Desmond Ong

Desmond C. Ong, Ph.D.

Researching AI & emotions at the intersection of
cognitive science, affective science, and computer science.

I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and am associated with the inter-departmental Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics group at UT. Prior to joining UT, I was at the National University of Singapore and the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR Singapore. I earned my Ph.D. in Psychology and a Master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. I hold an undergraduate degree in Economics (summa cum laude) and Physics (magna cum laude) from Cornell University.

View Research → Google Scholar CV (PDF)

News & Updates

Nov 2025

2026 Early Career in Affective Science Award

I am honored to receive this Award from the Society for Affective Science

Aug 2025

Josh Holahan Teaching Excellence Award

I received the Department of Psychology Excellence in Teaching Award

June 2025

NSF CAREER Award

I received an NSF CAREER Award for "Quantifying Social and Affective Cognition in Humans and Machines"

March 2025

Program Co-Chair, SAS 2026

I will be co-organizing the 2026 Society for Affective Science Annual Conference (Pittsburgh, March 12-14)

Jan 2025

Editor's Choice Award

My paper with Tiffany Doan and Yang Wu received the Editor's Choice Award at Psychological Review

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For Researchers

Advancing the science of emotion and AI

Explore our lab's work on computational models of affective cognition, empathy, AI systems that understand human emotional experiences, AI Ethics, and more.

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For Organizations

Bringing emotion science into your AI strategy

I help organizations understand the human side of AI: from building products grounded in the latest affective science and AI technology to navigating the ethical implications of AI and emotions.
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Research Areas

💭

Computational Models of Affective Cognition

Building formal models of how people reason about and predict other's emotional states, using tools like probabilistic programming and Bayesian inference.

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🤝

Empathy and Empathic Accuracy

Studying how people empathize with others, including behavioral and neural mechanisms that support accurate empathic inferences.

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🤖

AI & Emotion Understanding

Developing AI systems that can recognize, understand, and respond to human emotions.
Most recently, we have studied how people perceive LLM-generated empathy ("LLMpathy"); AI sycophancy and its effects on mental health.

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📊

Using Large Language Models in Psychology

Applying advanced AI models, including Large Language Models, in psychology can allow us to advance our understanding of human behavior at scale and enable tailored interventions.

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Teaching

PSY 371Q: Ethics in Behavioral Data Science

Next offered: Fall 2025
Past offerings: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023

An exploration of various ethical issues in behavioral data science, including privacy, algorithmic bias, transparency, and the responsible use of AI in understanding human behavior.

PSY 371T: Text Analysis for Behavioral Data Science

Next offered: Spring 2026
Past offerings: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023

An introduction to computational text analysis methods for behavioral research, covering word-count methods, statistical NLP approaches, deep learning and large language model prompting. Taught in Python.

Past course:

Affective Computing

Last Taught: Fall 2021, Fall 2020.

An introduction to affective computing, including affect recognition technologies and affect generation technologies.

Past course:

Introduction to statistics

Last Taught: Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2019.

Introduction to statistics for freshmen in an information systems major. Covered topics like: linear regression, time series, linear and integer optimization. Taught in R. (Unfinished e-book)

Archived News

Sep 2022
Best Paper Award: My paper was selected for the Best of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 2021 Paper Collection
Aug 2022
I started at UT Austin as an Assistant Professor of Psychology
June 2022
I received a Faculty Teaching Excellence Award from the National University of Singapore
Oct 2021
My paper received the Best Paper Award at ACII 2021 (International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction)
Aug 2021
My student Kong Yan San won the NUS School of Computing (SoC) Outstanding Computing Project Prize
Aug 2020
My student Terence Lim won the NUS Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Prize