Nicholas Vincent

Assistant Professor · School of Computing Science · Simon Fraser University

nvincent@sfu.ca

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

Sep 2017–Nov 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. Dissertation record
Sep 2012–Jun 2016 BS, Electrical Engineering University of California, Los Angeles
  • Magna Cum Laude

Industry Experience

May 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
Sep 2016–Jun 2017 Cloud Programming Specialist Cloudbakers, Chicago, IL
Jun 2016–Sep 2016 NREIP Naval Research Intern Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (now NAVWAR), San Diego, CA
Jun 2015–Sep 2015 NREIP Naval Research Intern Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (now NAVWAR), San Diego, CA
Jun 2014–Sep 2014 Software Engineer Intern Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA
Jun 2013–Sep 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 Haidan Liu, Poorvi Bhatia, Nicholas Vincent, Parmit Chilana
ACM CHI, 2026
[P22]
Are We Horses? Rethinking Data as Labor Tae Wan Kim, Nicholas Vincent
Philosophy & Technology, 2026
[P21]
Collective Bargaining in the Information Economy Can Address AI-Driven Power Concentration Nicholas Vincent, Matthew Prewitt, Hanlin Li
NeurIPS Position Papers, 2025
[P20]
An Audit and Analysis of LLM-Assisted Health Misinformation Jailbreaks Against LLMs Ayana Hussain, Patrick Zhao, Nicholas Vincent
AIES, 2025
[P19]
Responsible AI in the OSS: Reconciling Innovation with Risk Assessment and Disclosure Mahasweta Chakraborti, Bert Joseph Prestoza, Nicholas Vincent, Seth Frey, Vladimir Filkov
AIES, 2025 (Previously appeared as a workshop paper at AAAI Workshop on AIGOV)
[P18]
Algorithmic Collective Action with Two Collectives Aditya Karan, Nicholas Vincent, Karrie Karahalios, Hari Sundaram
ACM FAccT, 2025
[P17]
Push and Pull: A Framework for Measuring Attentional Agency on Digital Platforms Zachary Wojtowicz, Shrey Jain, Nicholas Vincent
ACM FAccT, 2025
[P16]
A Canary in the AI Coal Mine: American Jews May Be Disproportionately Harmed by Intellectual Property Dispossession in Large Language Model Training Heila Precel, Allison McDonald, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent
ACM CHI, 2024
[P15]
Pika: Empowering Non-Programmers to Author Executable Governance Policies in Online Communities Leijie Wang, Nicholas Vincent, Julija Rukanskaitė, Amy X. Zhang
ACM CHI, 2024
[P14]
Peer Produced Friction: How Page Protection on Wikipedia Affects Editor Engagement and Concentration Leah Ajmani, Nicholas Vincent, Stevie Chancellor
ACM CSCW, 2023
[P13]
The Dimensions of Data Labor: A Road Map for Researchers, Activists, and Policymakers to Empower Data Producers Hanlin Li, Nicholas Vincent, Stevie Chancellor, Brent Hecht
ACM FAccT, 2023
[P12]
Behavioral Use Licensing for Responsible AI Danish Contractor, Daniel McDuff, Julia Katherine Haines, Jenny Lee, Christopher Hines, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent, Hanlin Li
ACM FAccT, 2022
[P11]
CEAM: The Effectiveness of Cyclic and Ephemeral Attention Models of User Behavior on Social Platforms Farhan Asif Chowdhury, Yozen Liu, Koustuv Saha, Nicholas Vincent, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah, Maarten W Bos
AAAI ICWSM, 2021
[P10]
Addressing Documentation Debt in Machine Learning Research: A Retrospective Datasheet for BookCorpus Jack Bandy, Nicholas Vincent
NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks, 2021
[P9]
AdverTiming Matters: Examining User Ad Consumption for Effective Ad Allocations on Social Media Koustuv Saha, Yozen Liu, Nicholas Vincent, Farhan Asif Chowdhury, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah, Maarten W Bos
ACM CHI, 2021
[P8]
Can "Conscious Data Contribution" Help Users to Exert "Data Leverage" Against Technology Companies? Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht
ACM CSCW, 2021 (Previously appeared as a workshop paper at Collective Intelligence.)
[P7]
A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht
ACM CSCW, 2021
[P6]
Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies Nicholas Vincent, Hanlin Li, Nicole Tilly, Stevie Chancellor, Brent Hecht
ACM FAccT, 2021
[P5]
How Do People Change Their Technology Use in Protest?: Understanding Protest Users Hanlin Li, Nicholas Vincent, Janice Tsai, Jofish Kaye, Brent Hecht
ACM CSCW, 2019 (Two co-first authors.)
[P4]
Measuring the Importance of User-Generated Content to Search Engines Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson, Patrick Sheehan, Brent Hecht
AAAI ICWSM, 2019 (Previously appeared as a workshop paper at WikiWorkshop.)
[P3]
"Data Strikes": Evaluating the Effectiveness of a New Form of Collective Action Against Technology Companies Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht, Shilad Sen
ACM The Web Conference, 2019
[P2]
Women (still) ask for less: Gender differences in hourly rate in an online labor marketplace Eureka Foong, Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht, Elizabeth M Gerber
ACM CSCW, 2018
[P1]
Examining Wikipedia With a Broader Lens: Quantifying the Value of Wikipedia's Relationships with Other Large-Scale Online Communities Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson, Brent Hecht
ACM CHI, 2018 (Best paper award.)

Workshop Papers & Posters

[W18]
WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity by Surfacing Knowledge Gaps Between English Wikipedia and other Language Editions Zining Wang, Yuxuan Zhang, Dongwook Yoon, Nicholas Vincent, Farhan Samir, Vered Shwartz
WikiWorkshop 2026, 2026 · Forthcoming
[W17]
Sync or Sink: Bounds on Algorithmic Collective Action with Noise and Multiple Groups Aditya Karan, Prabhat Kalle, Nicholas Vincent, Hari Sundaram
Algorithmic Collective Action Workshop at NeurIPS 2025, 2025
[W16]
If open source is to win, it must go public Joshua Tan, Nicholas Vincent, Katherine Elkins, Magnus Sahlgren
CodeML @ ICML 2025, 2025
[W15]
Epistemic Authority in AI Fact-Checking: A Human and Data Centric Perspective Devansh Bhojak, Nicholas Vincent
4S 2025 Conference: Reverberations, 2025
[W14]
Step-By-Step Reasoning with Meta Cognitive Prompts to Reduce Contextual Hallucination Brian Miki, Nicholas Vincent
HEAL Workshop @ CHI 2025, 2025
[W13]
Canada as a Champion for Public AI: Data, Compute and Open Source Infrastructure for Economic Growth and Inclusive Innovation Nicholas Vincent, Mark Surman, Jake Hirsch-Allen
author preprint, 2025
[W12]
Responsible AI in the OSS: Reconciling Innovation with Risk Assessment and Disclosure Mahasweta Chakraborti, Bert Joseph Prestoza, Nicholas Vincent, Seth Frey, Vladimir Filkov
AAAI 2025 Workshop on AIGOV, 2025
[W11]
Designing an open-source LLM interface and social platforms for collectively driven LLM evaluation and auditing Timothy J. Baek, Nicholas Vincent, Lawrence Kim
HEAL Workshop @ CHI 2024, 2024
[W10]
The Need for Flexible Interfaces for Text-to-Image Auditing: A Case Study of DALL·E 2 and DALL·E 3 Clare Provenzano, Parsa Rajabi, Diana Cukierman, Nicholas Vincent
GenAICHI @ CHI 2024, 2024
[W9]
An Alternative to Regulation: The Case for Public AI Nicholas Vincent, David Bau, Sarah Schwettmann, Joshua Tan
RegML 2023 Workshop @ NeurIPS 2023, 2023
[W8]
Sharing the Winnings of AI with Data Dividends: Challenges with 'Meritocratic' Data Valuation Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht
EAAMO 2023 Poster Track, 2023
[W7]
Epistemic Injustice in Online Communities: Unpacking the Values of Knowledge Creation and Curation within CSCW Applications Leah Ajmani, Mo Houtti, Jasmine C Foriest, Michael Ann Devito, Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson
Workshop at CSCW, 2023
[W6]
Can Licensing Mitigate the Negative Implications of Commercial Web Scraping? Hanlin Li, Nicholas Vincent, Yacine Jernite, Nick Merrill, Jesse Josua Benjamin, Alek Tarkowski
Workshop at CSCW 2023, 2023
[W5]
Ethical Tensions, Norms, and Directions in the Extraction of Online Volunteer Work Hanlin Li, Leah Ajmani, Moyan Zhou, Nicholas Vincent, Sohyeon Hwang, Tiziano Piccardi, Sneha Narayan, Sherae Daniel, Veniamin Veselovsky
Workshop at CSCW, 2022
[W4]
Misleading Tweets and Helpful Notes: Investigating Data Labor by Twitter Birdwatch Users Isaiah Jones, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent
ACM CSCW Posters, 2022
[W3]
Collaborative Design of Contribution Tracking Systems for Decentralized Organizations Nicholas Vincent, Christine Vandevoorde
CESC 2022, 2022
[W2]
Deep learning of tissue fate features in acute ischemic stroke Noah Stier, Nicholas Vincent, David Liebeskind, Fabien Scalzo
BIBM 2015 Workshop on Biomedical Visual Search and Deep Learning, 2015
[W1]
Detection of hyperperfusion on arterial spin labeling using deep learning Nicholas Vincent, Noah Stier, Songlin Yu, David S Liebeskind, Danny JJ Wang, Fabien Scalzo
BIBM 2015 Workshop on Biomedical Visual Search and Deep Learning, 2015

Other Publications

[O7]
Open WebUI: An Open, Extensible, and Usable Interface for AI Interaction Jaeryang Baek, Ayana Hussain, Danny Liu, Nicholas Vincent, Lawrence H. Kim
arXiv preprint, 2025
[O6]
AI for Just Work: Constructing Diverse Imaginations of AI beyond "Replacing Humans" Weina Jin, Nicholas Vincent, Ghassan Hamarneh
arXiv preprint, 2025
[O5]
A step forward in tracing and documenting dataset provenance Nicholas Vincent
Nature Machine Intelligence, News & Views, 2024
[O4]
Twitter Engagement with Retracted Articles: Who, When, and How? Rod Abhari, Nicholas Vincent, Henry K Dambanemuya, Herminio Bodon, Emőke-Ágnes Horvát
arXiv preprint, 2022
[O3]
From My Data to Our Data Yakov Feygin, Nicholas Vincent, Hanlin Li, Chirag Lala, Luisa Scarcella
Book chapter in The Future of Building Wealth, 2021
[O2]
A Data Dividend that Works: Steps Toward Building an Equitable Data Economy Yakov Feygin, Hanlin Li, Chirag Lala, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent, Luisa Scarcella, Matthew Prewitt
Berggruen Institute white paper, 2021
[O1]
Mapping the Potential and Pitfalls of 'Data Dividends' as a Means of Sharing the Profits of Artificial Intelligence. Nicholas Vincent, Yichun Li, Renee Zha, Brent Hecht
arXiv preprint, 2019

Editorial & Commentary

Op-eds, essays, and commentary published in external venues.

[E5]
Where Biden’s AI policies fall short in protecting workers.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Feb 2024
[E4]
How creatives can stop AI from stealing their work.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Oct 2023
[E3]
A roadmap toward empowering the labor force behind AI.
Montreal AI Ethics Institute Research Summaries, Jul 2023
[E2]
ChatGPT Stole Your Work. So What Are You Going to Do?
Wired, Jan 2023
[E1]
What if we could check Big Tech?: The collective voice of millions of users could be as effective as regulation
Northwestern Now, Mar 2021

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
2024–2025 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

Teaching Experience

Spring 2026 Instructor, CMPT700 Technical Writing and Research Communication Simon Fraser University
Spring 2026 Supervisor, CMPT 415/416/894 Special research projects, honours research, and directed studies 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
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
Fall 2023 Instructor, CMPT120 Introduction to Computing Science and Programming Simon Fraser University, ~188 students
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

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 (Upcoming 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) San Diego, CA
Oct 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
Sep 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
Feb 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
Jan 2021 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