Andrew Aquilina

Hey! 👋 I’m Andrew. I am a Ph.D. student at the School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh. I am grateful to be working under the guidance of Yu-Ru Lin.

My research examines how socially-aware NLP systems assess and affect users’ mental well-being. I’ve been studying this by investigating the socially situated nature of psychological distress, the way language models support users over multi-turn conversations, and the risk scenarios that make chatbots harmful.

Outside of research, I’m into music, cooking, exploring new places… and anything creative to be honest (I’ve been trying out pastel painting lately)! I’m also from Malta, a small island in the Mediterranean.

Updates

• [April 2026] Excited to share that our workshop paper, “Auditing Support Strategies in LLMs through Grounded Multi-Turn Social Simulation”, has been selected for an oral presentation at the SocialLLM Workshop at ICWSM 2026! 🎉 See you in LA!
• [May 2025] Collaborated at SICSS-CMU with an interdisciplinary team to analyse how political perceptions of AI shifted before and after ChatGPT’s launch.
• [March 2025] Presented my first Ph.D. project as a poster at the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute Spring 2025 Symposium!

Education

Aug. 2024 - Apr. 2029 (Expected), Department of Informatics and Networked Systems, University of Pittsburgh,

Doctor of Philosophy in Information Science.

Aug. 2021 - Jun. 2022, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University,

Master of Science in Computer and System Sciences, Artificial Intelligence.

Oct. 2018 - Jun. 2021, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Malta,

Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence (with First Class honours).

Papers

Favourite song right now?

Blog

This is a space for my thoughts, research notes, and things I've been learning. Most importantly, it is a no AI zone 🚫 - meaning I cannot use it to ideate, draft, write, or proofread for me. It is organic! 🌱