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Takuya Maeda

Ph.D. Student
Western University
tmaeda@uwo.ca


About Me

Hi! I’m Takuya.

I am a 3rd year PhD student at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University. My research interests span human computer interaction, science and technology studies, and communication, examining the social and ethical impact of anthropomorphic design in AI systems. My current work frames anthropomorphic AI as a social assemblage that affords parasocial dynamics between users and chatbots, examining how actors within sociotechnical systems (developers, users, media, etc.) collectively animate computational tools, making them seem like social “agents.” My work is jointly supervised by Prof. Luke Stark and Prof. Anabel Quan-Haase. Besides FIMS, I'm affiliated with the Rotman Institute of Philosophy and Starling Centre.

In addition to my own research, I am currently engaging in a number of research projects supported by CIFAR and SSHRC, including (1) a project on Eliza effects (CIFAR Catalyst/SSHRC grant), (2) a project related to regulatory practices around emerging technologies (CIFAR Catalyst), and (3) a project on AI literacy and digital divide funded by SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant and SSHRC Catalyst Grant.

Previously, I completed a master’s program in information science and engineering at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, where I studied natural language processing and explored research topics related to social computing, health informatics, online abuse and hate speech, and ethics in NLP.

Research Areas

News

Publications

  1. Ethics in Computational Communication Research: The 3Cs Framework of Conceptualization, Contextualization, and Consideration
    Takuya Maeda,Kesiena Fofah, Charlotte Nau, Anabel Quan-Haase
    ICA Handbook of Computational Communication Research, Chapter 2: Ethics(Handbook), 2026 (forthcoming).
    PDF (TBD)
  2. Anthropomorphism as Social Affordance: Charting the Co-Animation of Chatbots into Social “Agents”
    Takuya Maeda, Luke Stark
    AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES), 2025.
    PDF (TBD)
  3. Toward agency-centered AI literacy: A scoping review. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology
    Takuya Maeda, Hillary Anderson, Anabel Quan-Haase, Katharine Willis, and Selena Gignac.
    Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), 2025.
    PDF (TBD)
  4. Walkthrough of Anthropomorphic Features in AI Assistant Tools
    Takuya Maeda
    Arxiv, 2025.
    PDF
  5. Misplaced Capabilities: Evaluating the Risks of Anthropomorphism in Human-AI Interactions
    Takuya Maeda
    AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES), 2024.
    PDF Poster
  6. When Human-AI Interactions Become Parasocial: Agency and Anthropomorphism in Affective Design
    Takuya Maeda, Anabel Quan-Haase
    ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), 2024.
    PDF

  7. Between Fact and Fabrication: How Visual Art Might Nurture Environmental Consciousness
    Rebecca Buening, Takuya Maeda, Kongmeng Liew, Eiji Aramaki
    Frontiers in Psychology, 2022.
    PDF

Recent Awards

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Other Recent Experience

Teaching

Western University

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