepted to the 30th International Web Conference (TheWebConf 2021) [Planned Schedule].

09, 2020: Our paper, Does Gender Matter? Towards Fairness in Dialogue Systems has been accepted to the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2020).

07, 2020: Awarded an NSF Research Traineeship IMPACTS Fellowship 2020-2022.

02, 2020: Our paper, Link and Interaction Polarity Predictions in Signed Networks has been accepted for publication in Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM 2020).

09, 2019: Administered a Recommender System Dataset Repository on Github consisting of a list of compatible datasets, algorithms, tutorials, metrics and more. Note that this repository contains popular real-world datasets, and can be found [HERE].

08, 2018: Awarded a Michigan State University Enrichment Fellowship (UEF) 2018-2023.

Publications

Preprints

Jamell Dacon.
Are You Worthy of My Trust?: A Socioethical Perspective on the Impacts of Trustworthy AI Systems on the Environment and Human Society (Preprint)

Jamell Dacon and Jiliang Tang.
What Truly Matters? Using Linguistic Cues for Analyzing the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and its Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020 (Preprint)

 

Conference, Journal & Workshops Proceedings

To be added...

 

Sourabh Palande, Joshua A.M. Kaste, Miles D. Roberts, Kenia Segura Abá, Carly Claucherty, Jamell Dacon, Rei Doko, Thilani B. Jayakody, Hannah R. Jeffery, Nathan Kelly, Andriana Manousidaki, Hannah M Parks, Emily M Roggenkamp, Ally M Schumacher, Jiaxin Yang, Sarah Percival, Jeremy Pardo, Aman Y Husbands, Arjun Krishnan, Beronda L Montgomery, Elizabeth Munch, Addie M Thompson, Alejandra Rougon-Cardoso, Daniel H Chitwood and Robert VanBuren.
Topological data analysis across the evolution of flowering plants reveals a core gene expression backbone that defines plant form and function (Revised Title)
PLOS Biology, 2023.

Jamell Dacon and Jiliang Tang.
Can We Identify and Dismantle “ISMs” that Plague Our Society: An Online Approach. (Non-Archival)
IC2S2'23: In Proceedings in the 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science, 2023.

Jamell Dacon and Jiliang Tang.
Beyond Race and Gender: A Look at Sociodemographic Biases Toward Persons with Disabilities. (Non-Archival)
IC2S2'23: In Proceedings in the 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science, 2023.

 

Jamell Dacon, Haochen Liu and Jiliang Tang.
Evaluating and Mitigating Inherent Linguistic Bias of African American English through Inference
COLING'22: In Proceedings in the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2022.

Jamell Dacon and Jiliang Tang.
Examining Word Representations between #BlackLivesMatter Movement and its Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020. (Non-Archival)
IC2S2'22: In Proceedings in the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science, 2022.

Jamell Dacon.
Understanding African American English on a Token-Level Beyond Accuracy. (Non-Archival)
IC2S2'22: In Proceedings in the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science, 2022.

Jamell Dacon, Harry Shomer, Shaylynn Crum-Dacon, Jiliang Tang.
Detecting Harmful Online Conversational Content towards LGBTQIA+ Individuals.
NAACL'22: Queer in AI Workshop, 2022.

Jamell Dacon.
Towards a Deep Multi-layered Dialectal Language Analysis: A Case Study of African-American English.
NAACL'22: In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (HCI+NLP), 2022.

Haochen Liu, Yiqi Wang, Wenqi Fan, Xiaorui Liu, Jamell Dacon, Lingjuan Lyu and Jiliang Tang.
Trustworthy AI: A Computational Perspective. (Presented)
TheWebConf'22: In Proceedings in the 31th International Web Conference, 2022.

 

Jamell Dacon and Haochen Liu.
Does Gender Matter in the News? Detecting and Examining Gender Bias in News Articles. (Non-Archival)
IC2S2'21: In Proceedings in the 7th International Conference on Computational Social Science, 2021.

Jamell Dacon and Haochen Liu.
Does Gender Matter in the News? Detecting and Examining Gender Bias in News Articles.
TheWebConf'21: In Proceedings in the 30th International Web Conference, 2021.

 

Haochen Liu, Jamell Dacon, Wenqi Fan, Hui Liu, Zitao Liu and Jiliang Tang.
Does Gender Matter? Towards Fairness in Dialogue Systems.
COLING'20: In Proceedings in the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2020.

Tyler Derr, Zhiwei Wang, Jamell Dacon, and Jiliang Tang.
Link and Interaction Polarity Predictions in Signed Networks.
SNAM'20: Social Network Analysis and Mining, 2020.