Effie Karas

Year in School
Junior

Major
Math + CS

Research Interests
Interactive Computing

Research Mentor
Prof. Camille Cobb

Research/Engagement Experience
While a CS STAR, I've had the opportunity to lead many events, including Hour of Code, Celebrating CS, prospective student visits, Trick-or-Research, serving in academic hearings, and more. With the Data Driven Design lab, I worked on a user study that aimed to achieve a more formal definition of sensitive information on mobile devices. During this mobile privacy study, my primary duties were to analyze and classify user data, and visualize trends using Python. Now, I work with Professor Cobb to discover the impact that technology, specifically security and privacy, has on individuals when these topics appear on television. We decided to focus on teen dramas, since young people are the most susceptible to messages perceived in the media. To summarize, we scraped the captions of a list of teen dramas, and counted the number of times technology-related words appeared. Then, we cross-referenced these counts with metadata such as release year, genre, and popularity to visualize and learn trends between the relevance of technology among different categories. Next, we will do analysis around the meaning and context of these words to determine how viewers might be impacted by the messages.

Interests
Board games, Esports, learning how to cook new things

Project Title
Technology in Television

How did I get interested in Computer Science?
I didn't always know that CS was my thing and didn't plan on majoring in CS until college application season started. However, I first got interested in CS when I took AP CS A at my high school and enjoyed it a lot. I was always into computers from gaming at a young age, but watching my brother pursue CS at UIUC was also a big inspiration. At first, I was applying to CS programs because I didn't know what else to do, and I knew I enjoyed CS enough to study it at school. My time here so far proves that I made the right choice, as I love programming, and my leap of faith paid off.

What social interests matter to me?
Gender equality and women's rights, increasing opportunity and equity for underrepresented groups in computing and education

What is my most impactful college experience?

These are a few of my favorite things!
I love sushi, anything sci-fi/fantasy, and trying new video games!

Research Description
Research has shown that media, especially television, can influence the views and behavior of young people. Since technology plays a big role in society and appears frequently on television, how it appears can impact how viewers feel about technology. To analyze the extent of this impact on young people, our research analyzes the frequency of technology-related content in teen dramas. More specifically, we will focus on the privacy and security side of technology as it plays a large influence on how viewers interact and behave with technology. Utilizing the frequency of keywords in the captions of tv shows, we can identify the trends of technology, security, and privacy topics in teen television. We will use these keywords to quantitatively analyze and visualize our findings so we can make high-level analyses automatically. We will also qualitatively analyze any occurrences of technology-related content to gain a more nuanced understanding of the context. Finally, scraping for corresponding IMDB metadata about the episodes and shows, including air date, genre, and popularity, will provide us more context to view trends based on these categories.

Biography
Efthalia (Effie) Karas is a junior majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science. She grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and growing up Greek was a big part of her childhood culture. She recently completed an internship at Target where she built an automatic data comparator tool, which she enjoyed doing very much. She is passionate about Human-Computer Interaction, and is currently researching under Professor Camille Cobb. In the past, she has also done research in mobile privacy under Professor Ranjitha Kumar. She has also enjoyed developing her machine learning skills through completing the AI4ALL program. Outside of academics, she enjoys playing on an Overwatch esports team here at the university.