Summer Research Intern

I worked on data analysis and language understanding in posts and submissions made by users in several subreddits. The following summarizes my work:

• Analyzing changes in languages of people in drugs-related (focusing on several psychedelics, and cannabis) and daily conversations (not related to drugs) over a span of 10 years.
• Determined similarities and differences in languages in different psychedelic related subreddits using statistical approaches.
• Previous clinical studies related to this experimented in a controlled medical environment, other psychological studies involved people willing to participate in group studies like surveys etc. This often led a very small group of people in experiments, and hence not generalizable. In our study, we provide an alternative strategy by using a natural experiment to understand how psychedelics effect people using social media data.
• I am currently working on performing time series analysis and incorporating more data to better understand the differences. The overarching goal here is a way to be able to predict subsceptibitlity to take drugs based on past behavior.