John P. Wihbey is Director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES Lab) at Northeastern University and an associate professor of media innovation and technology in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. He is also a faculty researcher at the Ethics Institute and a co-founder of Northeastern’s Internet Democracy Initiative.

John’s forthcoming book is Governing Babel: The Debate over Social Media Platforms and Free Speech – and What Comes Next (MIT Press, Fall 2025). John has served as a research consultant for foundations, government, and social media companies. From 2019 to 2024, he directed Northeastern’s graduate programs in Media Innovation and Data Communication, Journalism, and Media Advocacy.

Author of The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2019), John has research and teaching interests that focus on the intersection of news and social media; emerging media technologies; computational journalism and visualization; media literacy; and tech policy. He has been Lead Investigator for the Ethics of Content Moderation Project at the Ethics Institute, which is exploring social media, information integrity, and governance issues.

His writing and research have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, as well as New Media & Society, Yale Journal of Law and Technology, The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Journalism Practice, Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, International Conference on Web and Social Media, and International Conference on Social Media and Society. He is also a media analyst whose commentary has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, CBC, NPR, Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Politico, Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), and Caixin Global.

John has worked in news media, including for The Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.) and the NPR show “On Point” (WBUR-Boston), and was an assistant director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where he helped found the Journalist’s Resource project. An affiliate of the Northeastern School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, John co-founded Northeastern’s Co-Lab for Data Impact. He was general co-chair of the Computation + Journalism Symposium in 2020 and 2021, and again in 2024. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College (magna cum laude); and holds an M.A. from Middlebury College, an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) from Northeastern University, with a research concentration in higher education administration and organizational communication and learning. 

Caleb Okereke is a Nigerian journalist, researcher, and media entrepreneur. He is the Founder and Executive Editor of Minority Africa, a digital publication supported by Google and the National Endowment for Democracy that uses data-driven, multimedia storytelling to center minority experiences across the African continent. His reporting spans multiple countries and platforms, with work published by Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, CNN, The Guardian, NPR, and VICE News. He previously served as a correspondent for Heidi.news.

In addition to his editorial and field reporting work, Caleb is a frequent speaker on inclusive journalism, narrative justice, and media representation. He has delivered talks and participated in panels at institutions such as Oxford University, Stanford University, and the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. His work often explores how media systems can be reimagined to reflect the full complexity of lived experience, particularly in historically underrepresented communities.

Caleb is currently pursuing a PhD in Northeastern University’s Interdisciplinary Design and Media program. At AIMES, his research intersects media innovation, artificial intelligence, and questions of equity, with a focus on how emerging technologies affect public knowledge, representation, and access to information in both African and global contexts.

Yash Phalle is a Master’s student in Artificial Intelligence at Northeastern University whose interests span applied AI, robotics, computer vision, and AI-powered learning systems. At AIMES Lab, he contributes to projects that explore how AI can support education, creativity, and media applications.

He has worked with the lab through JRNL 6460: AI in Media Industries as a Teaching Assistant, helping students from media and journalism backgrounds build practical AI skills. He also contributes to HuskyAI and other AI-media projects within the lab.

In Spring 2026, he hosted the workshop “Introduction to Vibe Coding,” introducing students to AI-assisted software development and showing how AI tools can be used to build websites, dashboards, and other digital projects without prior programming experience.

Outside of AIMES, Yash likes working with robots!

Samantha D'Alonzo is currently pursuing a PhD in Northeastern University's Interdisciplinary Design and Media program. Her research projects have ranged from automatically detecting biased words in news media to developing online interventions to promote pro-social values on social media. Prior to starting at Northeastern she worked at Jane Street Capital as a Product & Strategy Analysis. Prior to that, she received a B.Sc. In Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Vivica Dsouza is a graduate student in Northeastern University’s Media Innovation and Data Communication program. She covers community news for The Bay State Banner and edits data and AI reporting at Storybench. Her work centers on interactive storytelling, public-records reporting and newsroom innovation. Her recent research examines the impacts of racial bias in historical training data for news AI.

Shashank Kadiyala is a graduate student pursuing a Master of Science in Computer Science at Northeastern University. His work focuses on AI systems, Large Language Models, agentic workflows, and applied machine learning, with interests spanning evaluation systems and human-AI interaction. At AIMES, he contributes to research and development exploring practical applications of artificial intelligence.

Anastasiia Boltkova is a graduate student in Media Innovation and Data Communication at Northeastern University. As an assistant editor at Storybench, she writes and edits stories about journalism, data, and technology, with a particular interest in how media covers artificial intelligence. 

Adam (he/him) is pursuing his master’s degree in Complex Network Analysis with research interests in language and social networks. His interests focus on applying computational methods to explore how communication shapes and reflects social structures. In prior research, he examined interactions among members of Congress through the language used in their speeches. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from The Ohio State University.

Bernice Mercy Sharon Malaiarasu is a Research Assistant and an M.S. in Artificial Intelligence student at Northeastern University. Previously a Senior Data Engineer at Thoughtworks, she specializes in Generative AI, multi-agent systems, and robust RAG pipelines. Her research interests focus on the practical application of large language models and predictive machine learning, alongside her academic contributions examining data silos. Her technical toolkit includes LangGraph, AWS and advanced model explainability. Outside of the lab, Bernice is an avid reader and enjoys exploring local walking trails.

Vaishnavi Sarmalkar is an MS Data Science student at Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences with a background in NLP, applied AI, and agentic systems. At the AIMES Lab, she works at the intersection of AI and media research, applying large language models to analyze how political concepts are represented in news coverage at scale. She is interested in building AI systems that make research faster, more rigorous, and reproducible across domains.