User:Skleiner4848/Desmond Upton Patton

Dr. Desmond Upton Patton is a Public Interest Technologist who uses qualitative and computational data collection methods to examine the relationship between youth and gang violence and social media. He also researched violence, grief, and identity on social media and the impacts of social media expressions on the lives and wellbeing of lower-income youth of color. He is an academic in the field of making AI and other innovative technologies more empathetic, culturally sensitive, and less biased. Dr. Patton is also a current professor at the Columbia School of Social Work (CSSW).

Dr. Patton is the Associate Dean for Innovation and Academic Affairs at CSSW, the founding director of SAFElab, and the co-director of the Justice, Equity and Technology lab at CSSW. He is also the Associate Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and the co-chair of the Racial Equity Task Force at The Data Science Institute and founder of the SIM|ED tech incubator at Columbia University.

Career
Before joining the faculty at Columbia, Dr. Patton was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work and School of Information. He holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and political science with honors from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, a Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan School of Social Work and a doctorate in Social Service Administration from the University of Chicago. His publications have been featured in various academic journals, such as Computers in Human Behavior and Educational Psychology Review.

Dr. Patton’s early work is comprised of attempting to detect trauma and preempt violence on social media. Dr. Patton is a social worker, and his early career researching gang violence has resulted in his current academic work researching language in social media algorithms and social work within data science development. Dr. Patton's main research interests in data science surround creating tools to better understand Black and Hispanic youth's online language. In response, he created the Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) approach to center and privilege culture, context and inclusion in machine learning and computer vision analysis. CASM can be used by organizations to analyze social media and workplace communications for potentially incendiary language, which taken out of context can lead to violence. Dr. Patton's main research involves creating non-biased and culturally nuanced algorithms using social work lenses and approaches, while also pairing the research with innovative and emerging technologies.

In 2018, he published a finding in the Nature journal, Digital Medicine, which uncovered grief as a pathway to aggressive communication on Twitter. The report was cited in an amici curiae brief submitted to the United States Supreme Court in Elonis v. United States, which examined the interpretation of threats on social media. Patton’s research at the intersections of social media, AI, empathy and race has been mentioned in the New York Times, Nature, Washington Post, NPR, Vice News, ABC News and other prestigious media outlets more than seventy times in the last three years.

Awards
He won the 2018 Deborah K. Padgett Early Career Achievement Award from the Society for Social Work Research (SSWR) for his work on social media, AI and well-being. Dr. Patton was named a 2017-2018 Fellow and was appointed Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is also a 2019 Presidential Leadership Scholar and Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard Kennedy School.

Degrees

 * Ph.D., Social Service Administration, University of Chicago - Chicago
 * M.S.W., Social Work, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
 * BA, Anthropology & Political Science, University of North Carolina - Greensboro