The Broad Strokes

Though a sociologist by training, I consider my work “undisciplined.” That is, I draw on and collaborate with researchers from fields such as cognitive science, communications, human-computer interaction, information science, machine learning, and STS. Research that excites me often transcends disciplinary boundaries and is legible to multiple audiences.

Currently, I am working on my first book—“Sharing Bodies in the Sharing Economy.” Drawing on data from years of in-person fieldwork, digital ethnography, and 100 interviews with members of the network hospitality platform Couchsurfing.org in 19 countries, this monograph explores how individuals navigate reciprocity and sexual ambiguity when socializing in a hybrid (online-to-offline) gift economy. This case study presents a microcosm of the politics of ‘sharing’ in the platform era and argues that excessively social platforms can engender interactional risks that ultimately jeopardize, instead of strengthen, sociality. Please contact me if you’d like to read a sample chapter.

My second empirical project homes in on the emergence of human-AI intimacy. Rapid advancements in large language models, multimodal processing, and hardware capabilities have given rise to increasingly sophisticated and high-fidelity artificial companions. Relying on in-person and digital ethnographies, I explore how human-AI interactions produce the future of on-demand intimacy, where intimacy can be acquired in a truly frictionless manner. Ultimately, this work advances our understanding of how norms around intimacy and relationships evolve in response to the growing presence of AI in everyday life.

Publications

Platform Relations & Technological Risks

Wang, Skyler. 2024. “How Platform Exchange and Safeguards Matter: The Case of Sexual Risk and Trust in Airbnb and Couchsurfing.” Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing., 8, CSCW1, Article 204 (April 2024), 23 pages.

Babcock, Nikole, Jose Zarate, Skyler Wang, Shannon D. Snapp, Ryan J. Watson, and Lisa A. Eaton. 2024. “How LGBTQ+ Young Adults Navigate Personal Risk in App-Based Hookups: The Safety Spectrum Theory.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 53:2347-2359.

Mukherjee, Meghna*, Margaret Eby*, Skyler Wang*, Armando Lara-Millán, and Maya Earle. 2022. “Medicalizing Risk: How Experts and Consumers Manage Uncertainty in Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Health Testing.” PLOS One 17(8):1-20. (*equal authorship)

Wang, Skyler. “Couch with Strings Attached: Reciprocal Positions in Relational Work.” Revise and resubmit at American Sociological Review.

Responsible & Social-Centered AI

Bell, Samuel and Skyler Wang. 2024. “The Multiple Dimensions of Spuriousness in Machine Learning.” arXiv:2312.05187.

Kampman, Onno P., Ye Sheng Phang, Stanley Han, Michael Xing, Xinyi Hong, Hazirah Hoosainsah, Caleb Tan, Genta Indra Winata, Skyler Wang, Creighton Heaukulani, Janice Huiqin Weng, Robert JT Morris.” 2024. “A Multi-Agent Dual Dialogue System to Support Mental Health Care Providers.” arXiv:2411.18429.

Wang, Skyler*, Ned Cooper*, and Margaret Eby. 2024. “From Human-Centered to Social-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Assessing ChatGPT’s Impact through Disruptive Events.” Big Data & Society 11(4):1-14. (*equal authorship)

Yong, Zheng-Xin, Ruochen Zhang, Jessica Zosa Forde, Skyler Wang, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Genta Indra Winata, Lintang Sutawika, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Long Phan, Yin Lin Tan, and Alham Fikri Aji. 2023. “Prompting Multilingual Large Language Models to Generate Code-Mixed Texts: The Case of South East Asian Languages.” Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching, pp. 43–63. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Foundational Machine Translation

Seamless Communication, Loïc Barrault, Yu-An Chung, Mariano Cora Meglioli, David Dale, Ning Dong, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Hady Elsahar, Hongyu Gong, Kevin Heffernan, John Hoffman, Christopher Klaiber, Pengwei Li, Daniel Licht, Jean Maillard, Alice Rakotoarison, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Guillaume Wenzek, Ethan Ye, Bapi Akula, Peng-Jen Chen, Naji El Hachem, Brian Ellis, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Justin Haaheim, Prangthip Hansanti, Russ Howes, Bernie Huang, Min-Jae Hwang, Hirofumi Inaguma, Somya Jain, Elahe Kalbassi, Amanda Kallet, Ilia Kulikov, Janice Lam, Daniel Li, Xutai Ma, Ruslan Mavlyutov, Benjamin Peloquin, Mohamed Ramadan, Abinesh Ramakrishnan, Anna Sun, Kevin Tran, Tuan Tran, Igor Tufanov, Vish Vogeti, Carleigh Wood, Yilin Yang, Bokai Yu, Pierre Andrews*, Can Balioglu*, Marta R. Costa-jussà*, Onur Celebi*, Maha Elbayad*, Cynthia Gao*, Francisco Guzmán*, Justine Kao*, Ann Lee*, Alexandre Mourachko*, Juan Pino*, Sravya Popuri*, Christophe Ropers*, Safiyyah Saleem*, Holger Schwenk*, Paden Tomasello*, Changhan Wang*, Jeff Wang*, and Skyler Wang*. 2025. “SeamlessM4T: Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation.” Forthcoming in Nature. (*research and engineering leadership)

Laurie Burchell, Jean Maillard, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Christian Federman, Philipp Koehn, Skyler Wang. 2024. “Findings of the WMT 2024 Shared Task of the Open Language Data Initiative.” Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), pp. 110–117. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Rust, Phillip, Bowen Shi, Skyler Wang, Necati Cihan Camgöz, and Jean Maillard. 2024. “Towards Privacy-Aware Sign Language Translation at Scale.” Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8624–8641, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.

NLLB Team, Marta R. Costa-jussà*, James Cross*, Onur Çelebi*, Maha Elbayad*, Kenneth Heafield*, Kevin Heffernan*, Elahe Kalbassi*, Janice Lam*, Daniel Licht*, Jean Maillard*, Anna Sun*, Skyler Wang*, Guillaume Wenzek*, Al Youngblood*, Bapi Akula, Loic Barrault, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Prangthip Hansanti, John Hoffman, Semarley Jarrett, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Dirk Rowe, Shannon Spruit, Chau Tran, Pierre Andrews, Necip Fazil Ayan, Shruti Bhosale, Sergey Edunov, Angela Fan, Cynthia Gao, Vedanuj Goswami, Francisco Guzmán, Philipp Koehn, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Holger Schwenk, and Jeff Wang. 2024. “Scaling Neural Machine Translation to 200 Languages.” Nature 630: 841-846. (*equal authorship)

Seamless Communication, Loic Barrault, Yu-An Chung, Mariano Coria Meglioli, David Dale, Ning Dong, Mark Duppenthaler, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Brian Ellis, Hady Elsahar, Justin Haaheim, John Hoffman, Min-Jae Hwang, Hirofumi Inaguma, Christopher Klaiber, Ilia Kulikov, Pengwei Li, Daniel Licht, Jean Maillard, Ruslan Mavlyutov, Alice   Rakotoarison, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Abinesh Ramakrishnan, Tuan Tran, Guillaume Wenzek, Yilin Yang, Ethan Ye, Ivan Evtimov, Pierre Fernandez, Cynthia Gao, Prangthip Hansanti, Elahe Kalbassi, Amanda Kallet, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Robin San Roman, Christophe Touret, Corinne Wong, Carleigh Wood, Bokai Yu, Pierre Andrews,* Can Balioglu,* Peng-Jen Chen,* Marta R. Costa-jussà,* Maha Elbayad,* Hongyu Gong,* Francisco Guzmán,* Kevin Heffernan,* Somya Jain,* Justine Kao,* Ann Lee,* Xutai Ma,* Alex Mourachko,* Benjamin Peloquin,* Juan Pino,* Sravya Popuri,* Christophe Ropers,* Safiyyah Saleem,* Holger Schwenk,* Anna Sun,* Paden Tomasello,* Changhan Wang,* Jeff Wang,* Skyler Wang,* and Mary Williamson.* 2023. “Seamless: Multilingual Expressive and Streaming Speech Translation.” arXiv:2312.05187. (*research and engineering leadership)

Sexualities

Wang, Skyler. 2022. “Migrant Allies & Sexual Remittances: How International Students Change the Sexual Attitudes of Those Who Remain Behind.” Sociological Perspectives 65(2): 328–349.

Watson, Ryan J., Shannon Snapp*, and Skyler Wang*. 2017. “What We Know and Where To Go From Here: A Review of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth Hookup Literature.” Sex Roles 77(11-12): 801-811. (*equal authorship)

Wang, Skyler. 2016. “Igniting a ‘Pink Dot’: Legal Pragmatism and Cultural Resonance in Singapore’s First LGBT Movement.” Sojourners 8: 4-14.

  • Best Article – Francesco Duina Scholarship Award

MacAulay, Maggie & Skyler Wang. 2016. “#ResistStigma: How Do We Get There?” Vancouver, BC: Community-Based Research Center for Gay Men’s Health. English | Français

Visual Arts

Wang, Skyler. 2016. “A Critique from Within: The Core of Ai Weiwei’s ‘Sunflower Seeds.’” Undergraduate Journal of Art History & Visual Culture 7: 10-17.