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

[April 26] Attending ACM CHI 2025 (Yokohama, Japan) as a paper presenter!

[April 24] One paper accepted to CUI 2025!

[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”! 🎉

Selected 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.  

• Linguistic Determinants of Effective Counterspeech: Strategies for Responding to Online Hate Speech

  Buse Çarık, Kaike Ping, Xiaohan Ding, James Hawdon, and Eugenia H. Rho. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2025 (Under Review)

• 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.  

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

Awards & Honors

• VT Autism Clinic & Center for Autism Research Student Fellowship

  Awarded in recognition of research proposal “Developing Human-AI Interaction Strategies to Sup- port Autistic Adults in Coping with Negative Self-Talk”

Selected Talks

• Designing Neuro-Affirming Human-AI Interactions for Coping with Negative Self-Talk in Autistic Adults

  Virginia Tech Center for Autism Research – Biennial Spring Autism Conference, March 2025

• Designing Multimodal AI Tools to Support Autistic Adults with Negative Self-Talk

  Virginia Tech Center for Human-Computer Interaction (CHCI) Seminar, February 2025

• Supporting Mental Health in Neurodiverse Communities: Enhancing LLM Accessibility through Multimodal Human-AI Interactions

  Symposium on the Human-Centered Future of Work, Virginia Tech, November 2023