About Me

I’m a third year Ph.D. student at the Virginia Tech and a member of Society + AI & Language (SAIL) Lab I where work with Dr. Eugenia Rho.
My research lies at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, Human-Computer Interaction, and Computational Social Science to explore how technology shapes our experiences and how it can be designed to better align with the ways we think and interact with the world around us.

Recent News

[Mar. 24] Presented our work at VTCAR Biennial Spring Conference: Promoting Well-being for Autistic People Across the Lifespan! 🎉

[Jan. 16] Paper accepted by CHI 2025. – Reimagining Support: Exploring Autistic Individuals’ Visions for AI in Coping with Negative Self-Talk 💡

[Oct. 14] Won the VTCAR Student Award to fund my research on “Designing neuro-affirming human-AI interactions for coping with negative self talk for autistic adults”! 🎉

Education

• Ph.D in Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Expected 2027
  • Advised by Dr. Eugenia Rho
• M.S. in Computer Science, Sabanci University, Dec 2022
  • Advised by Dr. Reyyan Yeniterzi
• B.S. in Computer Science, Sabanci University, Jun 2020
  • with Minor in Psychology

Publications

• Reimagining Support: Exploring Autistic Individuals’ Visions for AI in Coping with Negative Self-Talk

  Buse Çarık, Victoria Izaac, Xiaohan Ding, Angela Scarpa, and Eugenia H. Rho. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2025.  

• Exploring Large Language Models Through a Neurodivergent Lens: Use, Challenges, Community-Driven Workarounds, and Concerns

  Buse Çarık, Kaike Ping, Xiaohan Ding, and Eugenia H. Rho. ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP), 2025.  

• Leveraging Prompt-Based Large Language Models: Predicting Pandemic Health Decisions and Outcomes Through Social Media Language

  Xiaohan Ding, Buse Çarık, Uma Gunturi, Valerie Reyna, and Eugenia H. Rho ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2024.  

• A Twitter Corpus for named entity recognition in Turkish

  Buse Çarık, Reyyan Yeniterzi. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2022.  

• A Turkish Hate Speech Dataset and Detection System

  Fatih Beyhan, Buse Çarık, İnanç Arın, Ayşecan Terzioğlu, Berrin Yanikoglu, Reyyan Yeniterzi.
  International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2022.  

• SU-NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Complex Named Entity Recognition with Entity Linking

  Buse Çarık, Fatih Beyhan, Reyyan Yeniterzi. SemEval Workshop at ACL 2022  

• SU-NLP at CheckThat! 2021: Check-Worthiness of Turkish Tweets

  Buse Çarık, Reyyan Yeniterzi. CLEF (Working Notes)  

Selected Talks

Teaching

Graduate Teaching Assistant

• Introduction to Software Design
  Fall 2024, Virginia Tech
• Introduction to Problem Solving
  Fall 2023, Virginia Tech
• Advanced Machine Learning
  Spring 2023, Virginia Tech
• Natural Language Processing
  Spring 2022, Sabanci University
• Computational Approaches to Problem Solving
  Fall 2021, Sabanci University
• Machine Learning
  Fall 2020, Sabanci University

Learning Assistant

• Operating Systems
  Fall 2019, Sabanci University