Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang

Hi there! I am a human-AI interaction (HAII) researcher and an Assistant Professor at USC Annenberg. I am also a core faculty member at USC Center for AI in Society. My research explores the impact of AI on individuals' work practices and their broader societal implications.

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. I also received my PhD in Communication at Cornell with a Concentration in Human-Computer Interaction. Throughout my PhD journey, I was fortunate to work at Microsoft Research, Google Research, Sony AI, Adobe, Accenture Labs, and Cornell Center for Social Sciences through various internships, fellowships, and PhD scholar programs.

I am always on the lookout for thought-provoking collaborators to work with. If you find anything interesting on this page, let's get in touch :)

CV Google Scholar angel.hwang [at] usc [dot] edu

A note to PhD applicants: Thank you for your interest in working with me! Due to the high volume of inquiries I receive, I'm unlikely to reply to every message (I'm sorry!). At USC Annenberg, PhD students are admitted through the Department, and I will serve as a first-year mentor/advisor for students accepted through this admission cycle. If you are interested in working with me, you are welcome to mention my name in your application. Additionally, I am serving on this year’s PhD admissions committee. This means: (1) I will be reading your application no matter what! (2) For fairness reason, I am not in the best position to provide individual feedback on your application. Again, I appreciate your enthusiasm and good luck with your application process!

Research

By keywords, here are some of the subjects that best capture my interests:
#   Human-AI collaboration
#   Socio-technical impact of AI
#   Scalable methods for human-centered AI research
#   Digital mental health
#   Future of work & the online labor market
#   Computational social science

To provide more context, I aim to examine — and ideally project — AI’s societal impacts and potential harms before they loom large. The key challenge is that many of these harms only emerge when AI systems are deployed at scale. To address this, I take three complementary approaches:

[individuals → AI] I analyze how individual decisions shape machine behaviors and project how these influences scale. e.g., how do individuals' data-sharing decisions create downstream effects on AI-infused digital health systems?
[AI → individuals] I investigate how algorithmic systems influence individual decision-making and behaviors, assessing their broader cumulative effects. e.g., how do different forms of AI assistance on freelance platforms influence individual clients' decisions and shape new norms for recruitment processes in the online labor market?
[methods that scale] To support these two efforts, I explore novel methods that enable investigating AI's impact at different scales. Currently, I pay much attention to simulation-based methods.

Latest News

10/2025 Giving a talk at USC's CS Research Colloquium.

10/2025 Attending 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society at Georgia Tech.

10/2025 Attending CSCW 2025 in Bergen, Norway! I will present our work on authenticity in co-writing with LLMs, chair sessions on health and crisis, and participate in the PosiTech Workshop.

10/2025 Attending CSCW NE. Excited to be back on the East Coast!

09/2025 Attending Stanford Trust and Safety Research Conference for the first time!

09/2025 Another year serving as CHI's AC. Looking forward to working with the Interaction Beyond the Individual subcommittee.

09/2025 Gave another talk at MASTS. This is my third semester participating in this group, and it remains one of my favorite on campus :) It's also a great pleasure to co-lead MASTS with Mike Ananny, Colin Maclay, and Chris O'Neill, featuring "sensing" as MASTS' theme this year.

09/2025 I gave a talk and participated in the Data Ethics in Health AI panel at the Responsible Data workshop series.

08/2025 Serving as program committee for CSCW'26.

07/2025 Our work examining large-scale data across two major freelance and creator platforms (Upwork and Bēhance) shows that creators who declare the use of AI receive significantly lower pay, but those who work on non-creative job functions earn more when labeling themselves as "AI Pros." I will present this work at the Annual Meeting of Academy of Management (AOM) and International Conference on Computational Social Science (ic2s2). See extended abstract here.

06/2025 Qian Yang (Cornell IS), Tanzeem Choudhury (Cornell Tech), Fei Wang (Weill Cornell Medicine), and I co-organize the inaugural Thought Summit on AI in Mental Health. This week-long event brings together experts from computer science, HCI, clinical health, and health policy to jointly discuss the new frontier of digital mental health.

05/2025 Attending Global AI Initiative's LLM and Society Thought Summit.

05/2025 I will lead a session on (de)valuation of AI-assisted work in the online labor market in an upcoming workshop series on "What is work worth?" at Data & Society.

04/2025 Organized a panel on "Human Subjects Research in the Age of Generative AI" at CHI'25 in Yokohama, Japan.

04/2025 Along with my amazing colleagues, we organize the Annual ShowCAIS at USC Center for AI in Society (happening April 11 on USC campus). I will speak at a session on AI and Mental Health and moderate a session on AI, local community, and policy.