Zihan Gao

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PhD Student
Information School
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706

Email: zihan [dot] gao [at] wisc [dot] edu

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About me

I am currently a third-year PhD student at the Information School of University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am fortunate to work with Prof. Jacob Thebault-Spieker and the amazing members in the Mad Collab. Before entering UW-Madison, I received my B.M. in Information Management Department and B.S. in Psychology Department from Peking University, under the supervision of Prof. Pengyi Zhang. Here is my CV.

Research Interest

I have explored the challenges people face when they move to new places for work and try to fit into different cultures. My work is about understanding local details that are often not obvious but very important, and filling in the gaps in current systems like large language models with this kind of information. I aim to create new tools that make it easier to connect these local insights with clear, measurable data. Additionally, I have looked into what happens when someone is permanently banned from social media. This research isn’t just about one website; it’s about understanding the wider impact of how online content is controlled and how it affects the digital world. I’m dedicated to studying how users who are banned behave afterwards and providing useful information to help make fair and inclusive decisions about these bans, to maintain a healthy and welcoming online community.

Publications

[1] Zihan Gao. Jacob Thebault-Spieker. 2024. Investigating Influential Users’ Responses to Permanent Suspension on Social Media. CSCW 2024. pdf

[2] Zihan Gao. Jiepu Jiang. Evaluating Human-AI Hybrid Conversational Systems with Chatbot Message Suggestions. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2021).pdf

[3] Jieli Liu, Zihan Gao, Pengyi Zhang. “Exploring How Topic Characteristics Influence Online Discussion Quality.” In Proceedings of the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2020.(poster)pdf

Teaching

TA in UW-Madison IS Dept from Spring 2022 to Spring 2023 (Course: Data and Algorithms: Ethics and Policy)