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Nicholas Vincent

Assistant Professor · School of Computing Science , Simon Fraser University

Responsible AI, Human-computer Interaction, Machine learning, social computing

Prof. Nick Vincent is an Assistant Professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He studies the content ecosystems and data supply chains that fuel data-dependent technologies like search engines, recommender systems, and generative AI. This involves exploring avenues for people to control how data flow and participate in the governance of AI systems. The overarching goal of this research is to work towards highly capable and widely beneficial AI technologies that mitigate -- rather than exacerbate -- inequalities in wealth and power.

(Longer bio)

Nick Vincent is an Assistant Professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He studies the content ecosystems and data supply chains that fuel data-dependent technologies like search engines, recommender systems, and generative AI. This involves exploring avenues for people to control how data flow and participate in the governance of AI systems. The overarching goal of this research is to work towards highly capable and widely beneficial AI technologies that mitigate -- rather than exacerbate -- inequalities in wealth and power. His work is published in responsible AI venues like ACM FAccT and human-computer interaction venues like ACM CHI. Prof. Vincent was previously a postdoc working with the Computational Communication Research Lab at UC Davis and the Social Futures Lab at the University of Washington. He received his PhD from Northwestern University's Technology and Social Behavior program (a joint degree in computer science and communication), where he worked in the People, Space, and Algorithms Research Group. During graduate school, he was a research intern at Snap and Microsoft. Before graduate school, he studied electrical engineering at UCLA, interned at Cisco, and conducted research at SPAWAR via the NREIP program.

Affiliations
sfu cs · ixlab · padcomp
Office
9241 TASC 1, SFU Burnaby
Updated
2025-10-16

Recent Content

Publications

Collective Bargaining in the Information Economy …, Vincent ..., NeurIPS Position Papers, Dec 2025 link
An Audit and Analysis of LLM-Assisted Health Misi…, Hussain ..., AIES, Jul 2025 link
Responsible AI in Open Ecosystems: Reconciling In…, Chakraborti ..., AIES, Jul 2025 link
Algorithmic Collective Action with Two Collectives, Karan ..., ACM FAccT, Jun 2025 link

Editorial

How collective bargaining for information, public…, Data Leverage Newsletter, Oct 2025 link
Which datasets should we assume are "in all the A…, Data Leverage Newsletter, Sep 2025 link
Algorithmic Collective Action With Two Collective…, Data Leverage Newsletter, Jul 2025 link
On AI-driven Job Apocalypses and Collective Barga…, Data Leverage Newsletter, Jun 2025 link

Talks

Panel Moderator, NeurIPS Workshop on Al…, N/A, Dec 2025
Collective Bargaining in the Informatio…, San Diego, CA, Dec 2025
A Data Flow Perspective on "AI Social S…, Seattle, WA, Sep 2025
Data Leverage and AI Safety, Singagore AI Safety Hub, Aug 2025

Media Coverage

Should the public sector build its own …, Gideon Lichfield , The Financial Times, Sep 2025 link
AI as 'teammate'? Not so fast, say expe…, Stacy Thomas , Canadian HR Reporter, Jul 2025 link
Can Wikipedia survive the rise of AI an…, Rhiannon Stevens , Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 2025 link
'Trial and error': Over half of AI redu…, Stacy Thomas , Canadian HR Reporter, May 2025 link

News & Notes

Note to prospective students: I currently am not actively recruiting, but encourage you to reach if you are particularly interested in my research; I may have some flexibility for strong candidates or be able to connect you to colleagues in my network. Please send just a short note expressing your specific interests (I cannot respond to generic inquiries).
2025 conferences: I attended FAccT and AIES, and will be at NeurIPS. Looking forward to the Algorithmic Collective Action Workshop, see more at https://acaworkshop.github.io/
Our position paper on 'Collective Bargaining in the Information Economy Can Address AI-Driven Power Concentration' was accepted to NeurIPS 2025 Position Paper track.

Publications

Latest peer-reviewed work plus workshop pieces and preprints.

Peer Reviewed

Filter by venue
  • Collective Bargaining in the Information Economy Can Address AI-Driven Power Concentration

    Nicholas Vincent, Matthew Prewitt, Hanlin Li
    NeurIPS Position Papers Dec 2025

    Link

  • An Audit and Analysis of LLM-Assisted Health Misinformation Jailbreaks Against LLMs

    Ayana Hussain, Patrick Zhao, Nicholas Vincent
    AIES Jul 2025

    arXiv

  • Responsible AI in Open Ecosystems: Reconciling Innovation with Risk Assessment and Disclosure

    Mahasweta Chakraborti, Bert Joseph Prestoza, Nicholas Vincent, Seth Frey
    AIES Jul 2025

    Link

  • Algorithmic Collective Action with Two Collectives

    Aditya Karan, Nicholas Vincent, Karrie Karahalios, Hari Sundaram
    ACM FAccT Jun 2025

    arXiv

  • Push and Pull: A Framework for Measuring Attentional Agency on Digital Platforms

    Zachary Wojtowicz, Shrey Jain, Nicholas Vincent
    ACM FAccT Jun 2025

    arXiv

  • A Canary in the AI Coal Mine: American Jews May Be Disproportionately Harmed by Intellectual Property Dispossession in Large Language Model Training

    Heila Precel, Allison McDonald, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent
    ACM CHI Mar 2024

    arXiv ACM DL DOI

  • Pika: Empowering Non-Programmers to Author Executable Governance Policies in Online Communities

    Leijie Wang, Nicholas Vincent, Julija Rukanskaitė, Amy X. Zhang
    ACM CHI Mar 2024

    arXiv DOI

  • Peer Produced Friction: How Page Protection on Wikipedia Affects Editor Engagement and Concentration

    Leah Ajmani, Nicholas Vincent, Stevie Chancellor
    ACM CSCW Nov 2023

    PDF DOI

  • The Dimensions of Data Labor: A Road Map for Researchers, Activists, and Policymakers to Empower Data Producers

    Hanlin Li, Nicholas Vincent, Stevie Chancellor, Brent Hecht
    ACM FAccT Jun 2023

    Link DOI

  • Behavioral Use Licensing for Responsible AI

    Danish Contractor, Daniel McDuff, Julia Katherine Haines, Jenny Lee, Christopher Hines, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent, Hanlin Li
    ACM FAccT Jun 2022

    Link DOI

  • CEAM: The Effectiveness of Cyclic and Ephemeral Attention Models of User Behavior on Social Platforms

    Farhan Asif Chowdhury, Yozen Liu, Koustuv Saha, Nicholas Vincent, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah, Maarten W Bos
    AAAI ICWSM May 2021

    PDF DOI

  • Addressing Documentation Debt in Machine Learning Research: A Retrospective Datasheet for BookCorpus

    Jack Bandy, Nicholas Vincent
    NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks May 2021

    arXiv

  • AdverTiming Matters: Examining User Ad Consumption for Effective Ad Allocations on Social Media

    Koustuv Saha, Yozen Liu, Nicholas Vincent, Farhan Asif Chowdhury, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah, Maarten W Bos
    ACM CHI May 2021

    PDF DOI

  • Can "Conscious Data Contribution" Help Users to Exert "Data Leverage" Against Technology Companies?

    Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht
    ACM CSCW Apr 2021

    PDF DOI Code

  • A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results

    Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht
    ACM CSCW Apr 2021

    ACM DL DOI Code

  • Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies

    Vincent, Nicholas and Li, Hanlin and Tilly, Nicole and Chancellor, Stevie and Hecht, Brent
    ACM FAccT Feb 2021

    Link DOI

  • How Do People Change Their Technology Use in Protest?: Understanding Protest Users

    Hanlin Li, Nicholas Vincent, Janice Tsai, Jofish Kaye, Brent Hecht
    ACM CSCW Nov 2019

    PDF DOI

  • Measuring the Importance of User-Generated Content to Search Engines

    Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson, Patrick Sheehan, Brent Hecht
    AAAI ICWSM Jul 2019

    PDF DOI Code

  • "Data Strikes": Evaluating the Effectiveness of a New Form of Collective Action Against Technology Companies

    Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht, Shilad Sen
    ACM The Web Conference May 2019

    PDF DOI Code

  • Women (still) ask for less: Gender differences in hourly rate in an online labor marketplace

    Eureka Foong, Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht, Elizabeth M Gerber
    ACM CSCW Oct 2018

    PDF DOI

  • Examining Wikipedia With a Broader Lens: Quantifying the Value of Wikipedia's Relationships with Other Large-Scale Online Communities

    Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson, Brent Hecht
    ACM CHI Apr 2018

    PDF DOI Code

Workshop / Pre-print

Filter by venue
  • Open WebUI: An Open, Extensible, and Usable Interface for AI Interaction

    Jaeryang Baek, Ayana Hussain, Danny Liu, Nicholas Vincent, Lawrence H. Kim
    arXiv preprint Oct 2025

    link

  • If open source is to win, it must go public

    Joshua Tan, Nicholas Vincent, Katherine Elkins, Magnus Sahlgren
    CodeML @ ICML 2025 Jul 2025

    link

  • Epistemic Authority in AI Fact-Checking: A Human and Data Centric Perspective

    Devansh Bhojak, Nicholas Vincent
    4S 2025 Conference: Reverberations May 2025

  • WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity by Surfacing Knowledge Gaps Between English Wikipedia and other Language Editions

    Zining Wang, Yuxuan Zhang, Dongwook Yoon, Nicholas Vincent, Farhan Samir, Vered Shwartz
    arXiv preprint Apr 2025

    link

  • Step-By-Step Reasoning with Meta Cognitive Prompts to Reduce Contextual Hallucination

    Brian Miki, Nicholas Vincent
    HEAL Workshop @ CHI 2025 Apr 2025

  • Canada as a Champion for Public AI: Data, Compute and Open Source Infrastructure for Economic Growth and Inclusive Innovation

    Nicholas Vincent, Mark Surman, Jake Hirch-Allen
    author preprint Apr 2025

    link

  • AI for Just Work: Constructing Diverse Imaginations of AI beyond "Replacing Humans"

    Weina Jin, Nicholas Vincent, Ghassan Hamarneh
    arXiv preprint Mar 2025

    link

  • Responsible AI in Open Ecosystems: Reconciling Innovation with Risk Assessment and Disclosure

    Mahasweta Chakraborti, Bert Joseph Prestoza, Nicholas Vincent, Seth Frey
    AAAI 2025 Workshop on AIGOV Dec 2024

    link

  • A step forward in tracing and documenting dataset provenance

    Nicholas Vincent
    Nature Machine Intelligence, News & Views Aug 2024

    link

  • Designing an open-source LLM interface and social platforms for collectively driven LLM evaluation and auditing

    Timothy J. Baek, Nicholas Vincent, Lawrence Kim
    HEAL Workshop @ CHI 2024 May 2024

  • The Need for Flexible Interfaces for Text-to-Image Auditing: A Case Study of DALL·E 2 and DALL·E 3

    Clare Provenzano, Parsa Rajabi, Diana Cukierman, Nicholas Vincent
    GenAICHI @ CHI 2024 May 2024

    link

  • An Alternative to Regulation: The Case for Public AI

    Nicholas Vincent, David Bau, Sarah Schwettmann, Joshua Tan
    RegML 2023 Workshop @ NeurIPS 2023 Nov 2023

    link

  • Sharing the Winnings of AI with Data Dividends: Challenges with 'Meritocratic' Data Valuation

    Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht
    EAAMO 2023 Poster Track Oct 2023

    link

  • Epistemic Injustice in Online Communities: Unpacking the Values of Knowledge Creation and Curation within CSCW Applications

    Leah Ajmani, Mo Houtti, Jasmine C Foriest, Michael Ann Devito, Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson
    Workshop at CSCW Oct 2023

    link

  • Can Licensing Mitigate the Negative Implications of Commercial Web Scraping?

    Hanlin Li, Nicholas Vincent, Yacine Jernite, Nick Merrill, Jesse Josua Benjamin, Alek Tarkowski
    Workshop at CSCW 2023 Oct 2023

    link

  • Ethical Tensions, Norms, and Directions in the Extraction of Online Volunteer Work

    Hanlin Li, Leah Ajmani, Moyan Zhou, Nicholas Vincent, Sohyeon Hwang, Tiziano Piccardi, Sneha Narayan, Sherae Daniel, Veniamin Veselovsky
    Workshop at CSCW Nov 2022

    link

  • Misleading Tweets and Helpful Notes: Investigating Data Labor by Twitter Birdwatch Users

    Isaiah Jones, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent
    ACM CSCW Posters Nov 2022

    link

  • Collaborative Design of Contribution Tracking Systems for Decentralized Organizations

    Nicholas Vincent, Christine Vandevoorde
    CESC 2022 Oct 2022

    link

  • Twitter Engagement with Retracted Articles: Who, When, and How?

    Rod Abhari, Nicholas Vincent, Henry K Dambanemuya, Herminio Bodon, Emőke-Ágnes Horvát
    arXiv preprint Mar 2022

    link

  • From My Data to Our Data

    Yakov Feygin, Nicholas Vincent, Hanlin Li, Chirag Lala, Luisa Scarcella
    Book Chapter Oct 2021

    link

  • A Data Dividend that Works: Steps Toward Building an Equitable Data Economy

    Yakov Feygin, Hanlin Li, Chirag Lala, Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent, Luisa Scarcella, Matthew Prewitt
    Berggruen Institute white paper Apr 2021

    link

  • Mapping the Potential and Pitfalls of 'Data Dividends' as a Means of Sharing the Profits of Artificial Intelligence.

    Nicholas Vincent, Yichun Li, Renee Zha, Brent Hecht
    arXiv preprint Nov 2019

    link

  • Deep learning of tissue fate features in acute ischemic stroke

    Noah Stier, Nicholas Vincent, David Liebeskind, Fabien Scalzo
    BIBM 2015 Workshop on Biomedical Visual Search and Deep Learning Nov 2015

    link

  • Detection of hyperperfusion on arterial spin labeling using deep learning

    Nicholas Vincent, Noah Stier, Songlin Yu, David S Liebeskind, Danny JJ Wang, Fabien Scalzo
    BIBM 2015 Workshop on Biomedical Visual Search and Deep Learning Nov 2015

    link

Editorial

Essays, commentary, and blogs.

Published Writing

Filter by venue
  • Where Biden’s AI policies fall short in protecting workers.

    Jan 2024 — The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists link

  • How creatives can stop AI from stealing their work.

    Sep 2023 — The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists link

  • A roadmap toward empowering the labor force behind AI.

    Jun 2023 — Montreal AI Ethics Institute Research Summaries link

  • ChatGPT Stole Your Work. So What Are You Going to Do?

    Dec 2022 — Wired link

  • What if we could check Big Tech?: The collective voice of millions of users could be as effective as regulation

    Feb 2021 — Northwestern Now link

Blog Posts

Filter by venue
  • How collective bargaining for information, public AI, and HCI research all fit together

    Oct 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Which datasets should we assume are "in all the AI models"?

    Sep 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Algorithmic Collective Action With Two Collectives [crosspost]

    Jul 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • On AI-driven Job Apocalypses and Collective Bargaining for Information

    Jun 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • How do we know our AI output is good? Double checks, bar charts, vibes, and training data.

    May 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Each Instance of "AI Utility" Stems from Some Human Act(s) of Information Recording and Ranking

    May 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Google and TikTok rank bundles of information; ChatGPT ranks grains.

    May 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • [microblog] One book is worth "0.06%" benchmark points to AI; is "no different from noise". What gives?

    Apr 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Public AI, Data Appraisal, and Data Debates

    Apr 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Evaluation Data Leverage: Advances like "Deep Research" Highlight a Looming Opportunity for Bargaining Power

    Mar 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Tipping Points for Content Ecosystems

    Feb 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • AI Labs Should Open Source Data Protection Technologies

    Jan 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Live by the free-content-for-training sword, die by the free-content-for-training sword

    Jan 2025 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Selling AGI like AG1: Will Consumers Push Back Against Proprietary Blends of Herbs and of Data?

    Dec 2024 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Perplexity CEO's Interaction with Striking New York Times Workers Does Not Reflect Well on the AI Industry

    Nov 2024 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Is Zuckerberg right to say that your specific creative work has no value to AI?

    Sep 2024 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • "Many Models" and "Track Changes" for AI: Some Thoughts on LLM Interfaces

    Aug 2024 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Project Spotlight: CollectiveVoice

    Jan 2024 — Metagov Blog link

  • Building a Data Pipeworks for Democratic AI: From Human Knowledge to Records to AI Systems

    Oct 2023 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Will the New York Times Data Strike Have a Large Impact on ChatGPT?

    Aug 2023 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • A Harbinger of the Future of Content? The New York Times Starts a Data Strike

    Aug 2023 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Reddit, StackOverflow, and Europe: All Trending Towards Data Dignity

    Apr 2023 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • The WGA Strike is a Canary in the Coal Mine for AI Labor Concerns

    Apr 2023 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Bing Rewards for the AI Age

    Mar 2023 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Plural AI Data Alignment

    Feb 2023 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • AI Technologies are System Maps, and You are a Cartographer.

    Feb 2023 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • AI Artist or AI Art Thief? Innovation, Public Mandates, and the Case for Talking in Terms of Leverage.

    Dec 2022 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • ChatGPT is Awesome and Scary: You Deserve Credit for the Good Parts (and Might Help Fix the Bad Parts)

    Nov 2022 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • The Paradox of Reuse, Language Models Edition.

    Nov 2022 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Apple Now Lets You Opt-Out of Tracking: Will This Give You More Influence Over Tech Companies?

    Jul 2021 — Technically Social link

  • GitHub Copilot and the Exploitation of “Data Labor”: A Wake-Up Call for the Tech Industry.

    Jun 2021 — PSA Computing Blog link

  • Powerful Technologies and Their Power Laws: Estimating Machine Learning Systems' Data Leverage Vulnerabilities

    Mar 2021 — Observable Notebook link

  • Why You are an Expert Language Model Trainer!

    Feb 2021 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

  • Don’t give OpenAI all the credit for GPT-3: You might have helped create the latest “astonishing” advance in AI too.

    Sep 2020 — PSA Computing Blog link

  • "Data Strikes": A New Form of Leverage for Tech Users?

    Sep 2020 — Data Leverage Newsletter link

Talks & Conversations

Invited talks, panels, and podcasts.

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Media Coverage

Select press, interviews, and commentary appearances.

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