Assistant Professor
Stephen Leacock Building, Room 839
855 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2T7
Email: skyler.wang [at] mcgill.ca
Office hours (by appointment): https://calendly.com/skylrwang
Research Areas
AI, Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, STS, Economic Sociology, Gender & Sexuality
Biography
Ph.D. Sociology, UC Berkeley, 2023
Skyler Wang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University, specializing in AI, technology, and human-computer interaction. Before joining McGill, he earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley and was a Sociologist at Meta’s Foundational AI Research (FAIR) lab.
Skyler’s research critically examines sociotechnical and AI systems' inner workings and social impact. Using mixed methods, experiments, and STS approaches, he investigates the epistemic cultures of machine learning and human-machine interactions in health and relational contexts. One branch of his empirical work explores how digital platforms—such as network hospitality, online dating, and AI companions—reshape modern intimacy and relationships. In applied AI, he focuses on improving online accessibility by developing socially and ethically grounded multimodal translation systems for speakers of underserved languages.
One of Skyler’s current empirical projects addresses the emergence of human-AI intimacy. Rapid advancements in large language models, multimodal processing, and hardware capabilities have given rise to increasingly sophisticated and high-fidelity artificial companions. Relying on in-person and digital ethnographies, Skyler explores how human-AI interactions produce the future of on-demand intimacy, where intimacy can be acquired in a truly frictionless manner. Ultimately, this work advances our understanding of how norms around intimacy and relationships evolve in response to the growing presence of AI in everyday life.
Skyler’s first book project, “Sharing Bodies in the Sharing Economy,” draws on over a hundred interviews with members of the network hospitality platform Couchsurfing.org to explore how individuals navigate reciprocity and sexual ambiguity when socializing in a hybrid (online-to-offline) gift economy. The book explores how this gifting context reveals broader tensions in the politics of “sharing” in the platform era. It argues that excessively social platforms can create interactional risks that, paradoxically, undermine rather than enhance sociality.
On the side of applied AI research, Skyler develops socially and ethically grounded multimodal translation systems for those communicating with underserved languages. Notably, his co-developed project No Language Left Behind, which doubled the number of languages made available in machine translation, was published in Nature. His other project, SeamlessM4T, a foundational multilingual and multitasking model that translates and transcribes across speech and text for 100 languages, was awarded one of TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023 and can also be found in Nature.
Skyler’s research has been featured in journals such as Nature, Big Data & Society, Information, Communication, and Society, PLOS One, Sex Roles, Archives of Sexual Behavior, and Sociological Perspectives, HCI & machine learning proceedings such as CSCW, ACL, and NAACL, and media outlets such as Reuters, NPR, CNN, WIRED, The Verge, Vox, Quartz, and GQ.
Selected Publications
For an updated list, please visit Skyler’s Google Scholar page.
Wang, Skyler. 2025. “Data Auxiliaries: Making Online Dating ‘Work’ with Dating Spreadsheets.” Information, Communication & Society: 1-18.
Bell, Samuel, Mariano Coria Meglioli, Megan Richards, Eduardo Sánchez, Christophe Ropers, Skyler Wang, Adina Williams, Levent Sagun, and Marta R. Costa-jussà. 2025. “On the Role of Speech Data in Reducing Toxicity Detection Bias.” Forthcoming in NAACL 2025.
Seamless Communication Team, Loïc Barrault, Yu-An Chung, Mariano Cora Meglioli, David Dale, Ning Dong, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Hady Elsahar, Hongyu Gong, Kevin Heffernan, John Hoffman, Christopher Klaiber, Pengwei Li, Daniel Licht, Jean Maillard, Alice Rakotoarison, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Guillaume Wenzek, Ethan Ye, Bapi Akula, Peng-Jen Chen, Naji El Hachem, Brian Ellis, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Justin Haaheim, Prangthip Hansanti, Russ Howes, Bernie Huang, Min-Jae Hwang, Hirofumi Inaguma, Somya Jain, Elahe Kalbassi, Amanda Kallet, Ilia Kulikov, Janice Lam, Daniel Li, Xutai Ma, Ruslan Mavlyutov, Benjamin Peloquin, Mohamed Ramadan, Abinesh Ramakrishnan, Anna Sun, Kevin Tran, Tuan Tran, Igor Tufanov, Vish Vogeti, Carleigh Wood, Yilin Yang, Bokai Yu, Pierre Andrews*, Can Balioglu*, Marta R. Costa-jussà*, Onur Celebi*, Maha Elbayad*, Cynthia Gao*, Francisco Guzmán*, Justine Kao*, Ann Lee*, Alexandre Mourachko*, Juan Pino*, Sravya Popuri*, Christophe Ropers*, Safiyyah Saleem*, Holger Schwenk*, Paden Tomasello*, Changhan Wang*, Jeff Wang*, and Skyler Wang*. 2025. “Joint speech and text machine translation for up to 100 languages.” Nature 637: 587–593. (*research and engineering leadership)
Wang, Skyler*, Ned Cooper*, and Margaret Eby. 2024. “From Human-Centered to Social-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Assessing ChatGPT’s Impact through Disruptive Events.” Big Data & Society 11(4):1-14. (*equal authorship)
Bell, Samuel and Skyler Wang. 2024. “The Multiple Dimensions of Spuriousness in Machine Learning.” arXiv:2312.05187.
Wang, Skyler. 2024. “How Platform Exchange and Safeguards Matter: The Case of Sexual Risk and Trust in Airbnb and Couchsurfing.” Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing., 8, CSCW1, Article 204 (April 2024), 23 pages.
Babcock, Nikole, Jose Zarate, Skyler Wang, Shannon D. Snapp, Ryan J. Watson, and Lisa A. Eaton. 2024. “How LGBTQ+ Young Adults Navigate Personal Risk in App-Based Hookups: The Safety Spectrum Theory.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 53: 2347-2359.
Phillip Rust, Bowen Shi, Skyler Wang, Necati Cihan Camgoz, and Jean Maillard. 2024. “Towards Privacy-Aware Sign Language Translation at Scale.” In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8624–8641, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
NLLB Team, Marta R. Costa-jussà*, James Cross*, Onur Çelebi*, Maha Elbayad*, Kenneth Heafield*, Kevin Heffernan*, Elahe Kalbassi*, Janice Lam*, Daniel Licht*, Jean Maillard*, Anna Sun*, Skyler Wang*, Guillaume Wenzek*, Al Youngblood*, Bapi Akula, Loic Barrault, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Prangthip Hansanti, John Hoffman, Semarley Jarrett, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Dirk Rowe, Shannon Spruit, Chau Tran, Pierre Andrews, Necip Fazil Ayan, Shruti Bhosale, Sergey Edunov, Angela Fan, Cynthia Gao, Vedanuj Goswami, Francisco Guzmán, Philipp Koehn, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Holger Schwenk, and Jeff Wang. 2024. “Scaling Neural Machine Translation to 200 Languages.” Nature 630: 841-846. (*equal authorship)
Yong, Zheng-Xin, Ruochen Zhang, Jessica Zosa Forde, Skyler Wang, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Genta Indra Winata, Lintang Sutawika, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Long Phan, Yin Lin Tan, and Alham Fikri Aji. 2023. “Prompting Multilingual Large Language Models to Generate Code-Mixed Texts: The Case of South East Asian Languages.” Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching, pp. 43–63. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Mukherjee, Meghna*, Margaret Eby*, Skyler Wang*, Armando Lara-Millán, and Maya Earle. 2022. “Medicalizing Risk: How Experts and Consumers Manage Uncertainty in Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Health Testing.” PLOS One 17(8):1-20. (*equal authorship)
Wang, Skyler. 2022. “Migrant Allies & Sexual Remittances: How International Students Change the Sexual Attitudes of Those Who Remain Behind.” Sociological Perspectives 65(2):328–349.
Watson, Ryan J., Shannon Snapp*, and Skyler Wang*. 2017. “What We Know and Where To Go From Here: A Review of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth Hookup Literature.” Sex Roles 77(11- 12):801-811. (*equal authorship)
Teaching
Undergraduate:
SOCI235 (“Technology & Society”)
SOCI301 (“Artificial Intelligence & Society”)
SOCI345 (“Social and Intimate Relationships in the Digital Age”)
Graduate:
SOCI505 (“Sociology of Digital Intimacy”)
SOCI601 (“Qualitative Research Methods 2”—Ethnographic Methods)