Assistant Professor
Stephen Leacock Building, Room 839
855 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2T7
E-mail: skyler.wang [at] mcgill.ca
Office: 839 Leacock
Office hours (by appointment):
Research Areas
AI, Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, STS, Economic Sociology, Gender & Sexuality
Biography
Ph.D. Sociology, UC Berkeley, 2023
Skyler Wang investigates whether socio-technical & artificial intelligence systems designed to improve our day-to-day lives meet their moral and social commitments. Using interdisciplinary tools, Skyler evaluates technology and AI’s social impact to critically inform engineering, design, and policy decisions. His empirical work examines how digital platforms (i.e., network hospitality, online dating, and AI companions) shape modern intimacies and relationships.
Currently, Skyler is working on his first book project: “Sharing Bodies in the Sharing Economy.” Drawing on over a hundred interviews with members of the network hospitality platform Couchsurfing.org, this monograph explores how individuals navigate reciprocity and sexual ambiguity when socializing in a hybrid (online-to-offline) gift economy. This case study presents a microcosm of the politics of ‘sharing’ in the platform era and argues that excessively social platforms can engender interactional risks that ultimately jeopardize, instead of strengthen, sociality.
Skyler’s second empirical project homes in on the emergence of human-AI intimacy. Rapid advancements in large language models, multimodal processing, and hardware capabilities have given rise to increasingly sophisticated and high-fidelity artificial companions. Relying on in-person and digital ethnographies, Skyler explores how human-AI interactions produce the future of on-demand intimacy, where intimacy can be acquired in a truly frictionless manner. Ultimately, this work advances our understanding of how norms around intimacy and relationships evolve in response to the growing presence of AI in everyday life.
On the side of applied AI research, Skyler develops socially and ethically grounded multimodal translation systems for those communicating with underserved languages. Notably, his co-developed project , which doubled the number of languages made available in machine translation, was published in . His other project, , a foundational multilingual and multitasking model that translates and transcribes across speech and text for 100 languages, was awarded one of .
Skyler’s research has been featured in academic venues such as Nature, CSCW, ACL, PLOS One, Sex Roles, Archives of Sexual Behavior, and Sociological Perspectives, and media outlets such as TIME, CNN, NPR, WIRED, Reuters, The Verge, Vox, San Francisco Chronicle, Quartz, and GQ.
Before arriving at UUֱ, Skyler received his Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley and was an AI Sociologist in the Foundational AI Research (FAIR) lab at Meta.
Selected Publications
For an updated list, please visit Skyler’s page.
Wang, Skyler. 2024. “"Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing., 8, CSCW1, Article 204 (April 2024), 23 pages.
Phillip Rust, Bowen Shi, Skyler Wang, Necati Cihan Camgoz, and Jean Maillard. 2024. “” In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8624–8641, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Babcock, Nikole, Jose Zarate, Skyler Wang, Shannon D. Snapp, Ryan J. Watson, and Lisa A. Eaton. 2024. “” Archives of Sexual Behavior. Online first.
NLLB Team, Marta R. Costa-jussà*, James Cross*, Onur Çelebi*, Maha Elbayad*, Kenneth Heafield*, Kevin Heffernan*, Elahe Kalbassi*, Janice Lam*, Daniel Licht*, Jean Maillard*, Anna Sun*, Skyler Wang*, Guillaume Wenzek*, Al Youngblood*, Bapi Akula, Loic Barrault, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Prangthip Hansanti, John Hoffman, Semarley Jarrett, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Dirk Rowe, Shannon Spruit, Chau Tran, Pierre Andrews, Necip Fazil Ayan, Shruti Bhosale, Sergey Edunov, Angela Fan, Cynthia Gao, Vedanuj Goswami, Francisco Guzmán, Philipp Koehn, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Holger Schwenk, and Jeff Wang. 2024. “” Nature. (*equal authorship)
Wang, Skyler*, Ned Cooper*, and Margaret Eby. “.” 2023. arXiv:2306.00227. (*equal authorship)
Yong, Zheng-Xin, Ruochen Zhang, Jessica Zosa Forde, Skyler Wang, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Genta Indra Winata, Lintang Sutawika, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Long Phan, Yin Lin Tan, and Alham Fikri Aji. 2023. “” Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching, pp. 43–63. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Wang, Skyler. 2022. “.” Sociological Perspectives 65(2):328–349.
Mukherjee, Meghna*, Margaret Eby*, Skyler Wang*, Armando Lara-Millán, and Maya Earle. 2022. “” PLOS One 17(8):1-20. (*equal authorship)
Watson, Ryan J., Shannon Snapp*, and Skyler Wang*. 2017. “.” Sex Roles 77(11- 12):801-811. (*equal authorship)
Teaching
Undergraduate:
SOCI235 (“Technology & Society”)
SOCI345 (“Social and Intimate Relationships in the Digital Age”)
Graduate:
SOCI601 (“Qualitative Research Methods 2”)