Viviane Ito

About

Hi! I am Vivi. 

I am Brazilian, but my family is originally from Japan (although my grandma was born in Korea, during the Japanese occupation). After spending more than 10 years working in advertising, I am making a career shift to academia.

Currently, I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Information Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Graduate Research Assistant at CITAP.  My research interests bridge computational and social science domains. On one hand, I study the linguistic properties of AI systems, exploring how they evolve with advancing models and technology. On the other hand, I examine how people interact with these systems, seeking to understand how they process and make sense of retrieved information.

To analyze these objects, I use natural language processing methods that I have learned in my BA and MA in Linguistics, both at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

I am also a yogi, barista, and worked as a volunteer in a dog shelter in Thailand.

I love talking about all those topics in the paragraphs above, so please, feel free to contact me about any of them!

itovivi [AT] unc [DOT] edu


LinkedInLink

Projects

Search Literacy (jan 2024 - present)

My work as a member of the Search Prompt Integrity and Learning Lab (SPILL Lab), explores how information flows through platforms in the evolving search space – permeated by AI systems and malicious agents. The lab is an interdisciplinary and transatlantic environment, with researchers coming from diverse backgrounds. Since the environment is very collaborative, I am participating in all research stages: from brainstorming research ideas to data collection, data analysis, literature reviews, and writing papers with our results. My most recent assignment is to study Wikipedia and Reddit data to understand how people make sense of online information.

Women's Biographies (aug 2023 - present)

Is the risk worth the reward? In this project, we are assessing the tension between notability and harassment. We aim to understand if notable women refrain from having a biography or photo on Wikipedia for fear of being harassed. As an RA in this space I’ve helped design survey questions, curate the survey sample, and write the data analysis plan. This survey is currently being piloted - after which I will also be responsible for analyzing the collected data. 


Discurso Y Dolor (jul 2021- jan 2022)

In this project, funded by FONDECYT, I was supervised by Prof. Mariana Pascual from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

My goal was to study a corpus of interviews with patients diagnosed with endometriosis. The disease causes chronic pain, and takes in average 7 to 10 years to diagnose. This delay is often due to failures in patient-doctor communication.

Questions that were the basis of the project:


Gender Bias In The Careers Of Olympic Athletes (jan 2021- mar 2022)

I was a Research Assistant in this project during my BA in Linguistics at USP, supervised by Prof. Marcos Lopes. It presented two central objectives, anchored in the hypothesis that the sports careers of professional athletes show mishaps directly related to gender. The main objective was to understand whether themes such as pain, career transition, and motherhood are relevant in differentiating the trajectory of female athletes.

To enable this study, computational analyses were made to quantitatively evaluate textual data, since the corpus of the work consists of a set of interviews. This methodology should allow the extraction of the most critical topics in the differentiation of interviews of men and women, besides generating metrics for visualizing such differences.


Curriculum Vitae

CV_Vivi_Ito_25.pdf

Papers