Nicholas Vincent
Assistant Professor · School of Computing Science · Simon Fraser University
Research Interests: Responsible AI, Human-computer Interaction, Machine learning, social computing
Website · SFU Profile · Google Scholar · Semantic Scholar · DBLP · GitHub
Academic Appointments
2023–Present Assistant Professor Simon Fraser University, Computing Science
Affiliate at Digital Democracies Institute and School of Public Policy. Research Director at Metagov.
2022–2023 Postdoctoral Scholar University of California, Davis, Communication
Co-advised by Seth Frey (UC Davis, Department of Communication) and Amy X. Zhang (University of Washington, School of Computer Science and Engineering)
Education
Aug 2017–Oct 2022 PhD, Technology and Social Behavior (joint degree, Computer Science and Communication) Northwestern University
- Advisor: Brent Hecht
- Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public to Mitigate Harms of Artificial Intelligence. Received SIGCHI 2024 Outstanding Dissertation Award and Northwestern University School of Communication Dissertation Award. [link]
Aug 2012–May 2016 BS, Electrical Engineering University of California, Los Angeles
- Magna Cum Laude
Industry Experience
Apr 2021–Aug 2021 Research Intern Microsoft, Office of the CTO, Redmond, WA
Mar 2020–Jun 2020 Research Intern Snap Inc, Computational Social Science, Santa Monica, CA
Aug 2016–May 2017 Cloud Programming Specialist Cloudbakers, Chicago, IL
May 2016–Aug 2016 NREIP Naval Research Intern Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (now NAVWAR), San Diego, CA
May 2015–Aug 2015 NREIP Naval Research Intern Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (now NAVWAR), San Diego, CA
May 2014–Aug 2014 Software Engineer Intern Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA
May 2013–Aug 2013 Cross Functional Intern Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA
Publications
Peer Reviewed
[P23]
Tracing Everyday AI Literacy Discussions at Scale: How Online Creative Communities Make Sense of Generative AI
[P22]
Are We Horses? Rethinking Data as Labor
[P21]
Collective Bargaining in the Information Economy Can Address AI-Driven Power Concentration
[P20]
An Audit and Analysis of LLM-Assisted Health Misinformation Jailbreaks Against LLMs
[P19]
Responsible AI in the OSS: Reconciling Innovation with Risk Assessment and Disclosure
[P18]
Algorithmic Collective Action with Two Collectives
[P17]
Push and Pull: A Framework for Measuring Attentional Agency on Digital Platforms
[P16]
A Canary in the AI Coal Mine: American Jews May Be Disproportionately Harmed by Intellectual Property Dispossession in Large Language Model Training
[P15]
Pika: Empowering Non-Programmers to Author Executable Governance Policies in Online Communities
[P14]
Peer Produced Friction: How Page Protection on Wikipedia Affects Editor Engagement and Concentration
[P13]
The Dimensions of Data Labor: A Road Map for Researchers, Activists, and Policymakers to Empower Data Producers
[P12]
Behavioral Use Licensing for Responsible AI
[P11]
CEAM: The Effectiveness of Cyclic and Ephemeral Attention Models of User Behavior on Social Platforms
[P10]
Addressing Documentation Debt in Machine Learning Research: A Retrospective Datasheet for BookCorpus
[P9]
AdverTiming Matters: Examining User Ad Consumption for Effective Ad Allocations on Social Media
[P8]
Can "Conscious Data Contribution" Help Users to Exert "Data Leverage" Against Technology Companies?
[P7]
A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results
[P6]
Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies
[P5]
How Do People Change Their Technology Use in Protest?: Understanding Protest Users
[P4]
Measuring the Importance of User-Generated Content to Search Engines
[P3]
"Data Strikes": Evaluating the Effectiveness of a New Form of Collective Action Against Technology Companies
[P2]
Women (still) ask for less: Gender differences in hourly rate in an online labor marketplace
[P1]
Examining Wikipedia With a Broader Lens: Quantifying the Value of Wikipedia's Relationships with Other Large-Scale Online Communities
Workshop Papers & Posters
[W18]
WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity by Surfacing Knowledge Gaps Between English Wikipedia and other Language Editions
[W17]
Sync or Sink: Bounds on Algorithmic Collective Action with Noise and Multiple Groups
[W16]
If open source is to win, it must go public
[W15]
Epistemic Authority in AI Fact-Checking: A Human and Data Centric Perspective
[W14]
Step-By-Step Reasoning with Meta Cognitive Prompts to Reduce Contextual Hallucination
[W13]
Canada as a Champion for Public AI: Data, Compute and Open Source Infrastructure for Economic Growth and Inclusive Innovation
[W12]
Responsible AI in the OSS: Reconciling Innovation with Risk Assessment and Disclosure
[W11]
Designing an open-source LLM interface and social platforms for collectively driven LLM evaluation and auditing
[W10]
The Need for Flexible Interfaces for Text-to-Image Auditing: A Case Study of DALL·E 2 and DALL·E 3
[W9]
An Alternative to Regulation: The Case for Public AI
[W8]
Sharing the Winnings of AI with Data Dividends: Challenges with 'Meritocratic' Data Valuation
[W7]
Epistemic Injustice in Online Communities: Unpacking the Values of Knowledge Creation and Curation within CSCW Applications
[W6]
Can Licensing Mitigate the Negative Implications of Commercial Web Scraping?
[W5]
Ethical Tensions, Norms, and Directions in the Extraction of Online Volunteer Work
[W4]
Misleading Tweets and Helpful Notes: Investigating Data Labor by Twitter Birdwatch Users
[W3]
Collaborative Design of Contribution Tracking Systems for Decentralized Organizations
[W2]
Deep learning of tissue fate features in acute ischemic stroke
[W1]
Detection of hyperperfusion on arterial spin labeling using deep learning
Other Publications
[O7]
Open WebUI: An Open, Extensible, and Usable Interface for AI Interaction
[O6]
AI for Just Work: Constructing Diverse Imaginations of AI beyond "Replacing Humans"
[O5]
A step forward in tracing and documenting dataset provenance
[O4]
Twitter Engagement with Retracted Articles: Who, When, and How?
[O3]
From My Data to Our Data
[O2]
A Data Dividend that Works: Steps Toward Building an Equitable Data Economy
[O1]
Mapping the Potential and Pitfalls of 'Data Dividends' as a Means of Sharing the Profits of Artificial Intelligence.
Editorial & Commentary
Op-eds, essays, and commentary published in external venues.
[E5]
Where Biden’s AI policies fall short in protecting workers.
[E4]
How creatives can stop AI from stealing their work.
[E3]
A roadmap toward empowering the labor force behind AI.
[E2]
ChatGPT Stole Your Work. So What Are You Going to Do?
[E1]
What if we could check Big Tech?: The collective voice of millions of users could be as effective as regulation
Grants
2025–2026 Informing Memory Institutions and Humanities Researchers of the Broader Impact of Open Data Sharing via Wikidata Wikimedia
Role: Collaborator | Amount: 49,450 USD | With: Hanlin Li
2024–2029 Empowering Data Creators to Advance Responsible Artificial Intelligence NSERC Discovery Grant with supplement
Role: Principal Investigator | Amount: 175,000 CAD
2023–2025 Data Empowerment through Data Sharing in the Humanities Breaking Barriers Interdisciplinary Incentive Grant (SFU)
Role: Co-Investigator | Amount: 60,000 CAD | With: Michelle Levy, Sheelagh Carpendale, Denise Oleksijczuk
Awards and Honors
- 2024: ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award , ACM SIGCHI (details)
- 2023: Graduate Dissertation Award , Northwestern University School of Communication (details)
- 2019: Presidential Fellowship Finalist , Northwestern University
- 2017: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program Honorable Mention , National Science Foundation (NSF)
Teaching Experience
Spring 2026 Instructor, CMPT700 Technical Writing and Research Communication Simon Fraser University
Fall 2025 Instructor, CMPT120 Introduction to Computing Science and Programming Simon Fraser University, ~200 students
Fall 2025 Instructor, CMPT419 Special Topics in AI: Collective Action and Public Interest AI Simon Fraser University, ~60 students
Spring 2025 Instructor, CMPT419 Special Topics in AI: Human and Data-centered AI Simon Fraser University, ~40 students
[outline]
Fall 2024 Instructor, CMPT120 Introduction to Computing Science and Programming Simon Fraser University, ~169 students
Spring 2024 Instructor, CMPT419 Special Topics in AI: Human and Data-centered AI Simon Fraser University, ~53 students
[outline]
Fall 2023 Instructor, CMPT120 Introduction to Computing Science and Programming Simon Fraser University, ~188 students
[outline]
2023-2025 Supervisor, Special research projects and honours research (CMPT 415/416/498) Simon Fraser University, ~27 students
27 undergraduate special-project and honours research students supervised across 2023-2025 (1 in 2023, 16 in 2024, 10 in 2025).
Fall 2020 Teaching Assistant, MTS525 Statistics and Statistical Programming (graduate) Northwestern University
[outline]
Academic Service
Supervision & Mentoring
Direct supervision: 3 MSc students. Co-supervision: 1 PhD student. External committee member: 2 PhD students. Undergraduate mentoring: 20+ students.
Reviewing
- Meta-reviews / Program Committee: AAAI ICWSM 2023; ACM EAAMO 2023; ACM CHI (2025, 2026); NeurIPS Position Papers 2025
- HCI/Social Computing Conference Reviews: ACM CHI (2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024); ACM CSCW (2020, 2021, 2022, 2025); AAAI ICWSM (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024); ACM The Web Conference (2022, 2023); WikiWorkshop (2023, 2025); IC2S2 (2023); SEGA Workshop on Smart Education and Generative AI (2025)
- ML Conference Reviews: NeurIPS (2023, 2024); NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025); ICML (2024, 2026); ICML Position Papers (2025); ICML Workshops (DataWorld - 2025); ACM FAccT (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026); ACM WSDM (2023); AAAI (2024); ICLR (2024)
- Journal Reviews: Nature Machine Intelligence; PLOS One; Patterns; Information, Communication, and Society; ACM Journal on Responsible Computing; ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
- Grant Reviews: Wikimedia Foundation Research Fund; NSERC (2024)
- Commendations: Best Reviewer - ICWSM 2021, ICWSM 2022; Special recognitions - NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks 2022, CSCW 2022, CHI 2025
Committee & Organizing Roles
- 2026 : Organizer, PoliSim@CHI 2026: Simulation-Based Social Media Governance with PoliSim , ACM CHI 2026 [link] (Organizer of the PoliSim workshop at ACM CHI 2026.)
- 2025 : Organizer, Workshop on Algorithmic Collective Action @ NeurIPS 2025
- 2024 : Advisor, Workshop on Creativity & Generative AI @ NeurIPS 2024 (Advisor for the Workshop on Creativity & Generative AI at NeurIPS 2024.)
- 2024 : Member, Simon Fraser University, Media, Communication, and Events Committee
- 2024 : Co-chair, ICWSM 2024 Data Challenge (Organized the Data Challenge track at ICWSM 2024.)
- 2023 : Member, Simon Fraser University, Undergraduate Program Committee
- 2023–2024 : Organizer, AI Palace Conference/Residency (Organized the AI Palace conference/residency in Bueckeberg, Germany, in summer 2023 and summer 2024.)
- 2019–2022 : Organizer, California Data Dividends Working Group
- 2019–2021 : Organizer, Northwestern University Artificial Intelligence Journal Club (Organized the Northwestern University Artificial Intelligence Journal Club.)
- 2018 : Co-chair, InfoSocial Graduate Student Conference (Served as one of two co-chairs for the InfoSocial graduate student conference.)
- 2018 : Member, Northwestern University, Computer Science Ph.D. Advisory Council
Selected Talks & Panels
Dec 2025 Panel Moderator, NeurIPS Workshop on Algorithmic Collective Action (Panel)
Sep 2025 A Data Flow Perspective on "AI Social Simulation": Will Recent AI Advances Enable New Social Science, Destroy Ecosystems for Knowledge, or Something More Subdued? Seattle, WA
Aug 2025 Data Leverage and AI Safety Singapore AI Safety Hub
Mar 2025 Canada as Champion for Public AI McMaster Internet Policy Lab
Mar 2025 Emerging Concerns with the Generative AI Data Paradigm (and how academic research and “Public AI” can help) UBC NLP
Mar 2025 Activism in the Age of AI IATSE 891 AI Day of Learning @ Downtown Vancouver
Aug 2024 Human-Centered AI Research and New Paradigms for Generative AI Data Human-Centered AI Conference @ Pepperdine University
May 2024 Economic Concentration and Dispossessive Data Use: Can HCI Solve Challenges from and to AI? SIGCHI 2024 Outstanding Dissertation Award
Jan 2024 A New Grand Data Bargain for Public Interest AI SFU DDI
Jan 2024 Responsive LLM Development (Panel) University of Toronto Data Sciences Institute: Fairness - ChatGPT Workshop
Mar 2023 Community Dialogue on Accountable Governance and Data Community Data Science Collective Community Dialogues
Feb 2023 Human-centered data and language models -- Privacy, data as labor, and licensing Stanford Social NLP Reading Group Talks
Jan 2023 Algorithmic Contestability Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence, Toward a Safety Science of AI
Dec 2022 Does the rise of AI need us to adopt new data licensing policies? (Panel) Open Health Data and AI Summit 2022
May 2021 The Importance of Wikipedia to Search Engines and Other Systems Wikipedia Research Showcase
May 2021 Public interest technologies for the ML age 3rd Obfuscation Workshop
Dec 2020 Data Agency: Individual or Shared? RadicalxChange Panels
Jul 2020 Data Driven Economy for All (Panel) RadicalxChange 2020 Conference
Apr 2018 The Critical Relationship of Volunteer-Created Wikipedia Content to Large-Scale Online Communities Wikipedia Research Showcase
Selected Media Coverage
- Sep 2025: Should the public sector build its own AI?, The Financial Times. (Coverage) (Link)
- Jul 2025: AI as 'teammate'? Not so fast, say experts warning it could be 'dangerous', Canadian HR Reporter. (Interview) (Link)
- May 2025: Can Wikipedia survive the rise of AI and Trump?, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (Interview) (Link)
- May 2025: 'Trial and error': Over half of AI redundancies a mistake, say leaders, Canadian HR Reporter. (Interview) (Link)
- Apr 2025: Inside Meta's secret experiments that improve its AI models, Business Insider. (Interview) (Link)
- Jan 2025: OpenAI Is Reaping What It Sowed With DeepSeek, Business Insider. (Interview) (Link)
- Jun 2024: Is data supply AI’s Achilles’ heel?, UBS. (Coverage) (Link)
- Apr 2024: Is this AI? See if you can spot the technology in your everyday life, The Washington Post. (Interview) (Link)
- Mar 2024: Jews have always been prolific writers. Has AI wound up with too much of their …, Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (Interview) (Link)
- Mar 2024: Nicholas Vincent explains why robots.txt is no longer enough to protect against…, IT Brew. (Interview) (Link)
- Jan 2024: AI is killing the grand bargain at the heart of the web, Business Insider. (Interview) (Link)
- Oct 2023: Newspapers want payment for articles used to power ChatGPT, The Washington Post. (Interview) (Link)
- Aug 2023: 'Data leverage' and the Harry Potter test: How much is a single book worth to a…, Business Insider. (Interview) (Link)
- Jul 2023: Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth, New York Times Magazine. (Interview) (Link)
- Jun 2023: We are all AI’s free data workers, MIT Technology Review. (Coverage) (Link)
- Apr 2022: Internet users are 'poisoning' their personal data in the fight against online …, Le Monde. (Interview) (Link)
- Jun 2021: Got the same name as a serial killer? Google might think you’re the same person, Vox. (Interview) (Link)
- May 2021: Facebook and Others Should Pay Us for Our Data. Here’s One Way, Bloomberg. (Coverage) (Link)
- Mar 2021: How to poison the data that Big Tech use to surveil you, MIT Technology Review. (Interview) (Link)
- Feb 2021: Your data is a weapon that can help change corporate behavior, Fortune. (Interview) (Link)
- Jul 2020: Is it time for Netflix subscribers to go on strike?, Quartz. (Interview) (Link)
- Mar 2018: YouTube May Add to the Burdens of Humble Wikipedia, New York Times. (Interview) (Link)