Sophie Spatharioti

About Me

I am a researcher with experience in conducting quantitative/qualitative research and data analysis and publishing research at top venues at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction, crowdsourcing, computational social science and games. I have extensive code development and design experience, and have led and collaborated with interdisciplinary teams, ranging from non-profits, to academics and product teams.

Most recently, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research NYC in the Computational Social Science Group. I worked on the Perspectives Engine, which aims to generate perspectives for helping people understand unfamiliar numbers encountered in news and other sources. I also conducted research on the impact of Large Language models in decision making and consumer search. My work at Microsoft has been incorporated in multiple product deployments (Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook).

I am also involved in Cartoscope, an open-source crowdsourcing image labeling platform, in collaboration with Northeastern University. Cartoscope has been used by non-profit organizations such as Healthy Gulf, for monitoring wetland loss in Louisiana, oil spills in the Niger Delta region, and damage assessment after events such as Hurricane Ida. My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Google, and Northeastern University TIER 1 grants.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, where I was advised by Professor Seth Cooper. I was awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship by Northeastern University to complete my Ph.D. studies in the Fall 2020 semester. In 2015, I received my degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.

Outside of research, I am a big tennis fan and you can easily spot me in the crowd by my headphones. Sometimes I pretend I have a clue about photography.

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Latest News

You can find more information at the News section.

[January 2024] Catch our work on augmenting human cognition and decision making with AI at Microsoft's Research Forum brief.
[January 2024] CHI 2024: Our work titled `Using Open Data to Automatically Generate Localized Analogies` has been conditionally accepted!
[December 2023] Microsoft's New Future of Work Report is out, featuring our work on LLM-based Search.
[July 2023] New paper: Comparing Traditional and LLM-based Search for Consumer Choice: A Randomized Experiment
[July 2023] Excited to see my work selected for Analog Forever Magazine's "Street Scenes/Streets, Seen" online exhibition!

Publications

Presentations

Work Experience

Postdoctoral Researcher - Microsoft Research, New York (03/2021 - 06/2023)

Part of the Computational Social Science Group. Working on the Perspectives Engine research project, which aims to generate perspectives for helping people understand unfamiliar numbers encountered in news and other sources. Part of my work is now deployed in PowerPoint.

Research Intern - Microsoft Research, New York (05/2019 - 08/2019)

Part of the Computational Social Science Group, mentored by Jake Hofman and Dan Goldstein. Worked on the Perspectives Engine research project, which aims to generate perspectives for helping people understand unfamiliar numbers encountered in news and other sources.

Research Intern - Microsoft Research, New York (05/2018 - 08/2018)

Part of the Computational Social Science Group, mentored by Jake Hofman and Dan Goldstein. Designed and implemented a crowdsourcing platform and database to generate perspectives for helping people understand unfamiliar numbers encountered in news and other sources.

Junior Software Engineer - Velti, Athens, Greece (10/2014 - 03/2015)

Part of the company’s Innovation Department, responsible for research on new technologies. Worked on OPENi, a European Union ICT Project, which is an open-source, web-based framework for integrating applications with cloud-based services and personal Cloudlets. Responsible for creating an Authentication Server, as well as a fully functional web user interface for OPENi.

Projects

Cartosco.pe

An opensource online platform for crowdsourcing analysis of environmental disasters

New

Cartoscope is building a sustainable online community that thinks across time and physical scales of environment damage. A non-profit can use Cartoscope to evaluate changes to a watershed over a long period of time, or used to look at a relatively local event and its remediation such as damage to a town from a tornado. Projects on the site can also be scaled up to organize crowd analysis of a widespread disaster, such as Hurricane Sandy.

Perspectives Engine

Perspectives Engine is an AI tool that automates the process of putting giant and unfamiliar numbers into familiar context, with a goal of improving reading comprehension. Perspective Engine has been integrated into Bing and PowerPoint Designer, where it and can now recognize when a slide contains a large number that might be difficult to interpret and put the number into perspective. Worked in designing and implementing the crowdsourcing platform for generating analogies for unfamiliar numbers, as part of my internships at Microsoft Research NYC.

Ida Damage Lookout

Healthy Gulf has partnered with Cartosco.pe to launch Hurricane Ida Damage Lookout, a movement that trains citizens to look at aerial photos on their own computers or phones and identify damage to the 600+ facilities in the path of Hurricane Ida. When you participate in a Lookout project from your computer, you will help us recognize three types of Hurricane Ida impacts: flooded petrochemical and oil and gas facilities, oil spills, and burning (flaring) of potentially hazardous gases.

Land Loss Lookout

The Mississippi River Delta, located on Louisiana’s Gulf coast, is one of the most fertile landscapes in the world. The delta provides food and shelter for those who call it home, as well as hurricane and flood protection, a flyway for migratory birds, recreational benefits, and more. Despite their economic and ecological value, Louisiana’s wetlands are being lost at an alarming rate. Over 400 square miles of marshland have been lost to oil and gas activity alone. In response to this crisis, Cartoscope, in partnership with Healthy Gulf and Northeastern University, developed Land Loss Lookout, a citizen science tool that trains users to identify types of wetland loss in the Gulf of Mexico and label where such loss is occurring by categorizing color infrared aerial photographs.

Tile-o-Scope AR

An augmented reality mobile game for sorting images using physical tiles, where participants decide the game rules. Tile-o-Scope AR aims to create stronger community bonds, elicit meaningful conversations around events, and sort data, by creating tangible, multiplayer and cooperative experiences for players, with applications in disaster response and environmental monitoring. Part of my research work as a PhD student at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences.

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Tile-o-Scope Grid

A web based online activity for sorting multiple images at the same time. Tile-o-Scope Grid aims at creating new, engaging interfaces for volunteer image sorting, by introducing elements of gamification and task variety. Part of my research work as a PhD student at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences.

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OPENi - A European Union ICT Project

OPENi is an open-source, web-based framework for integrating applications with cloud-based services and personal Cloudlets. Responsible for creating a fully functional web user interface for OPENi, as part of my internship at Velti.

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COSMOS - Cultivate resilient smart Objects for Sustainable city applicatiOnS

In a world of multi-stakeholder information and assets provision on top of millions of real-time interacting and communicating things, COSMOS aims at enhancing the sustainability of smart city applications by allowing IoT based systems to reach their full potential. COSMOS will enable things to evolve and act in a more autonomous way, becoming more reliable and smarter. Contributed to the project as part of my undergraduate thesis titled "Study, Extraction and Utilization of Relational Models among Virtual Entities in the Social Internet of Things", while at NTUA.

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