Plural Connections - Publications

Bolded = peer reviewed

Selected publications

N. Gillani, D. Beeferman, C. Vega-Pourheydarian, C. Overney, P. Van Hentenryck, D. Roy (2023). Redrawing attendance boundaries to promote racial and ethnic diversity in elementary schools. Educational Researcher.

Selected media: The Hechinger Report, Education Week, KQED Mindshift, NPR All Things Considered

N. Gillani (2023). ChatGPT Isn’t the Only Way to Use AI in Education. WIRED.

N. Gillani, E. Chu, D. Beeferman, R. Eynon, D. Roy (2021). Parents' online school reviews reflect several racial and socioeconomic disparities in K-12 education. AERA Open, 7(1): 1-16.

Selected media: American Educational Research Association, MIT News

N. Gillani, D. Roy (2022). The Internet Needs You-Are-Here Maps. WIRED.

N. Gillani*, A. Yuan*, M. Saveski, S. Vosoughi, D. Roy (2018). Me, My Echo Chamber, and I: Introspection on Social Media Polarization. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW ‘18), Lyon, France. Honorable mention for best paper.

Selected media: MIT Technology Review, Slate

inclusive Education

C. Overney, C. Moe, A. Chang, N. Gillani. BoundarEase: fostering constructive community engagement to inform more equitable student assignment policies. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘25).

H. Guan, N. Gillani, T. Simko, J. Mangat, P. Van Hentenryck (2025). Contextual Stochastic Optimization for School Desegregation Policymaking. In Proceedings of the 2025 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

M. Landry, N. Gillani (2024). Merging public elementary schools to reduce racial/ethnic segregation. Extended abstract and invited oral presentation at the 2024 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).

N. Gillani*, T. Simko*, K. Chandra (2024). Race or SES? Estimating the impacts of different policy objectives on K-12 school integration. Extended abstract and invited oral presentation at the 2024 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).

N. Gillani, C. Overney, C. Schuch, K. Chandra (2023). Fostering More Integrated Schools Through Community-Driven, Machine-Informed Rezoning. Essay for the American Institutes of Research, Integration and Equity 2.0: New Approaches for a New Era.

K. Zhu, N. Gillani, P. Van Hentenryck (2023). Impacts of Differential Privacy on Fostering more Racially and Ethnically Diverse Elementary Schools. Extended abstract and invited oral presentation at the 2023 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).

Research summary available via the Montreal AI Ethics Institute

K. Chandra, F. Pantano, G. Bikhazi, N. Gillani (2023). Byte-Sized Justice: Supporting School Desegregation Policymaking with Algorithmic Redistricting. Extended abstract and poster at the 2023 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).

N. Gillani*, D. Beeferman*, C. Overney, C. Vega-Pourheydarian, D. Roy (2023). All a-board: sharing educational data science research with school districts. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S '23).

Extended abstract and poster at the 2023 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).

Extended abstract and invited oral presentation at the 2022 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).
Invited oral presentation at the ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO ‘22)
Selected media: The Hechinger Report, KQED Mindshift, NPR All Things Considered

N. Gillani (2023). ChatGPT Isn’t the Only Way to Use AI in Education. WIRED.

Also discussed on NPR's The Takeaway

N. Gillani, R. Eynon (2023). Understanding and improving social factors in education: a computational social science approach. Forthcoming in: T. Yasseri (Ed.), Handbook of Computational Social Science. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.

N. Gillani, R. Eynon, C. Chiabaut, K. Finkel (2023). Unpacking the “Black Box” of AI in K12 education. Educational Technology & Society, 26(1): 99-111.

Included on JSTOR's reading list for Artificial Intelligence and Education

N. Gillani, E. Chu, D. Beeferman, R. Eynon, D. Roy (2021). Parents' online school reviews reflect several racial and socioeconomic disparities in K-12 education. AERA Open, 7(1): 1-16.

Earlier version also accepted as an extended abstract and invited oral presentation at the 2020 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).
Selected media: American Educational Research Association, MIT News

A. Yuan*, N. Gillani* (2017). Championing a spirit of genuine inquiry to combat social fragmentation. Invited paper at “Re-examining the meaning of education in an uncertain world”, Oxford Comparative and International Education, Oxford, UK.

R. Eynon, I. Hjorth, T. Yasseri, N. Gillani (2016). Understanding Communication Patterns in MOOCs: Combining Data Mining and Qualitative Methods. Data Mining and Learning Analytics: Applications in Educational Research.

N. Gillani, R. Eynon (2014). Communication Patterns in Massively Open Online Courses. The Internet and Higher Ed., 23, 18-26.

N. Gillani, T. Yasseri, R. Eynon, I. Hjorth (2014). Structural limitations of learning in a crowd: communication vulnerability and information diffusion in MOOCs. Scientific Reports, 4, 6447.

R. Eynon, I. Hjorth, N. Gillani, T. Yasseri (2014). ‘Vote Me Up If You Like My Ideas!’ Experiences of Learning in a MOOC. 2014 ICA Pre-conference working paper: Innovation in Higher Education: Building a Better Future?

N. Gillani, R. Eynon, M. Osborne, I. Hjorth, S. Roberts (2014). Communication Communities in MOOCs. Poster at the 2014 KDD Workshop on Data Mining for Educational Assessment and Feedback.

Z. Nurmohamed, N. Gillani, M. Lenox (2013). A New Use for MOOCs: Real-World Problem Solving. Harvard Business Review.

N. Gillani (2013). MOOC-Sourcing for Social Good. Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Works in progress

R. Eynon, N. Gillani. Computational Social Science and Social Justice Research in Digital Education: An Improbable Combination? Under review.

K. Zhu, N. Gillani, P. Van Hentenryck. Impacts of Differential Privacy on Fostering more Racially and Ethnically Diverse Elementary Schools. Working paper.

C. Overney, C. Vega-Pourheydarian, M. Mitchell, W. Hall, N. Gillani, D. Roy. Voice Your Choice: Creating a Community Engagement Process for New Magnet Programs in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Working paper.

B. Saldias*, N. Gillani*, S. Priscilla-Makini*, M. Hughes*, D. Roy. Designing conversational technology to support school counseling-related activities. Working paper.

Mindful Media Consumption and Sharing

X. Guo*, N. Potnis*, M. Yu, N. Gillani, S. Vosoughi (2024). The Computational Anatomy of Humility: Modeling Intellectual Humility in Online Public Discourse. The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

D. Beeferman, A. Chang-Lee, T. Simko, N. Gillani (2024). Quantifying Issue Attention in City Council Meetings. Extended abstract and invited oral presentation at the 2024 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).

D. Beeferman and N. Gillani (2023). FeedbackMap: a tool for making sense of open-ended survey responses. In Companion Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing: Demos Track (CSCW ’23 Companion).

S. Fulay, N. Gillani, D. Roy (2023). Divergences in Following Patterns between Influential Twitter Users and their Audiences Across Dimensions of Identity. Forthcoming Poster in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM '23).

Extended abstract and poster at the 2023 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).

N. Gillani, D. Roy (2022). The Internet Needs You-Are-Here Maps. WIRED.

M. Saveski*, N. Gillani*, P. Vijayaraghavan, A. Yuan, D. Roy (2022). Perspective-taking to reduce affective polarization on social media. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM '22).

Selected media covering the underlying web application: The New York Times, ReCode, MIT Technology Review

E. Chu*, N. Gillani*, and S. Priscilla Makini (2020). Games for Fairness and Interpretability. Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020 (WWW ‘20), Workshop on Data Science for Social Good.

Also accepted to the 2020 ICLR Workshop on Trustworthy ML

N. Gillani, R. Levy (2019). Simple dynamic word embeddings to map perceptions in the public sphere. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science, NAACL 2019.

Also accepted as a poster at the 2018 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).
Selected media: MIT Technology Review, Slate

Theses and other publications

N. Gillani (2021). Designing for a new "ZIP code destiny". Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD, Media Arts and Sciences.

N. Gillani (2014). Uncovering latent features in massive open online courses. University of Oxford, Master's by Research, Department of Engineering.

N. Gillani (2013). Learner communications in massively open online courses. University of Oxford, MS.c., Department of Education.

N. Gillani (2012). Joint Assessment and Restoration of Power Systems. Brown University, Undergraduate Honors Thesis.

P. Van Hentenryck, N. Gillani, C. Coffrin (2012). Joint Assessment and Restoration of Power Systems. Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), France, 792-797.

* Denotes contributions of equal importance