Photo of Bandy, Jack

Jack Bandy

Clinical Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science

Contact

Building & Room:

CDRLC 3454

Address:

850 W. Taylor St., Chicago IL 60607

Office Phone:

312.996.9756

Email:

jxb@uic.edu

Spring 2026 Office Hours - Open to all
Sunday
Monday 10:00am – 11:30am
Tuesday
Wednesday 10:00am – 11:30am
Thursday
Friday
Saturday

You are welcome to use this link to schedule a drop-in meeting (in-person or virtual)

Selected Publications

Bandy, Jack. Algorithmic Media and the Enshittified Town Square: How Big Tech Corrupts Democratic Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, 2026. https://link.springer.com/book/9783032194374

Hagar, Nick, and Jack Bandy. “Practical Datasets for Analyzing LLM Corpora Derived from Common Crawl.” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, vol. 19, pp. 2454–2464, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v19i1.35948

Chen, Jiahao, Jack Bandy, Dave Buckley, and Ruchi Bhatia. “AI Transparency in Practice: What Was Learnt from Third‑Party Audit of Recommender Systems at LinkedIn and Dailymotion.” Christchurch Call Initiative on Algorithmic Outcomes, report, Oct. 31, 2024.

Bandy, Jack, and Nicholas Diakopoulos. “Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm and the 2020 US Election.” Social Media+ Society, vol. 9, no. 3, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196898

Bandy, Jack, and Tomo Lazovich. “Exposure to Marginally Abusive Content on Twitter.” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, vol. 17, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v17i1.22123

Bandy, Jack. “Problematic Machine Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review of Algorithm Audits.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 5, no. CSCW1, pp. 1–34, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449148

Bandy, Jack, and Nicholas Vincent. “Addressing ‘documentation debt’ in machine learning: A retrospective datasheet for bookcorpus.” Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2021.

Publication Aggregators

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science & Communication Studies from Northwestern University (2023)

M.S. in Computer Science from University of Kentucky (2018)

B.S. in Computer Science from Wheaton College, IL (2016)

Research Currently in Progress

Most of my time and energy is currently channeled toward teaching. I also work on several research projects related to human-computer interaction and ethical issues in computing, outlined below. If you are interested in collaborating in some way, please reach out!

Analyzing Training Datasets for Large Language Models
  • Quality benchmarks for datasets
  • Auditing heuristics in filtering pipelines
  • Dataset transparency
  • Consent and provenance in training data
  • Connections between data filtering/preprocessing choices and model behavior

Risks and Harms from Large Language Models

  • Frameworks for output evaluation (safety, accuracy, reliability, etc.)
  • Homogenization due to LLM outputs (e.g. linguistic and rhetorical patterns from LLMs)
  • Moral/ethical permissiveness of LLMs
  • Misrepresentation in LLM outputs
  • Persuasive effects of LLMs
Auditing Algorithmic Feeds
  • Analyzing "algorithmic media" feeds (e.g. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram)
  • Amplification of different source types (e.g. low-quality content, misinformation)
  • Quantifying algorithmic suppression of sources or topics
  • Alternative feed designs, i.e. "algorithmic choice"
  • Recommendation pathways in algorithmic media
  • Dashboards for feed transparency

Computer Science Education

  • Embedding ethics exercises in other courses (e.g. data science, programming, etc.)
  • Exercises for transparency, documentation, auditing in ML data and ML models
  • Tracking/measuring growth in students' ethical reasoning
  • Connecting real-world case studies with fiction