Desmond C. Ong
Scholar

Desmond C. Ong

Google Scholar ID: BrgeiJAAAAAJ
Assistant Professor of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin
Affective CognitionEmotionsEmpathyAffective Computing
Citations & Impact
All-time
Citations
3,594
 
H-index
28
 
i10-index
51
 
Publications
20
 
Co-authors
16
list available
Resume (English only)
Academic Achievements
  • Received NSF CAREER Award in June 2025 for project: 'CAREER: HCC: Quantifying Social and Affective Cognition in Humans and Machines'
  • Awarded Josh Holahan Department of Psychology Excellence in Teaching Award in Aug 2025
  • Paper with Tiffany Doan and Yang Wu received Editor's Choice Award from Psychological Review in Jan 2025
  • Paper 'Applying Probabilistic Programming to Affective Computing' selected for Best of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 2021 Paper Collection (Sep 2022)
  • Published review article on using LLMs in psychology in Nature Reviews Psychology (Oct 2023)
  • Program Co-Chair of the 2026 Society for Affective Science Annual Conference
  • Organizer of CogSci 2023; Program Co-Chair of ACII 2022; Ethics Chair of ACII 2023
  • Pioneered Ethical Impact Statements for ACII conferences with guidelines and checklists
  • Research funded by Toyota Research Institute, Microsoft Research, AI Singapore, and Singapore’s National Robotics Programme
Research Experience
  • Former Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore
  • Former Research Scientist at the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR Singapore
  • Collaborating with Microsoft Research on 'Large Language Models and Digital Empathy' (started Oct 2023)
  • Collaborating with Toyota Research Institute on interventions to increase empathy (started Apr 2023)
  • Member of the Ethics Committee of The Hume Initiative, working on ethical pathways for empathic AI