Ken Holstein

🎭 How do LLMs (mis)represent culture?
🧮 How often?
🧠 Misrepresentations = missing knowledge? spoiler: NO!

At #CHI2026 we are bringing ✨TALES✨ a participatory evaluation of cultural (mis)reps & knowledge in multilingual LLM-stories for India

📜 arxiv.org/abs/2511.21322

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Learn more about our group here: www.thecoalalab.com

For this postdoc, there's flexibility to scope a project together around mutual interests. Depending on your interests, there will also be opportunities to collaborate with PhD students and faculty collaborators across universities.

The start date is flexible, between August to November 2026.

I am recruiting a postdoc in HCI & AI!


Interested in augmenting human thinking and learning, futures of work & education, participatory AI, collective intelligence, or related topics? Please get in touch! This 2-year position will be based at a top university in Europe (email or DM for more info)

Microsoft Research NYC is hiring a researcher in the space of AI and society!

Submit to the 6th Human-Centered Explainable AI (HCXAI) workshop at CHI 2026 in Barcelona!

🗓️ Deadline: Feb 19, 2026
📝 2-5 page single column papers (excluding refs)
🌐 hcxai.jimdosite.com

w/ co-organizers Nick von Felten, Leon Reicherts, @anjali-singh.bsky.social, Tony Zhang, Peter Dalsgaard, Yue Fu, Zhitong Klara Guan, Jessica He, Haotian Li, Srishti Palani, Gonzalo Ramos, @seanrintel.bsky.social, @advaitsarkar.bsky.social, Anuschka Schmitt, & @levlevlev.bsky.social

The Tools for Thought workshop at #CHI2026 is now accepting submissions! (due Feb 12, 2026 AoE)

We invite work that explores how to effectively design, evaluate, or apply *AI-based tools that augment and protect human cognition*.

For more, see: ai-tools-for-thought.github.io/workshop/

In a new blog post, I contrast two flavors of empiricism: the one practiced in the social sciences and the one practiced in ML/CS.

I argue that we need both, given that CS is increasingly about "claims," and not just constructing artifacts.

doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

In case you missed it in the flurry of NeurIPS activity, @hannawallach.bsky.social and I recorded a (video) podcast on women in ML, friendship, research, and careers.

Spread the word! 📢 The FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics) group at @msftresearch.bsky.social in NYC is hiring interns and postdocs to start in summer 2026! 🎉

Apply by *December 15* for full consideration.

How public involvement can improve the science of AI | PNAS As AI systems from decision-making algorithms to generative AI are deployed more widely, computer scientists and social scientists alike are being ...

Can public involvement in AI evaluation improve the science? Or does it compromise quality, speed, cost?

In @pnas.org, Megan Price & I summarize challenges of AI evaluation, review strengths/weaknesses, & suggest how participatory methods can improve the science of AI
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I am beyond trilled to present two 🏆 award-winning papers 🏆 @acm-cscw.bsky.social this year CSCW in beautiful Bergen, Norway!! Broadly, I'm excited to chat about responsible AI, AI auditing and red-teaming, and human-AI interaction. Say hi if we run into each other!

The point is to understand Machines can’t make sense of the world for us.

Inspired by a post by @bayesianboy.bsky.social , I wrote something on the differences between information and insight — and why understanding remains a very human act

A subtle aspect of predictive modeling is target variable construction: the process of translating a latent, unobservable concept like "healthcare need" into a prediction target

But how does target variable construction unfold in practice, and how can we better support it going forward? #CSCW2025 🧵

LLM safety work often reasons over high-level policies (be helpful & polite), but must tackle on-the-ground cases (unsolicited money advice when stocks are mentioned). This can feel like driving on an unfamiliar road guided by a generic driver’s manual instead of a map. We introduce: Policy Maps 🗺️

There is a lot of talk and effort to figure out how genAI is different (I am also guilty of this!) -- the reality is that genAI is not that different and genAI is not that new either; it was hard to evaluate in the past, and it is still as hard to evaluate now #facct2025

Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems Is a Social Science Measurement Challenge The measurement tasks involved in evaluating generative AI (GenAI) systems lack sufficient scientific rigor, leading to what has been described as "a tangle of sloppy tests [and] apples-to-oranges com...

Check out the camera-ready version of our ICML position paper ("Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems Is a Social Science Measurement Challenge") to learn more!!! arxiv.org/abs/2502.00561

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Somewhat oddly, the Trump regime's initial moves to cut science funding went very broad. This is catalyzing solidarity & advocacy around the value of science (see comms featuring cancer cures & tech innovation). But their next move may be to try to drive a wedge b/w "good science" & "bad science".

How is fascism going for you? Here’s how it’s going for me. A catalog of impacts thus far from this administration’s horrors.

How's fascism going for you? medium.com/bits-and-beh...

Securing your phone before entering the USA. 🧵
At CDC we travel around the globe to confront health threats and have never worried about returning home. Yet more researchers, including US Citizens, are having their phones searched at Customs.

security.ucop.edu/resources/tr...

Unidentified men grabbing someone off the street and putting her in a car because she wrote an op-Ed. This as flatly authoritarian as anything we’ve seen in this country in a very long time.

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past

1. @alisongopnik.bsky.social, Cosma Shalizi, James Evans and myself have a new piece in Science on "AI" Large Models, pushing back against much of the collective wisdom about what they can and can't do. Official below, unpaywalled at henryfarrell.net/large-ai-mod... . So why this now?

ACM CHI 2025 PolicyCraft: Supporting Collaborative and Participatory Policy Design through Case-Grounded Deliberation Tzu-Sheng Kuo, Quan Ze Chen, Amy X. Zhang, Jane Hsieh, Haiyi Zhu, Kenneth Holstein

How can we help communities collaboratively shape policies that impact them?

In our #CHI2025 paper, we present PolicyCraft, a system that supports ✨collaborative policy design✨ through case-grounded deliberation.

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Image of the first page of the CHI 2025 paper titled "A Taxonomy of Linguistic Expressions That Contribute To Anthropomorphism of Language Technologies" by authors Alicia DeVrio, Myra Cheng, Lisa Egede, Alexandra Olteanu, & Su Lin Blodgett

How can we better think and talk about human-like qualities attributed to language technologies like LLMs? In our #CHI2025 paper, we taxonomize how text outputs from cases of user interactions with language technologies can contribute to anthropomorphism. arxiv.org/abs/2502.09870 1/n

Requiem for 18F A small government unit did what DOGE is pretending to do

"18F works just how Musk + team pretend that they want gov't to work. But when his team found it, they destroyed it. 18F’s work is evidence that gov't works well, which undermines their msg that it doesn’t. 18F’s parent agency, the [GSA], turns a profit as an agency. So it has to be destroyed too."

#Pittsburgh friends, Join me on Friday #standupforscience2025. Our city will be devastated if our universities lose critical funding. Our universities are top 10 employers, the entire city’s economy is dependent on science funding. www.eventbrite.com/e/stand-up-f...

Expanding Local Government Capacity for AI Procurement and Use As new waves of AI technologies continue to enter the public sector, touching a breadth of services critical to the welfare of the American people, this center of excellence will help maintain high st...

🏛️ How can we ensure that AI enhances, rather than harms, public services?

In our policy memo, published with the Federation of American Scientists (@scientistsorg.bsky.social), we provide recommendations for how the fed gov't could help state & local agencies make better AI procurement decisions.🧵

‘Constitutional Crisis’ Is an Understatement It’s the hottest, and most useless, buzz phrase of the moment.

Joseph Ura: “A president refusing to abide by the law or the Constitution and ignoring court orders to stop his illegitimate actions would be a constitutional crisis like a bank robbery is a cash flow crisis.” www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

U.S. weighs destroying $500 million in stockpiled covid tests The government is reviewing proposals to shut down the program that ships free covid tests to American households and has been considering destroying 160 million tests.

Friendly reminder to get your free Covid tests before they throw them away.

Covidtests.gov

wapo.st/42VLGQh