Cat Mai

Hi! I am pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at NYU Tandon, advised by Damon McCoy. My current research interests are broadly in user privacy and social media auditing, with an emphasis on targeted advertising.

I'm lucky to have had many research opportunities; not everything resulted in a tangible output, but I learned a lot along the way. Highlights and mentors include: training models to predict croplands (Sam Khallaghi and Lyndon Estes at AIRG), analyzing parasocial relationships on YouTube (Shuo Niu), and understanding smart phone interactions to predict mood (Talie Massachi and Jeff Huang at Brown HCI).

Email: cat.mai@nyu.edu
CV | Google Scholar | GitHub | Keybase

* = equal contribution

Most papers here list authors by order of contribution, while some are by alphabetical order.

Peer-reviewed

Simple temporal domain adaptation techniques for mapping the inter-annual dynamics of smallholder-dominated croplands over large extents
Lyndon Estes, Sam Khallaghi, Rahebe Abedi, Mary Asipunu, Nguyen Ha, Boka Luo, Cat Mai, Amos Wussah, Sitian Xiong, Yao-Ting Yao
European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2024 (EGU '24)
[pdf] [doi] [website]

#TeamTrees: Investigating How YouTubers Participate in a Social Media Campaign
Shuo Niu, Cat Mai, Katherine G. McKim, and D. Scott McCrickard
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW '21)
[pdf] [doi] [code]

Investigating Drug Addiction Discourse on YouTube
Katherine McKim, Cat Mai, Danielle Hess, Shuo Niu
Companion Publication of the 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '21 Companion)
[pdf] [doi]

#StayHome #WithMe: How Do YouTubers Help With COVID-19 Loneliness?
Shuo Niu, Ava Bartolome*, Cat Mai*, Nguyen B. Ha*
Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21)
[pdf] [doi]

Non-peer-reviewed

Predicting Emotion and Attention from Smartphone Behavioral Data
Dinithi Silva-Sassaman, Cat Mai, Jing Qian, Jeff Huang
Clark Fall Fest '21
[pdf] [website]

Numerical Analysis Report: Tension Spline
Mahdi Boulila, Meherab Hossain, Cat Mai, Daniel Wright
[pdf]

How YouTubers Participate in a Social Media Campaign: A Culture-Based Analysis of #TeamTrees
Cat Mai
Clark Winter Fest '21
[pdf]

“Odd One Out”: Model Based Biology in an ESL Classroom
Cat Mai*, Tina Chiem*, Anisha Hassan*
Clark Fall Fest '19
[pdf]

Code

I write research code that serve very specific use cases (read: won't work out of the box and are potentially buggy). Still, I'd like to believe there are parts of it that could be useful to other people.

YouTube video crawler from channel URLs: GitHub
YouTube ad crawler: GitHub

Miscellaneous

In my free time, I boulder, indoor garden, and play Go/weiqi. I also eat a lot of apples. Some varieties 🍎.

If you're applying for PhD programs, one version of my Statement of Purpose and CV at the time. I'm happy to answer questions (to the best of my knowledge).