Takuya Maeda

About Me

Hi! I’m Takuya.

I am a 2nd year PhD student at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University, examining the ethical and design implications of conversational AI systems. In particular, I am interested in how anthropomorphic features affect information retrieval behaviors and perceptions towards AI-assistant tools. I hope to apply my research findings to the domains of education and medicine (esp. mental health). My work is jointly supervised by Prof. Luke Stark and Prof. Anabel Quan-Haase.

In addition to my own research, I am currently engaging in a number of research projects, including (1) research on the perceptions and use of generative AI systems among undergraduate students, and (2) a project related to “AI literacy and public awareness”.

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

• Human-computer interaction (HCI), Human-AI interaction (HAI)
• Social implications of NLP
• Algorithmic harms
• Anthropomorphism

News

• [Oct. 2024] Presented a poster(SP) at AIES2024
• [June. 2024]   Presented at FAccT 2024
• [March. 2024]   Accepted to FAccT 2024
• [September. 2023]   Started PhD at Western

Conference and Journal Papers

Recent Awards

• 2024     AIES Travel Award, AAAI/ACM AIES
• 2024     FAccT Travel Award, ACM FAccT’24
• 2023     Catherine Sheldrick Ross Doctoral Recruitment Scholarship, Western University
• 2023     Dean’s Entrance Scholarship, Western University
• 2023-2027     Doctoral Scholarship, Western University
• 2023     NAIST Outstanding Student Award (Given to top 3/140 students), Nara Institute for Science and Technology

Grants

• 2021     The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science, Social Science Research Council, “Abusive Language and Gatekeeping in Twitch Streaming Cultures”

Other Recent Experience

Research-related employment

• 2024-present     Graduate Student Assistant, the Western Academy for Advanced Research, Western University
• 2020-2022     Research Assistant, Social Computing Labs, NAIST

Teaching

Western University

• (Winter 2024)     MIT2200: Mapping Media and Cultural Theory
• (Fall 2023)     MIT2100: Political Economy of Media

Reearch Collaboration

• 2022-present     “Understanding Social Withdrawal and Hikikomori: Research and Development of an Intelligent Companion Application for AI-Assisted Therapy”, University of Canterbury

• 2021-2022     AI Ethics and Fairness Research Group, University of Tokyo

  • Project (1):   Fairness framework for Hiring AI
  • Project (2):   Ethical implications and risks of NLP applications for suicide prevention

Review

• CHI2025, NeurIPS Workshop2024

Volunteer

• 2024    Student Volunteer, FAccT’24
• 2024    Facilitator, XPLANE

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