Sarah Cooney

sarah.cooney@villanova.edu

I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Villanova University. I have a PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California (USC), where I was advised by Barath Raghavan, and I have a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Saint Joseph's University (SJU). My research expertise is in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Specifically, I study how technology interacts with cultural factors (such as faith and spirituality) to promote sustainability, resilience, and individual wellbeing within communities.

News and Press

Three Former McNulty Scholars Share How the Prestigious Program Impacted Their Lives
An article on the SJU McNulty Scholars program in which my story and career path are featured along with two other former scholars.
September 2022
Making Urban Environments Sustainable with AI
A profile on my PhD research from USC's Viterbi School of Engineering.
April 2022

Teaching

Fall of 2022 - CSC 1051: Algorithms & Data Structures I

Selected Publications

Alternative Pathways to Caring for Limits: The Case of Ecospirituality
Sarah Cooney, Vishal Sharma, Joshua Palmer, Neha Kumar, and Barath Raghavan

Eighth Workshop on Computing within Limits, Virtual

June 2022
Opening the Gate to Urban Repair: A Tool for Citizen-Led Design
Sarah Cooney and Barath Raghavan

CSCW 2022, Virtual

November 2022
Toward Co-Creative Tools for Tactical Urban Revitalization
Sarah Cooney

Doctoral Consortium, CHI 2021, Virtual

May 2021
Riding the Bus in Los Angeles: Creating Cultural Micro-Exposures via Technology
Sarah Cooney

alt.CHI, CHI 2021, Virtual

May 2021
Adaptive Cyber Deception: Cognitively Informed Signaling for Cyber Defense
Edward A. Cranford, Palvi Aggarwal, Cleotilde Gonzalez, Sarah Cooney, Milind Tambe, Christian Lebiere

Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, HI

Best Paper - Digital Government Track

January 2020
Learning to Signal in the Goldilocks Zone: Improving Adversary Compliance in Security Games
Sarah Cooney, Kai Wang, Elizabeth Bondi, Thanh Nguyen, Phebe Vayanos, Hailey Winetrobe, Edward A. Cranford, Cleotilde Gonzalez, Christian Lebiere, Milind Tambe

Proceedings of the Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Würzburg, Germany

September 2019
Mobile Game Theory with Street Gangs
Sarah Cooney, Wendy Gomez, Kai Wang, Jorja Leap, P. Jeffrey Brantingham, Milind Tambe

ECML-PKDD 4th Workshop on Data Science for Social Good (SoGood), Würzburg, Germany

September 2019

Selected Projects

PatternPainter

A software system designed to allow everyday citizens to create designs for urban repair projects in their neighborhoods without the need for training or expert facilitation. Try the prototype here. (Enter any text as the MturkID.)

The CommYOUnity Data Project

A project to collect a dataset with photos of people's neighborhoods with captions describing what they love and what improvements they would make. Contribute here