About Me

I am a PhD student researching human-machine interaction and data governance in the workplace. I am advised by Brian Keegan in the Column Lab.

My research analyses the role of data in the relationship between workers and their work environment in the platform economy. I focus on how unprecedented quantification has fundamentally re-organized workplaces and how workers react to and cope with these new environments. In particular, I explore the real-world implications of platform labor on workers' information seeking and generation behaviors.

You can read more about my research projects here and my teaching experience here.

Selected Research Projects

  1. "Understanding Human Intervention in the Platform Economy: A case study of an indie food delivery service.
    Samantha Dalal, Ngan Chiem, Nikoo Karbassi, Yuhan Li, Andrés Monroy-Hernandez.
    CHI 2023
  2. "Hey, Can You Add Captions?": Infrastructuring for Accessibility on TikTok.
    Ellen Simpson, Samantha Dalal, and Bryan Semaan.
    CSCW 2023
  3. Governing the Commons of Platform Labor Data Assets
    Samantha Dalal and Brian Keegan.
    Position paper for Civic Technologies: Research, Practice, and Open Challenges Workshop at CSCW ‘20
  4. Extraction or Inclusion: Reflections on an Academic Workshop in Food Delivery Gig Work
    Samantha Dalal, Christelle Tessono, Klaudia Jazwinska, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Danny Spitzberg, Elizabeth Anne Watkins, Andrés Monroy-Hernandez
    Workshop Paper for UC San Diego Just Transitions Workshop '22

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News

  • December 2023

    My team and I won a CARTSS grant for $4,000! This grant will support research on the Migrant Sociotechnical Resilience project where we will investigate how digital labor platforms become ingrained in migrant workers' labor market trajectories.

  • May 2023

    I will be joining the Social Media Collective at MSR as a research intern for the summer of 2023. I'll be working on a project to document the infrastructure that supports digital entrepreneurship in the 21st century.

  • April 2023

    I will be presenting my new paper at CHI 2023! Come by our paper session to learn more about how human intervention underpins the gig economy through our case study of an "indie" food delivery platform. We'll also be discussing the limitations of design recommendations and how HCI and CSCW researchers can grapple with these limitations in their work.

  • January 2023

    The Workers Algorithm Observatory Project has been awarded $50,000 by Mozilla as part of the Mozilla Tech Fund 2023 cohort! Our team, consisting of Dan Calacci, Andrés Monroy-Hernandez, and Danny Spitzberg, is working to develop infrastructures that support worker-led inquiry.

  • August 15th, 2021

    I won the community-based research fellowship at CU Boulder. I'll be doing work with a local gig drivers union to create data-driven narratives from the worker perspective.

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