- Alejandro Ciuba
- He/They
- STIW Lab at the University of Pittsburgh
- 135 N. Bellefield Ave.
- University of Pittsburgh
- alejandrociuba@pitt.edu
- Google Scholar
Recent Projects
About Me
I am a fourth year PhD student in computer science at the University of Pittsburgh researching game design with NLP through community participation. I am advised by Dr. Aakash Gautam and co-advised by Dr. Xiang (Lorraine) Li.
I received my B.S. in computer science at the University of Pittsburgh in 2023. During this time, I did educational NLP research with Dr. Diane Litman and developed a speaker segmentation pipeline for the APLS project under Dr. Dan Villarreal.
Research Interests
My research focus examines how games with NLP components can be developed through community-focused design practices (e.g., participatory design) for participant benefit.
The big questions of my research are:
- How do NLP technologies affect game design and the outcome of game-based interventions?
- How can games with NLP components be designed for and with community participants using community-focused design frameworks?
- What tensions exist when developing game-based interventions with NLP components?
- How can serious games with NLP components meaningfully affect participant communities in ways unavailable to games without NLP involvement?
- How can NLP data collection be reformed to encourage community participation over pure data extraction?
Major Updates
2026
- I just finished another successful year of being the NOUR mentor. I am extremely proud of all the students, who all spent the summer growing as researcher and completing a wide array of projects!
- My research with YY Li and Dr. Aakash Gautam, Not Just Duolingo: Supporting Immigrant Language Preservation Through Family-Based Play, has just been accepted as a CHI2026 short paper.
2025
- I have just been accepted into the UR2PhD workshop series by the CRA. I will be mentoring an undergraduate student on a developing HCI project.
- Our research collaboration between STIW Lab and Sensify Lab (University of Delaware), Regulating Social Media: Surveying the Impact of Nepali Government's TikTok Ban, has been accepted to CSCW 2025!
- I was selected to teach for the NOUR Program, which is designed to give undergraduate students a first experience in research over the summer semester. I ran learning sessions on topics such as citation management, quantatative statistics, and poster design.
- Research with Joey Hou (first author) and Dr. Lorraine Li has been accepted as a workshop paper for the iRAISE workshop at AAAI, Improve LLM-based Automatic Essay Scoring with Linguistic Features