Tim Althoff

The goal of my research is to better understand and empower people through data.

My research develops computational methods that leverage large-scale behavioral data to extract actionable insights about our lives, health and happiness through combining techniques from data science, social network analysis, and natural language processing.

I direct the Behavioral Data Science Group which works on research related to mental health, misinformation, scientific reproducibility, and public health including informing the COVID-19 response.

We are always looking for great postdocs.

I am also looking for PhD students, especially in but not limited to neural representation learning, NLP and applications to psychology and mental health, causal inference, data science, and mobile health. If you're interested please apply to the UW Allen School.
Go Dawgs!

Selected highlights

2023
Making Online Communities 'Better': A Taxonomy of Community Values on Reddit
Galen Weld, Amy Zhang, Tim Althoff
ICWSM 2024 (accepted)
pdf
Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Model Interaction
Ashish Sharma, Kevin Rushton, Inna Wanyin Lin, David Wadden, Khendra G. Lucas, Adam S. Miner, Theresa Nguyen, Tim Althoff
ACL 2023
Outstanding Paper Award
pdf data code
Human-AI Collaboration Enables More Empathic Conversations in Text-based Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Support
Ashish Sharma, Inna Lin, Adam Miner, David Atkins, Tim Althoff
Nature Machine Intelligence 2023
pdf nature project dataset code
Homekit2020: A Benchmark for Time Series Classification on a Large Mobile Sensing Dataset with Laboratory Tested Ground Truth of Influenza Infections
Mike A Merrill, Esteban Safranchik, Arinbjörn Kolbeinsson, Piyusha Gade, Ernesto Ramirez, Ludwig Schmidt, Luca Foschini, Tim Althoff
CHIL 2023
pdf
Leveraging Mobile Technology For Public Health Promotion: A Multidisciplinary Perspective
Jennifer L. Hicks, Melissa A. Boswell, Tim Althoff, Alia J. Crum, James A. Landay, Joy P. Ku, Paula M.L. Moya, Elizabeth L. Murnane, Michael P. Snyder, Abby C. King, Scott L. Delp
Annual Review of Public Health 2023
pdf
Mapping User Engagement in Digital Psychotherapy: An Integrative Engagement Model
James M Zech, Morgan Johnson, Michael D Pullman, Thomas D Hull, Tim Althoff, Sean A Munson, Nicole Fridling, Boris Litvin, Jerilyn Wu, Patricia A Areán
JMIR Formative Research 2023
pdf
2022
Disparate impacts on online information access during the COVID-19 pandemic
Jina Suh, Eric Horvitz, Ryen W. White, Tim Althoff
Nature Communications 2022
pdf
Gendered Mental Health Stigma in Masked Language Models
Inna Wanyin Lin*, Lucille Njoo*, Anjalie Field, Ashish Sharma, Katharina Reinecke, Tim Althoff, Yulia Tsvetkov
EMNLP 2022
pdf
GLOBEM: Cross-Dataset Generalization of Longitudinal Human Behavior Modeling
Xuhai Xu, Han Zhang, Yasaman Sefidgar, Xin Liu, Woosuk Seo, Jennifer Brown, Yiyi Ren, Kevin Kuehn, Mike Merrill, Paula Nurius, Anne Browning, Shwetak Patel, Tim Althoff, Magaret E. Morris, Eve Riskin, Jennifer Mankoff, Anind K. Dey
NeurIPS 2022
pdf data and code
GLOBEM: Cross-Dataset Generalization of Longitudinal Human Behavior Modeling
Xuhai Xu, Xin Liu, Han Zhang, Weichen Wang, Subgiya Nepal, Kevin S. Kuehn, Jeremy Huckins, Margaret E. Morris, Paula S. Nurius, Eve A. Riskin, Shwetak Patel, Tim Althoff, Andrew Campell, Anind K. Dey, Jennifer C. Mankoff
IMWUT/UbiComp 2022
pdf data and code
A computational approach to measure the linguistic characteristics of psychotherapy timing, responsiveness, and consistency
Adam S Miner, Scott L Fleming, Albert Haque, Jason Fries, Tim Althoff, Denise Wilfley, W Stuart Agras, Arnold Milstein, Jeff Hancock, Steven M Ash, Shannon W Stirman, Bruce A Arnow, Nigam Shah
npj Mental Health Research 2022
pdf
Large-scale diet tracking data reveal disparate associations between food environment and diet
Tim Althoff, Hamed Nilforoshan, Jenna Hua, Jure Leskovec
Nature Communications 2022
pdf dataset
Estimating the Burden of Influenza on Daily Activity at Population Scale Using Commercial Wearable Sensors
Aziz Mezlini, Allison Shapiro, Eric J. Daza, Eamon Caddigan, Ernesto Ramirez, Tim Althoff, Luca Foschini
JAMA Network Open 2022
pdf
Adjusting for Confounders with Text: Challenges and an Empirical Evaluation Framework for Causal Inference
Galen Weld*, Peter West*, Maria Glenski, David Arbour, Ryen Rossi, Tim Althoff (* equal contribution)
ICWSM 2022
pdf
CORAL: COde RepresentAtion Learning with Weakly-Supervised Transformers for Analyzing Data Analysis
Ge Zhang, Mike Merrill, Yang Liu, Jeff Heer, Tim Althoff
EPJ Data Science 2022
pdf
2021
Same data, different conclusions: Radical dispersion in empirical results when independent analysts operationalize and test the same hypothesis
Martin Schweinsberg, ..., Tim Althoff, ..., Eric Luis Uhlmann (179 authors total)
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 2021
pdf
Online Mobile App Usage as an Indicator of Sleep Behavior and Job Performance
Chunjong Park, Morelle Arian, Xin Liu, Leon Sasson, Jeffrey Khan, Shwetak Patel, Alex Mariakakis, Tim Althoff
WWW/WebConf 2021
pdf
Daily, weekly, seasonal, and menstrual cycles in female mood, behavior, and vital signs
Emma Pierson, Tim Althoff, Daniel Thomas, Paula Hillard, Jure Leskovec
Nature Human Behavior 2021
pdf
Characterizing COVID-19 and Influenza Illnesses in the Real World via Person-Generated Health Data
Nikki Marinsek, Allison Shapiro, Ieuan Clay, Ben Bradshaw, Ernesto Ramirez, Jae Min, Andrew Trister, Yuedong Wang, Tim Althoff, Luca Foschini
Cell Patterns 2021
pdf
Efficient and Explainable Risk Assessments for Imminent Dementia: Insights from an Aging Cohort Study
Nicasia Beebe-Wang*, Alexandra Okeson*, Tim Althoff§, Su-In Lee§ (*§ equal contribution)
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics 2021
pdf
Leveraging Community and Author Context to Explain the Performance and Bias of Text-Based Deception Detection Models
Galen Weld, Ellyn Ayton, Tim Althoff, Maria Glenski
NAACL Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda 2021
Best Paper Award
pdf
Estimating the Burden of Influenza on Daily Activity at Population Scale Using Commercial Wearable Sensors
Aziz Mezlini, Allison Shapiro, Eric J. Daza, Eamon Caddigan, Ernesto Ramirez, Tim Althoff, Luca Foschini
medRxiv 2021
pdf
2020
Assessing the relationship between routine and schizophrenia symptoms with passively sensed measures of behavioral stability
Joy He-Yueya, Benjamin Buck, Andrew Campbell, Tanzeem Choudhury, John M Kane, Dror Ben-Zeev, Tim Althoff
NPJ Schizophrenia 2020
pdf
Boba: Authoring and Visualizing Multiverse Analyses
Yang Liu, Alex Kale, Tim Althoff, Jeff Heer
VAST 2020
pdf
Data-Driven Implications for Translating Evidence-Based Psychotherapies into Technology-Delivered Interventions
Jessica Schroeder, Jina Suh, Chelsey Wilks, Mary Czerwinski, Sean Munson, James Fogarty, Tim Althoff
EAI PervasiveHealth 2020
pdf
Engagement Patterns of Peer-to-Peer Interactions on Mental Health Platforms: A Case-Study of TalkLife
Ashish Sharma, Monojit Choudhury, Tim Althoff, Amit Sharma
ICWSM 2020
pdf
2019
Passively-sensed Behavioral Correlates of Discrimination Events in College Students
Yasaman S. Sefidgar, Woosuk Seo, Kevin S. Kuehn, Tim Althoff,, Anne Browning, Eve Riskin, Paula S. Nurius, Anind K. Dey, Jennifer Mankoff
IMWUT/UbiComp 2019
pdf
Leveraging Routine Behavior and Contextually-Filtered Features for Depression Detection among College Students
Xuhai Xu, Prerna Chikersal, Afsaneh Doryab, Daniella Villalba, Janine M. Dutcher, Michael J. Tumminia, Tim Althoff, Sheldon Cohen, Kasey Creswell, David Creswell, Jennifer Mankoff, Anind K. Dey
IMWUT/UbiComp 2019
pdf
Best Practices for Analyzing Large-scale Health Data from Wearables and Smartphone Apps
Jennifer L. Hicks, Tim Althoff, Rok Sosic, Peter Kuhar, Bojan Bostjancic, Abby C. King, Jure Leskovec, Scott L. Delp
NPJ Digital Medicine (2) 2019
pdf
2018
Learning Individualized Cardiovascular Responses from Large-scale Wearable Sensors Data
Haraldur T. Hallgrímsson, Filip Jankovic, Tim Althoff, Luca Foschini
NIPS ML4H 2018
pdf
Data Science for Human Well-being
Tim Althoff
Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford University
SIGKDD Dissertation Award 2019
thesis   defense
Modeling Interdependent and Periodic Real-World Action Sequences
Takeshi Kurashima, Tim Althoff, Jure Leskovec
WWW 2018
pdf
Modeling Individual Cyclic Variation in Human Behavior
Emma Pierson, Tim Althoff, Jure Leskovec
WWW 2018
pdf
Psychomotor function measured via online activity predicts motor vehicle fatality risk
Tim Althoff, Eric Horvitz, Ryen W. White
NPJ Digital Medicine (1) 2018
pdf   suppl. inf.   method details
2017
Large-scale physical activity data reveal worldwide activity inequality
Tim Althoff, Rok Sosic, Jennifer L. Hicks, Abby C. King, Scott L. Delp, Jure Leskovec
Nature (547.7663) 2017
pdf   suppl. inf.   Nature   project   press releases   dataset
Population-Scale Pervasive Health
Tim Althoff
IEEE Pervasive Computing 2017
pdf  
Harnessing the Web for Population-Scale Physiological Sensing: A Case Study of Sleep and Performance
Tim Althoff, Eric Horvitz, Ryen W. White, Jamie Zeitzer
WWW 2017
pdf   appendix   slides  
2016
Quantifying Dose Response Relationships Between Physical Activity and Health Using Propensity Scores
Tim Althoff, Rok Sosic, Jennifer L. Hicks, Abby C. King, Scott L. Delp, Jure Leskovec
NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning for Health 2016
workshop
2015
TimeMachine: Timeline Generation for Knowledge-Base Entities
Tim Althoff, Xin Luna Dong, Kevin Murphy, Safa Alai, Van Dang, Wei Zhang
KDD 2015
pdf   full version   slides   poster   demo
2014
How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests
Tim Althoff, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky
ICWSM 2014
pdf   slides   dataset
2013
Analysis and Forecasting of Trending Topics in Online Media Streams
Tim Althoff, Damian Borth, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel
ACM Multimedia 2013
pdf   slides
Analysis and Forecasting of Trending Topics in Online Media
Tim Althoff
Master's Thesis, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany April 2013
pdf   slides
2012
Detection Bank: An Object Detection Based Video Representation for Multimedia Event Recognition
Tim Althoff, Hyun Oh Song, Trevor Darrell
ACM Multimedia 2012
pdf   poster
Sparselet Models for Efficient Multiclass Object Detection
Hyun Oh Song, Stefan Zickler, Tim Althoff, Ross Girshick, Mario Fritz, Christopher Geyer, Pedro Felzenszwalb, Trevor Darrell
ECCV 2012
pdf   project   demo video
Don't Look Back: Post-hoc Category Detection via Sparse Reconstruction
Hyun Oh Song, Mario Fritz, Tim Althoff, Trevor Darrell
UC Berkeley, Tech. Rep. UCB/EECS-2012-16 Jan. 2012
pdf   archive
2011
Balanced Clustering for Content-based Image Browsing
Tim Althoff, Adrian Ulges, Andreas Dengel
German Computer Science Society, Informatiktage March 2011
pdf   project   demo
2010
Scalable Clustering for Hierarchical Content-based Browsing of Large-scale Image Collections
Tim Althoff
Bachelor's Thesis, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany September 2010
pdf

Behavioral Data Science Group Logo

Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington

Assistant Professor
Computer Science
University of Washington

Gates Center #313
3800 E Stevens Way NE
Box 352355
Seattle, WA 98195



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Many thanks to David Jurgens for the site template/inspiration