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Past Member

Dan Calacci

Former Research Assistant
  • Human Dynamics

Dana graduated from the Human Dynamics group with a PhD in 2023. 

She is now an Assistant Professor of Human-Centered AI at Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). 

Her work at the media lab focused on studying how data, its stewardship, and analysis can impact community governance. In her dissertation, she worked on building frameworks and tools that allow informal collectives of workers and others to pool information in order to make better decisions, build power, and improve our understanding of society. Dana is also active in advocating for data and platform co-operatives & other structures that help individuals take an active role in how their data is collected and used. She is interested in how principles from participatory design can be used to create a more ethical, engaged, and subject-centered social science.

Dana also previously worked on measuring how people's daily mobility patterns contribute to income segregation in cities. They were also an active contributor to and founder of the Rhythm initiative to create open-source tools to measure human face-to-face social interaction. Dana is a co-founder of a spin-off company, Riff Learning, that is based in part on work that they did while a Master's student at the lab.

Other work Dana has been involved in includes: mapping corporate surveillance in cities, building massively scalable distributed deep reinforcement learning systems, behavioral health monitoring systems, and healthcare public policy.

Before joining the lab, Dana nabbed a B.S. in Computer Science from Northeastern University, with minors in Political Science and Sociology. While at Northeastern, she published work on inferring political influence networks using natural language processing techniques.