Mandi L. Cai
Hello! I am a PhD student in Northwestern University's Technology and Social Behavior program, which is a joint program in computer science and communication. My interests include the communication of real‐time election results and election forecasts to the public, literacy/attitudes/opinions around data and AI, and digital tools that open up venues for participation in our governance. I am advised by Matthew Kay, as a member of the MU Collective, and my research is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Before this, I was a designer and developer on the data visuals team at The Texas Tribune, reporting on issues affecting Texans through data analysis and visualizatons. Before that, I created dashboards for scientists at BioBright. Before that, I studied cognitive neuroscience and worked at a lab investigating human navigation and movement through virtual reality.
updates
research
Mandi Cai and Matthew Kay
In proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
Fumeng Yang, Mandi Cai, Chloe Mortenson, Hoda Fakhari, Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu, Jessica Hullman, Steven Franconeri, Nicholas Diakopoulos, Erik Nisbet, Matthew Kay
VIS 2023: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Best Paper Award
Motivations, Goals, and Pathways for AI Literacy for Journalism
Mandi Cai*, Sachita Nishal*
In proceedings of the AI Literacy workshop at the 2023 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
bylines
From 2019 to 2022, I worked as a data journalist at The Texas Tribune, covering COVID-19's impact in Texas, tracking immigration numbers across the Texas-Mexico border, rebuilding a data explorer of government workers' salaries, among other topics. You can see a full list of my bylines here.
artwork & creative projects
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