CV

amber.chen@psych.ucsb.edu | ORCID | GitHub

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Updated in June 2025.

Education

• Ph.D. candidate in Social Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara (Sept 2022 – May 2027 expected), Santa Barbara, CA, USA
  Advisor: Prof. Hongbo Yu
• M.S. in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara (Sept 2025 – May 2027 expected), Santa Barbara, CA, USA
• M.A. in Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Nov 2017), Hong Kong SAR, China
  Thesis: See What You Want to Avoid: Motivation Impacts Emotion Recognition through Attentional Selection
  Advisor: Prof. Helene H. Fung
• B.B.L. in Sociology, Sun Yat-sen University (June 2016), Guangdong Province, China
  Thesis: An Empirical Analysis of Chinese Social Class Schema Based on CLDS 2016
  Advisor: Prof. Yucheng Liang
• Exchange Student, University of California, Berkeley (Aug – Dec 2014), Berkeley, CA, USA

Technical Skills

Programming & Data: Python, SQL, R, MATLAB; Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, statsmodels
Machine Learning & NLP: BERT, GPT, CLIP, VGG, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, Hugging Face
Statistical Methods: A/B Testing, Causal Inference, Regression Analysis, Time Series, Bayesian Inference
Data Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery, PySpark, SQL databases, APIs
Analytics & Visualization: Statistical modeling, forecasting, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Tableau

Projects

Information Spread on Social Media — Code • Paper (Current)

• Analyzed 20M+ multilingual social media posts on X and Weibo using advanced NLP pipelines (BERT, translation APIs) to track misinformation spread and user behavior patterns across cultural contexts
• Built predictive models to identify viral content patterns, achieving 85% accuracy in predicting post engagement

VisualGPT: Multimodal AI for User Perception (Current)

• Processed 10+ years of web news texts
• Fine-tuned GPT/VGG/CLIP and evaluated alignments between AI representations and behavioral data
• Developed dual-route model integrating language models to predict user impressions on visual content (images, logos, artwork), improving accuracy by +20% over baseline models

Time-Series Analysis of Cultural Sentiment — Code • Paper • PDF (Sept 2023)

• Scraped 70+ years of news articles
• Trained language models on 3.5B-token using High-Performance Computing
• Built time-series forecasting models and applied causal inference methods on sentiment trends
• Developed reproducible ML pipeline with automated data processing, model training, and evaluation

Deep Learning Health Prediction — Paper • Press Release (July 2022)

• Designed deep neural networks for longitudinal health data analysis, achieving mean absolute error of 5.68 years on aging prediction
• Implemented feature engineering pipeline processing medical datasets with 2,000+ participants

Publications

• Chen, A. X., Cao, R, Lin, C., Wang, S., & Yu, H. (in prep). A dual-route model of face processing: Dissociating the perceptual and conceptual contributions.
• Cao, J., Chen, A. X. *, Mai, C., & Fung, H. H. (submitted). Age Bias in People’s Daily Across 72 Years. doi
• Chen, A. X., Sun, S., & Yu, H. (2024). Moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency: A comparison between American and Chinese history. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1–14. doi
• Mai, C., Chen, D., Olivos, F., & Chen, A. X. (2023). Disentangling Stereotypes towards Older Age Groups: Evidence from Factorial Survey Experiments in China and the USA. Gerontology, 1–24. doi
• Chen, Y., Chen, A. X., Yu, H., & Sun, S. (2023) Unraveling moral and emotional discourses on social media: a study of three cases, Information, Communication & Society. doi
• Galkin, F., Kochetov, K., Koldasbayeva, D., Fung, H. H, Chen, A. X., & Zhavoronkov, A. (2022). Psychological factors substantially contribute to biological aging: Evidence from the aging rate in Chinese older adults. Psychology and Aging. doi
• Chen, A. X. , Tsang, V. H. L. , Wong, J. T. K., Fung, H. H., & Ayalon, L. (2020). Three Ways that Ageing Affects Women Differently from Men: Menopause, Changes in Physical Appearance and Caregiving. In *Cambridge Handbook of the International Psychology of Women. doi
• Fung, H. H, Chu, S. T. W., Jiang, D., Chen, A. X., & Ng, C. C. (2019). Contrasting the Effects of Mortality Salience and Future Time Limitation on Goal Prioritization in Older and Younger Adults. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences. doi

*Co-first authors contributed equally to this work.

Invited Talks

• Invited Participant, A Neurocomputational Framework for Mapping Social Relationships: Insights from EEG. Bridging the Inter-Disciplinary Gap in the Mathematical Modeling of Social Phenomena Workshop. Banff International Research Station (BIRS), Alberta, Canada. November 2-7 2025

Conferences

• Chen, A. X. & Yu, H. (2025, April 23 - 27). A dual-route model of social trait perception from face: Dissociating the perceptual and conceptual contributions behaviorally and neurally. Social and Affective Neuroscience Society Conference [Oral Presentation]. Chicago, IL, USA.
• Chen, A. X., Cao, R., Wang, S., & Yu, H. (2024, February 7-10). Contextualized Social Information Predicts Neuronal Representation of Social Traits Perceived from Faces. SPSP 2024 Annual Convention [Oral Presentation]. San Diego, CA, USA.
• Chen, A. X., Sun, S., & Yu, H. (2023, February 22-25). Moralization of unproductive effort: Cross-cultural and historical analysis based on NLP. SPSP 2023 Annual Convention [Poster Presentation]. Atlanta, GA, USA.
• Chen, A. X., Lu, M., & Fung, H. H. (2022, March 30 - April 2). Cultural differences in the prevalence and spread of emotional complexity on social media. SAS 2022 Annual Conference [Oral Presentation]. Online.

Work Experience

Data Scientist & Lab Manager • Motivation and Emotion Laboratory, CUHK (Sept 2017 – July 2022)

• Managed cross-cultural research projects analyzing emotional patterns using statistical modeling, psychophysiological data, and large-scale surveys across multiple countries
• Supervised team of 20+ research assistants in data collection, processing, and analysis workflows
• Presented findings to stakeholders and published research outcomes

Data Analyst & Research Assistant • Center for Social Survey, SYSU (May 2014 – August 2016)

• Managed large-scale data collection for the Chinese Education Panel Survey (CEPS), coordinating data from 1,000+ students across multiple schools
• Processed and analyzed survey data using Stata to identify educational trends and policy implications

Data Analyst Intern • MaxInsight, Customer Experience Analytics Platform (Feb 2014 – May 2014)

• Analyzed user comments to generate actionable insights for competing brands for enterprise clients

Research Grants

• General Research Fund (Aug 2023 – Apr 2026), Research Grants Council of Hong Kong. Project: Age Differences in Information Spreading: A Social Network Perspective. Role: Co-Investigator, Leading Facebook Study; Amount: HKD 1,042,719
• Social Science Research Impact Fund (Jun 2021 – Feb 2023), Faculty Office of Social Science, CUHK. Project: Increasing preparation of ageing and decreasing negative age stereotypes by increasing self-relevance. Role: Co-Investigator, Leading Weibo Study; Amount: HKD 500,000
• Interdisciplinary Research Seed Funding (Aug 2021 – Apr 2022), Faculty Office of Social Science, CUHK. Project: Age stereotypes across time and the roles of self-relevance: A computational social science approach. Role: Co-Investigator; Amount: HKD 15,000
• Research Grant (Jan 2021 – Apr 2021), Hong Kong Sociological Association. Project: Ageism Under the Covid-19 Pandemic and Its Cross-cultural Variations. Role: Co-Investigator; Amount: HKD 5,000
• Interdisciplinary Research Seed Funding (Oct 2020 – Apr 2021), Faculty Office of Social Science, CUHK. Project: Ageism Under the Covid-19 Pandemic and Its Cross-cultural Variations: A Computational Social Science Approach. Role: Co-Investigator, Leading Twitter Study; Amount: HKD 15,000
• Tencent Anthropology Fieldwork Grant (Jun 2014 - Dec 2015), Tencent Research Institute. Project: How Adolescents Adopt Different Perceptions of the Same Social Network: The Role of Network Position. Role: Principal Investigator; Amount: CNY 3,000

Awards and Honors

• African and Asian Students in STEM Scholarship, UCSB (2025)
• GSA Conference Travel Grant, UCSB (2023-2025)
• Highlighted Poster Award, The 2019 Technology, Mind & Society, Washington, D.C., USA. (2019)
• Academic Excellence Scholarship (top 5%), School of Sociology and Anthropology, SYSU (2014 - 2015)
• Active Member Award, SYSU (2014 - 2015)
• Third Place Award at Survey Contest of Political Affairs, Guangdong Province (2014)
  Project: “How Time Costs and Inference Accuracy Contribute to Limited Social Networks on Weibo”
• Second Place Award at Social Investigation Contest of Social Issues, SYSU (2014)
  Project: “Useful but Expensive: The Maintenance of Heterogeneity in Social Networks among 65 Adults”
• Outstanding Individual Scholarship, SYSU (2013 – 2014)

Professional Training

• Konstanz School of Collective Behavior (Jul 22 - Aug 9, 2024), University of Konstanz, Germany. Focus: Modeling collective behaviors of animals and humans.
• NeuroDataReHack (Jul 8-12, 2024), Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Virginia, USA. Focus: Collaborative neuroinformatics projects and data science.
• Certified Carpentries Instructor Training (Mar 2025), The Carpentries. Courses: Carpentries Pedagogical Model, Build a Workshop Website, Participatory Live Coding
• Big Data Analytics (Jan - Mar 2024), DataCamp. Courses: Big Data Fundamentals/Feature Engineering/Machine Learning with PySpark
• Computational Neuroscience (Jul 2022), Neuromatch Academy. Modules: Dynamical Systems, Stochastic Processes, Group Project on fMRI and CNN
• Research Ethics Training (Aug 2020), CUHK. Domains: Human Subject Ethics, Survey and Behavioral Ethics, Publication Ethics
• Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (Jul - Aug 2016), SYSU. Modules: Information Diffusion in Online Social Networks, Agent-based Social Simulation
• Summer Institute in Advanced Quantitative Methods (Jul 2014), Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. Modules: Multilevel Modeling, Counterfactual Model of Causality

Experimental Skills

• Experienced in using PsychoPy, E-Prime, Eye-tracking techniques, and physiological measurements

Community Services

• Statistics Fellow, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, UCSB (2023/24)
• Coordinator of Journal Club ReproducibiliTea (2023-2024)
• Mentor for graduate applications: Yichen Wang (Cornell, 2023/24), Jing Chen (Virginia Tech), Yinbo Zheng (University of Georgia), Kun Wang (Baylor University), Weifang Huang (Boston College), Leyi Zhuang (CUHK), Junsong Lu (UCSD, 2022/23), Lyu Meng (Boston College), Yilin Kou (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Languages

• English (fluent), Mandarin Chinese (native), Cantonese (conversational)