About

Angela Xiao Wu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research broadly investigates the connections between media technologies, knowledge production, and politics. Her scholarly work has been recognized and supported by fellowships from prestigious organizations including the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Henry Luce Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Angela holds a Ph.D. in Media, Technology and Society from Northwestern University, a Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) in Communication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and a B.A. in Journalism and Communication with a Minor in Applied Computer Science from Tsinghua University. Prior to joining New York University, she served as an assistant professor at CUHK's School of Journalism & Communication.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Data Mining
• Social Science
• Political economy
• Data science
• Advertising
• Psychology
• Internet privacy
• Economics
• World Wide Web
• Business
• Law

Selected publications

• Genome-wide annotation and comparative analysis of miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) in six pear species

  Planta · 2025-06-16 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Practice and Impact of Using Fall Screening Tools in Emergency Medicine for Older Adults: A Scoping Review

  Journal of Applied Gerontology · 2025-02-12

  review

  Falls are a leading cause of injury among older adults in the United States which leads to significant morbidity and mortality. Though screening for fall risk is an important preventative measure in the emergency department (ED), fall screening tools' feasibility and utility remain a challenge in EDs. This scoping review aimed to identify the fall screening tools, their psychometric properties, their best practices, and their impact in the ED among patients aged 60 years and older. In the 25 publications included in this review, 6 functional assessments and 10 screening questionnaires were used. Even though this review found several tools that are easy to apply and have good psychometric properties in the ED setting, there is a need for increased feasibility, support, and effectiveness. Consistent education and resource allocation remains a challenge for fall screening. Future research needs to focus on optimizing fall screening tools and practices to improve fall prevention measures in ED.

  PublisherDOI

• Golden shares in Chinese platforms: The state as news licensor and minority shareholder

  Platforms & Society · 2025-07-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay tells the little-known story behind Beijing's “golden shares” in tech—one in which Chinese platforms' pursuit of profit from a restricted data stream, namely news, inadvertently led to the decimation of their global market capitalization. Because this outcome was unintended, its origins lie in plain sight, albeit in an overlooked corner: China's journalism licensing apparatus. The story foregrounds critical dimensions of platform value creation and its fragilities—often eclipsed in dominant narratives of “platform capitalism.” It also illuminates the “many hands” of the state, not typically associated with the Chinese government, that help shape the dynamics of global technocapitalism.

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the Urban Structure of Recreational Spaces through Residents’ Mobility Behavior Using Mobile Phone Signaling Data

  Journal of Urban Planning and Development · 2025-03-28 · 3 citations

  article

  With urban development taking the shape of a people-oriented approach, combinations of human behavior and physical spaces are under the spotlight of urban research. This study aims to explore the methodology of integrating residents’ recreational behaviors with the structure of urban physical spaces, thereby providing a reference for improving and optimizing existing recreational spaces. It delves into a method for identifying residents’ recreational activities through mobile phone signaling data. From the standpoint of recreational behaviors, this study establishes an analytical framework for the urban structure of recreational spaces, which encompasses activity intensity, space radiation capacity, and recreational–residential function structures. Employing Nanjing, China, for empirical analysis, the results are as follows: (1) The distribution of activity density is unbalanced, which displays a high degree of polarization in the downtown and a gradual decline from the downtown outward. (2) There is a lack of city-wide influential recreation center and a higher proportion of recreational activities occur in the subdistricts adjacent to residences. (3) The structural proximity of residential recreational functions is influenced by administrative divisions.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘China' as a ‘Black Box?' Rethinking methods through a sociotechnical perspective

  2025-06-09

  book-chapterSenior author

  Amid the ongoing pandemic and the so-called ‘New Cold War,’ physical mobility dwindles and political paranoia surges. China has been increasingly portrayed as a ‘black box’ in anglophone discourse, scholarly and popular alike. More than ever, digital platforms serve as the sites and means to know ‘the Chinese reality.’ In this paper, we mobilize insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially its epistemological and ontological reflections on the ‘black box’ metaphor, to confront the ongoing ‘blackboxing’ of China and, in tandem, the embrace of digital platform data as ‘open source’ to penetrate China from afar. Foregrounding the role of technological infrastructures, research positionality, and power relations in knowledge production, we situate this phenomenon in broader shifts in geopolitics and academic ecology. We then suggest alternative routes for empirical investigation: (1) to reembed Chinese platform data in their sociotechnical contexts, (2) to approach a ‘networked China’ at and across different scales, and relatedly, (3) to attune to obscured positionalities in fieldwork and analysis. Ultimately, we urge communities of China researchers to attend to the politics and materiality of knowledge production and resist the pervading ‘New Cold War’ framing.

  PublisherDOI

• Carbon decoupling and drivers decomposition under the carbon neutrality target: Evidence from county-level cities in China

  Resources Conservation and Recycling · 2025-06-16 · 12 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Politics of Platforms/ <i>Pingtai</i> 平台: A Chinese Genealogy

  Communication and the Public · 2024-09-16 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Drawing on archival research for a book-length history of Chinese media governance, this essay presents a Chinese lineage of platform, or pingtai , in the fashion of Gillespie’s famous explication of the “politics of platforms.” Gillespie demonstrates that in the mid-2000s, tech companies began to call themselves as “platforms,” to take advantage of the term’s connotation as open and neutral enabler of the ideal market. Taken as global, this rhetorical strategy features frequently in transnational platform studies. The politics of platform in China, however, does not subscribe to the “root paradigm” of liberal capitalism. The invocation of pingtai has a pedigree traceable to the intellectual zeitgeist of the 1980s and state informatization and e-government of the 1990s and 2000s, which projected a distinct imaginary about information technology in relation to social organization. It is these deep-seated normative expectations that are driving the dynamic of platform governance in contemporary China.

  PublisherDOI

• Delirium Screening Practices For Older Adults In Emergency Departments Across United States: A Scoping Review

  Journal of Geriatric Emergency Medicine · 2024-12-09

  reviewOpen accessSenior author

  Delirium is commonly missed among older patients in the Emergency Department (ED). Identifying and managing patients with delirium in ED is critical to help improve health outcomes and prevent falls and readmission. There are several validated delirium screening tools but their utilization for assessing delirium in emergency department settings are still under investigation. The overall purpose of this review was to summarize information on current screening practices for delirium among older adults (65 or older) in EDs across United States and to identify current gaps in knowledge and evidence to help inform future research and practice. A comprehensive literature search for a scoping review was performed using PubMed, Embase, and CINAHL. Studies describing the utilization of delirium screening tools in older adults aged 65 or older visiting emergency departments of US were included. A total of 1,430 studies were screened by title and abstract after the removal of duplicates and 10 publications were included in the final review out of the 14 full text publications which met our inclusion criteria. The Confusion Assessment Method (CAM) or its variants were commonly used as diagnostic tools or reference standards in the selected studies. However, the sensitivity and specificity of these tools varied. Most studies addressed the utilities of delirium screening tools but provided limited information on the frequency of their use in ED settings. Additionally, there was minimal data on the actual practices of delirium screening and the impact of such screenings in ED.

  PublisherDOI

• Evolutionary origin and gradual accumulation with plant evolution of the LACS family

  BMC Plant Biology · 2024-05-31 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: LACS (long-chain acyl-CoA synthetase) genes are widespread in organisms and have multiple functions in plants, especially in lipid metabolism. However, the origin and evolutionary dynamics of the LACS gene family remain largely unknown. RESULTS: Here, we identified 1785 LACS genes in the genomes of 166 diverse plant species and identified the clades (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) of six clades for the LACS gene family of green plants through phylogenetic analysis. Based on the evolutionary history of plant lineages, we found differences in the origins of different clades, with Clade IV originating from chlorophytes and representing the origin of LACS genes in green plants. The structural characteristics of different clades indicate that clade IV is relatively independent, while the relationships between clades (I, II, III) and clades (V, VI) are closer. Dispersed duplication (DSD) and transposed duplication (TRD) are the main forces driving the evolution of plant LACS genes. Network clustering analysis further grouped all LACS genes into six main clusters, with genes within each cluster showing significant co-linearity. Ka/Ks results suggest that LACS family genes underwent purifying selection during evolution. We analyzed the phylogenetic relationships and characteristics of six clades of the LACS gene family to explain the origin, evolutionary history, and phylogenetic relationships of different clades and proposed a hypothetical evolutionary model for the LACS family of genes in plants. CONCLUSIONS: Our research provides genome-wide insights into the evolutionary history of the LACS gene family in green plants. These insights lay an important foundation for comprehensive functional characterization in future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Analyzing CASIS Policy Data with AI: Sentiment Trends and Topic Modeling

  Research Square · 2024-11-15

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Harsh Taneja

  23 shared

• Jianguo Zhao

  Institute of Zoology

  6 shared

• Yu Wang

  Hefei University of Technology

  6 shared

• Taoran Shi

  6 shared

• Liang Xu

  Qingdao Agricultural University

  4 shared

• Stephanie Edgerly

  Northwestern University

  4 shared

• Zechun Huang

  Fujian Provincial Hospital

  4 shared

• Yanfang Wang

  Chinese Academy of Sciences

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Media, Technology, and Society

  Northwestern University

  2014

Awards & honors

• Outstanding Article Award 2015, International Communication…