Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Lehigh University
About us
We study how power, trust, and care get built into software — in AI teammates, content platforms, classrooms, and the invisible labor of care — and we build systems as provocations: simulations to think from inside, environments that make a design’s consequences visible before they are real.
Our research platforms — Truman, Social Media TestDrive, SocialSim, DART, and Moshi — let us put people inside a design and see what it does to them, under conditions where nothing is at stake yet.
The Critical Computing Cadre is part of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Lehigh University.
Projects
| Project | What we’re doing | People |
|---|---|---|
| Platform Care Work | Care work, and the platforms that increasingly organise it. | Rosemary Steup, Ojaswi Joshi, Chioma Chigozie-Okwum |
| Bystander Intervention & Online Safety | Who speaks up when something goes wrong online, and what design has to do with it. | Dominic DiFranzo, Hanjing Shi |
| Misinformation & Community Norms | Misinformation as a community process rather than an individual failure. | Dominic DiFranzo, Hanjing Shi, Chenchen Mao, Joshua Krinsky, Kabir Gupta |
| AI-Mediated Communication | What happens to people when a machine is in the middle of the conversation. | Dominic DiFranzo, Hanjing Shi, Chenchen Mao, Emily Wegrzyn, Ojaswi Joshi, Kabir Gupta |
| Digital Literacy at Scale | Practising the encounter with deception before the encounter arrives. | Dominic DiFranzo |
| Imagined Futures of GenAI in Education | The futures instructors and students are already imagining, and acting on. | Emily Wegrzyn, Hanjing Shi, Rosemary Steup |
Recent publications
- Preprint · 2026
Culturally-grounded governance for multilingual language models
Shi & DiFranzo · arXiv:2602.00497
- Preprint · 2026
When visibility outpaces verification
Shi & DiFranzo · arXiv:2602.11412
- Conference paper · 2026
Artful reconfiguration: decoupling novelty and design in a computer-saturated world
Steup, Chigozie-Okwum, Gavade & Baumer · PACM HCI
- Workshop paper · 2026
Human control is the anchor, not the answer: early divergence of oversight in agentic AI communities
Shi & DiFranzo · CHI 2026 Workshop on Human-Agent Collaboration
- Conference paper · 2026
Exploring COVID-19 framing across diverse platforms
Shi, Aghajari, DiFranzo, Jia & Baumer · ICWSM 2026, 20(1), 2149–2164
- Conference paper · 2026
Designing for safety in sensitive online spaces: the role of pseudonymity and verification friction
Gallagher, Shi & DiFranzo · ACM Web Science 2026, 381–391
- Conference paper · 2025
A relationship-centered perspective on home care work
Steup & Jung · PACM HCI 9(7), 1–23
Members
Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering
Rosemary SteupFacultyLabor, care & technology
Hanjing ShiDoctoral ResearcherAgentic AI governance, disclosure, epistemic coordination
Chenchen MaoDoctoral ResearcherAI trust & anthropomorphism
Emily WegrzynDoctoral ResearcherAI-mediated communication and the norms of generative AI use
Ojaswi JoshiDoctoral ResearcherAlgorithmic systems and human relationships · platform care work
Chioma Chigozie-OkwumDoctoral ResearcherParticipatory design of algorithmic systems
Joshua KrinskyDoctoral ResearcherDeepfake creation, detection, and end-user intervention
Kabir GuptaUndergraduate ResearcherAI companionship · science, technology & society
Join the lab
We take PhD students through Lehigh’s CSE program, and we work with master’s and undergraduate researchers year-round — including students in the Honors IDEAS program. You do not need to arrive knowing critical theory, and you do not need to arrive knowing how to build things. You do need to be willing to learn.