This is me trying to give a serious look to my students when they think they’re secretly clicking me LOL
Hi, I am Collegiate Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Virginia Tech (Innovation Campus). I received my Ph.D. from NC State University in 2024. My interests lie in building NLP systems for social good. My research spans across understanding multiple aspects of social media such as studying the narratives used in hate speech and inciting speech. Moreover, I analyze how we can facilitate support to users on mental-health and other support-seeking communities. I have also served as a reviewer in reputed venues such as ACL, ICWSM, and ACM TIST.
Research Interests
Applied NLP, Social media analytics, AI for social good, Responsible computing, Computational social science
Advising and Mentoring
Cheng-Chen Huang, was masters student at Virginia Tech; Currently research intern at SONY
Mansi Saxena, a current Ph.D. student at NCSU
Sanjana Cheerla, a current Ph.D. student at NCSU
Ganning Xu, was research intern at NCSU; Currently pursuing his undergrad from Georgia Tech University
Awards and Achievements
Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award – Computer Science, NC State
Won the Carla Savage Award – the most awesome Ph.D. student, Spring 2023
Won the best Master’s thesis award in Computer Science, 2019
Teaching
Natural Language Processing – Fall 2025
Social Media Analytics – Fall 2025
Natural Language Processing – Spring 2025
Machine Learning with Big Data – Spring 2025
Natural Language Processing – Fall 2024
Social Media Analytics – Fall 2024
Selected Publications
Sanjana Cheerla, Vaibhav Garg, Saikath Bhattacharya, and Munindar P. Singh. “Weapons of Online Harassment: Menacing and Profiling Users via Social Apps.” To Appear; Accepted at IEEE Computer.
Vaibhav Garg, Hui Guo, Nirav Ajmeri, Saikath Bhattacharya, and Munindar P. Singh. “Understanding App Reviews to Guide Misuse Audits.” To Appear; Accepted at Communications of the ACM (Impact factor=22.7).
Mansi Saxena, Vaibhav Garg, Bhaskar Ray, Aura Mishra, and Munindar Singh. 2025. “Understanding Narratives of Trauma on Social Media.” In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Web Science Conference 2025 (Websci ‘25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 338–347. https://doi.org/10.1145/3717867.3717892
Vaibhav Garg, Ganning Xu and Munindar P. Singh, “Understanding Inciting Speech as New Malice,” in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 947-956, June 2025, doi: 10.1109/TCSS.2024.3504357
Vaibhav Garg, Hannah Javidi, Jiaqing Yuan, Ruijie Xi, and Munindar P. Singh. 2025. “Analyzing Reddit Stories of Sexual Violence: Incidents, Effects, and Requests for Advice.” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 19, 1 (Jun. 2025), 568-585. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v19i1.35832.
Amanul Haque, Vaibhav Garg, Hui Guo, and Munindar Singh. 2022. Pixie: Preference in Implicit and Explicit Comparisons. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 106–112, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Sanjana Cheerla, Vignitha Ampally, Vaibhav Garg, Saikath Bhattacharya, and Munindar P. Singh. “Identifying Online Misbehavior.” Poster at the Hot Topics in the Science of Security (HotSoS) Symposium. 2020. Best Undergraduate Student Poster Award to Sanjana Cheerla
Contact
📬 Contact Me at vaibhavg@vt.edu
📣 Note for Prospective Students: If you’re a student interested in my work or seeking guidance, feel free to reach out! Please include a brief introduction and mention your interests or questions clearly. To help me understand your motivation, please summarize one of my research papers in your own words (not something copied or generated by ChatGPT 😉). This shows you’ve engaged with the work and helps me respond more meaningfully. You can contact me via email.
Looking forward to hearing from you!