Zhicong Chen
Block AS6
11 Computing Drive
National University of Singapore (Kent Ridge Campus)
Singapore 117416
I develop computational methods and data-driven approaches to study online safety, social sensing, and multilingual text mining. My work combines natural language processing, network analysis, and data mining to measure information risk, behavior, and discourse across digital environments, from anonymous and underground ecosystems to mainstream social media. I build reproducible data pipelines and analytical frameworks for large-scale datasets to provide rigorous empirical evidence for cybersecurity, platform governance, and the societal impacts of digital systems.
My research is organized around three interconnected themes. First, I study privacy and security in decentralized and anonymous systems, applying text mining and network analysis to examine how anonymity tools like Tor are adopted and how information risk is distributed across platforms. Second, I investigate social sensing and behavioral analytics for digital resilience, using panel data and machine learning techniques to quantify how platform use is associated with behavioral patterns and how emotion dynamics in online discourse are associated with collective action. Third, I develop multilingual NLP and text mining for cultural and geopolitical analytics, training diachronic embedding models on large-scale corpora spanning decades to detect and measure long-term social and cultural shifts.
My work has appeared in EPJ Data Science, New Media & Society, American Psychologist, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature Portfolio), and other peer-reviewed venues. I received my Ph.D. from City University of Hong Kong in 2022, where I was advised by Prof. Xiaofan Liu and Prof. Jonathan J. H. Zhu at the Web Mining Laboratory. I hold a master’s degree from Nanjing University (2018) and a B.Eng. in Software Engineering from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (2016).
