Professor
Director of Doctoral Studies
Assistant Graduate Advisor
Matthew Lease is a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Senior Member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and an Amazon Scholar. Lease co-directs the $20M NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI) and is a faculty founder and leader of UT’s Good Systems, an eight-year, $20M university-wide Grand Challenge aimed at designing responsible AI technologies. In 2023-2024, Lease was invited four times to address the Texas Legislature on responsible AI.
Lease directs the UT Austin Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Human-Centered Computing (AI&HCC), where his team’s research spans artificial intelligence (AI) modeling and human-computer interaction (HCI) design. The lab creates novel datasets, builds AI models, and evaluates both model performance and their impact on end-users. When automated AI falls short, they design human-in-the-loop approaches, leveraging AI model explanations and creative user interfaces. To promote fair AI, the lab focuses on better annotation techniques to avoid bias and develops modeling strategies to mitigate dataset biases. Their work tackles real-world problems as part of UT Austin's Good Systems Grand Challenge, with an ongoing emphasis on content moderation—exploring automated, human-in-the-loop, and human-safe practices to combat disinformation, hate speech, and online polarization.
Ph.D. Computer Science, Brown University, 2010
M.Sc. Computer Science, Brown University, 2004
B.Sc. Computer Science, University of Washington, 1999
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Responsible AI: Fair and Explainable AI
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
Information Retrieval (IR)
Gauri Kambhatla, Matthew Lease, and Ashwin Rajadesingan. Promoting Constructive Deliberation: Reframing for Receptiveness. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, pages 5110--5132, 2024.
Venelin Kovatchev and Matthew Lease. Benchmark Transparency: Measuring the Impact of Data on Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), pages 1536--1551, 2024.
Houjiang Liu, Anubrata Das, Alexander Boltz, Didi Zhou, Daisy Pinaroc, Matthew Lease, and Min Kyung Lee. Human-centered NLP Fact-checking: Co-Designing with Fact-checkers using Matchmaking for AI. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW2):1--44, 2024. Best Paper Honorable Mention 🏆.
Alexander Braylan, Madalyn Marabella, Omar Alonso, and Matthew Lease. A General Model for Aggregating Annotations Across Simple, Complex, and Multi-Object Annotation Tasks. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 78:901--973, December 2023.
Anubrata Das, Houjiang Liu, Venelin Kovatchev, and Matthew Lease. The State of Human-centered NLP Technology for Fact-checking. Information Processing & Management, 60(2), 2023
Soumyajit Gupta, Sooyong Lee, Maria De-Arteaga, and Matthew Lease. Same Same, But Different: Conditional Multi-Task Learning for Demographic-Specific Toxicity Detection. In Proceedings of the Web Conference, pages 3689--3700, 2023.
Anubrata Das, Chitrank Gupta, Venelin Kovatchev, Matthew Lease, and Junyi Jessy Li. ProtoTEx: Explaining Model Decisions with Prototype Tensors. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pages 2986--2997, 2022.
Ruijiang Gao, Maytal Saar-Tsechansky, Maria De-Arteaga, Ligong Han, Min Kyung Lee, Wei Sun, and Matthew Lease. Robust Human-AI Collaboration with Bandit Feedback. In Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST), 2022. Best Student Paper Award 🏆.
Danula Hettiachchi, Mike Schaekermann, Tristan J. McKinney, and Matthew Lease. The Challenge of Variable Effort Crowdsourcing and How Visible Gold Can Help. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5, 2021. Article number 332, 26 pages. Presented at the 24th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).
Md Mustafizur Rahman, Dinesh Balakrishnan, Dhiraj Murthy, Mucahid Kutlu, and Matthew Lease. An Information Retrieval Approach to Building Datasets for Hate Speech Detection. In Proceedings of the Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS): Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2021.
Miriah Steiger, Timir J. Bharucha, Sukrit Venkatagiri, Martin J. Riedl, and Matthew Lease. The Psychological Well-Being of Content Moderators: The Emotional Labor of Commercial Moderation and Avenues for Improving Support. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1--14, 2021.
Mucahid Kutlu, Tyler McDonnell, Tamer Elsayed, and Matthew Lease. Annotator Rationales for Labeling Tasks in Crowdsourcing. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 69:143--189, 2020. Conference Awards Track 🏆 .
2024 Test of Time Paper Award, AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP)
2024 Most Influential Paper Award, IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)
2024 Best Paper Honorable Mention, ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
2022 Best Student Paper, Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST)
2020 Conference Award Track, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)
2019 Best Student Paper, European Conference for Information Retrieval (ECIR)
Early Career awards from DARPA, NSF, and IMLS