Social Futures Lab

As part of our series “Democratizing AI for the Global Majority,” Teanna Barrett (@bound4nostar.bsky.social) examines the politics and power asymmetries shaping AI development in Africa today, and how developing local AI ecosystems might offer a path for progress. datasociety.net/points/towar...

Who Puts the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) have a longstanding tradition of interrogating the values that underlie systems in order to create novel and accessibl...

Yesterday, as part of the #CSCW2025 virtual session, Philip Baillargeon, a summer REU intern with us last year, presented his DEI Recognition award paper: Who Puts the "Social" in "Social Computing"?: Using A Neurodiversity Framing to Review Social Computing Research. dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

earlier this summer I published my first paper of my phd! ✨ a qualitative study on how creative writers are using AI in their writing and what their strategies were in order to align with their personal writing values

Wow, really excited to have our paper highlighted by Alondra Nelson! I'll be presenting this paper at @facct.bsky.social next Thursday at 9am (local time) for anyone interested in learning more! A paper thread is soon to come 👀

The first page of an academic paper with a figure depicting the use of Canvil, a Figma widget for designerly adaptation of LLMs, along with the names of the 6 authors.

🤖LLMs are being integrated everywhere, but how do we ensure they're delivering meaningful user experiences?

In our #chi2025 paper, we empower designers to think about this via 🎨designerly adaptation🎨 of LLMs and built a Figma widget to help!

📜 arxiv.org/abs/2401.09051
🧵👇

AI agents are entering online social spaces, but often their messages feel generic or intrusive. In our #CHI25 paper, we introduce Social-RAG, a workflow that grounds AI generations in the specific group context by retrieving from the group’s interaction history. 🧵(1/9)

Do you make custom feeds on Bluesky? We'd love to hear about your experiences as part of a research project at @uofwa.bsky.social @socialfutureslab.bsky.social ! Come chat with us for 45 mins and get $20 gift card. Express your interest here: forms.gle/CtoZTwCovTv8....

If you are passionate about the AI's potential to help **over-worked** public defenders, please share this! If you happen to have work experience in the public sector, please sign up for our interviews! 🤩

Can LLM prompting help social media users create and iterate on their content filters more easily?

In our #CHI2025 paper, we compared in an experiment three authoring strategies:
🤖 Prompting LLM
🔎 Labeling examples for ML classifiers
📐 Authoring keyword rules

(🧵1/N)

Screenshot of the first page of the paper SPICA: Retrieving Scenarios for Pluralistic In-Context Alignment

In-context learning can be an effective way to conduct value alignment of LLMs through examples, but when there are multiple pluralistic groups, are the best examples for one group also the ones for another?

We explore this in our paper 🌟SPICA🌟
(🧵1/9)

Are any of you content creators on YouTube or can share this with any creators on YouTube? We're looking to test out a system we've built to enable creators to make custom filters for their comments, no technical skills needed! We offer $20 for a 1 hour remote session where you can try out the tool.

Allen School professor Amy X. Zhang receives Sloan Research Fellowship for empowering users to make ‘our online spaces as rich and varied as our offline ones’ - Allen School News As the head of the Allen School’s Social Futures Lab, professor Amy X. Zhang’s research draws on the design of offline public institutions and communities to then develop new social computing systems ...

When it comes to social platforms, #UWAllen prof & 2025 #SloanFellow @amyxzhang.bsky.social seeks to empower users and “make our online spaces as rich and varied as our offline ones.” Learn more about her work in the @socialfutureslab.bsky.social: news.cs.washington.edu/2025/02/24/a... #UWdiscovers

52 Finalists Named for the 2025 Hertz Fellowships | Fannie and John Hertz Foundation The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation today announced 52 finalists for the 2025 Hertz Fellowships in applied sciences, mathematics and engineering. Selected from more than 1,000 applicants and represen...

Congrats to our undergrad Andre Ye for being named a Hertz Fellow finalist (and only finalist from UW)! www.hertzfoundation.org/news/52-fina...

Three UW scientists named Sloan Fellows Three University of Washington faculty members have been awarded early-career fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The new Sloan Fellows, announced Feb. 18, are Amy L. Orsborn, the Clare.....

Zhang, whose research aims to empower people to take control of their online social experiences, is one of 3 @uofwa.bsky.social faculty to earn Sloan Fellowships this year, joined by @neuroamyo.bsky.social and @uwchemistry.bsky.social ’s Diane Xiao: www.washington.edu/news/2025/02... #UWdiscovers /2

2025 Fellows | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Our mission is to make the world a better place through the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Huge congratulations to #UWAllen professor @axz.bsky.social of @socialfutureslab.bsky.social and Ph.D. alum Lydia Chilton, professor at @columbiauniversity.bsky.social, on their selection as 2025 @sloanfoundation.bsky.social #SloanFellows in computer science! sloan.org/fellowships/... #ThisIsUW 1/2

A screenshot of the first page of an academic figure with a list of authors and a high-level schematic figure describing Cocoa, an interactive system for co-planning and co-execution with AI agents.

🤔Giving complex tasks to AI agents is easy—getting them to do exactly what you want isn’t. How can human-AI collaboration give us more reliable & steerable agents?

🍫Introducing Cocoa, our new interaction paradigm for balancing human & AI agency in complex human-AI workflows. 🧵

Tomorrow at #GROUP2025, @jina.bsky.social will present a paper on her interviews with people who voluntarily respond to misinformation online and their membership in different communities dedicated to supporting this: the Twitter/X Community Notes Discord, r/QAnonCasualties, and r/vaxxhappened.

LLMs as Research Tools: A Large Scale Survey of Researchers' Usage and Perceptions The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led many researchers to consider their usage for scientific work. Some have found benefits using LLMs to augment or automate aspects of their research pipe...

Hi everyone, I am excited to share our large-scale survey study with 800+ researchers, which reveals researchers’ usage and perceptions of LLMs as research tools, and how the usage and perceptions differ based on demographics.

See results in comments!

🔗 Arxiv link: arxiv.org/abs/2411.05025

Hi Bluesky (+ many friendly familiar faces). I'm a researcher in HCI + ML, assistant prof at Simon Fraser University up in BC, and working on "healthy data flow". Doing a quick thread recapping some recent writing (blogs, pre-prints, etc.) that capture the things I work on and talk about!

This platform is already bubbling with people who care about reimagining the social internet into something better.

Here's a starter pack. Reply with more folks we should add!

Are you a researcher in CS or a CS-adjacent field who uses planning docs to organize your research? Want to try out our new AI agent-powered system for working with research planning docs in a paid user study? Details and sign up here! forms.gle/TGzKFaFYs6x7...

With oh so many social apps today, it's time for us social computing builders and designers to take a pause, zoom ALL the way out, and also take a trip down memory lane...

Check out @mbernst.bsky.social's talk on Wed at #CSCW2024 9:00 – 10:30 "Session 1d: Understanding and Shaping Online Behavior"!

The first author, Connie Moon Sehat, will be giving a talk on this paper on Tuesday at #cscw2024 in 16:30 – 18:00 Session 4d: "Misinformation and Fact Checking"! Also go talk to her about our new nonprofit building tools for productive public dialogue ➡️ discourselabs.org

Screenshot of the title, authors, and abstract for the linked research paper

If you're attending #CSCW2024, check out this work which will be presented at noon on Monday by @ruotongw.bsky.social !

Our paper proposes a design concept 🌉meeting bridges🌉, or information artifacts that facilitate post-meeting understanding and collaboration. Arxiv link: arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03259

The winning ideas at the UW computer science school annual research showcase From left: Magdalena Balazinska, professor and director of the Allen School; Jon Turow, partner, Madrona; Vidya Srinivas, Ph.D. student, Allen School;

Congrats to @ruotongw.bsky.social for winning the Madrona Prize at the Allen School Research Day! She won it for her pair of projects examining team communication and collaboration in remote work 👏👏👏 www.geekwire.com/2024/the-win...

Please see our upcoming COLM paper envisioning LLMs for critical thinking! 💭We report on some interesting interviews with philosophers aka “professional thinkers” - turns out they don’t like LLMs very much for this work! 🤔

First page of the paper. Title: "Misinformation as a Harm: Structured Approaches for Fact-Checking Prioritization"

It seems obvious that we should prioritize addressing misinformation that is more harmful. But what makes something more likely to be harmful? Can we can reason about it before the harm has occurred?

📣 In an upcoming #CSCW2024 paper, we present a taxonomy of *Misinformation as a Harm* ➡️

Can provenance save us from a barrage of synthetic media? While provenance can indeed help people better calibrate trust and accuracy perceptions of media, it can also come with its own risks of misinterpretation

Concerned about what’s real vs fake, esp after seeing Sora videos? In a new blog post, I (w/ Jina Yoon & @axz.bsky.social) summarize our recent research with the C2PA on how media provenance standards impact credibility perceptions in social media feeds: www.cip.uw.edu/2024/02/21/p...

The Form-From model describes social media designs along two main dimensions: (1)~The \textit{form} or shape that the content takes, either flat as in a chatroom or threaded as in individual posts with linked comments, and (2)~\textit{from} where a user receives content, as from spaces such as channels, from networks such as a friend graph, or from a platform-wide commons such as an algorithmic For You page. For simplicity, examples in this figure are coded as of their design at their initial launch.

What unifies, and what distinguishes, social media designs? Are all the Twitter spinoffs actually meaningfully different designs from each other? Form-From is a design space from @axz.bsky.social, myself, @karger.bsky.social, and Mark Ackerman that will appear at #cscw2024: arxiv.org/abs/2402.05388

Labeling AI-Generated Images on Facebook, Instagram and Threads | Meta Nick Clegg offers a new approach to identifying and labeling AI-generated content.

Meta is rolling out labels for genAI media! See our recent paper studying the design and impact of provenance indicators - we found they help ppl spot deceptive media w/ some caveats. w/ @kjfeng.bsky.social and the C2PA UX working group: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

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