We are excited to announce CSCW's 2025's Lasting Impact Award winners. Congrats to Jill Dimond, Michaelanne Thomas, Daphne LaRose, and Amy Bruckman who will receive the award for their 2013 paper "Hollaback!: The Role of Collective Storytelling Online in a Social Movement Organization." #csccw2025

Crunching away on a paper for #CHI2026 about online communities, moderation, or sociolinguistics? You may be want to check out recent work led by @galenweld.bsky.social on predicting SOVC within subreddits based on the style and structure of conversations. arxiv.org/abs/2508.08596

"Perhaps over the longer term, we will need some hybrid of computer science and social science that is the equivalent of economics, political science and sociology." Yes, I agree!

📣 Yale workshop, Oct 16-17! 📣 How could/should content ranking work? What's new in content moderation? How can platforms promote civility? Hosted by Yale's Institute for Foundations of Data Science (FDS). Great speakers! Submit posters by 9/22! Spread the word! yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgori...

I am recruiting PhD students this year! Our research group is holding an info session in a few weeks - details are at blog.communitydata.science/prospective-... , including a sign-up link.

Some nice coverage of our paper (and award) from ICWSM back in June. Big congrats to @lleibm.bsky.social on his successful first author paper, and big things to @timalthoff.bsky.social and @axz.bsky.social for their support as always!

Some notes on what I found interesting about this study + reflections: - writers set boundaries on how they used AI to maintain their values; however, these changed over time as they saw how good models could be, or they'd pull back frm overuse. boundary erosion or renegotiation?

Just cited for a submission going in this week. Awesome work. I’m really fascinated about preservation of voice and values while using llms. This was a great glimpse into that.

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

Job alert! 🌸🏔️ The UW iSchool is hiring for *two* TT faculty positions, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, broadly defined. It's pretty here! Applications due November 15th 2025 (priority deadline). Link: apply.interfolio.com/171020

I traded in my title from asst. to asst. (aka I have tenure!) 😜 The last 5 years have been a roller coaster, and I have so many mentors, students, collaborators to thank ❤️ I hope our work at the @socialfutureslab.bsky.social has at some point been interesting, inspiring, informative, etc. for you.

Wonder why Claude decided to report users to the authorities? It might be because its constitution says Claude should choose responses in the long-term interest of humanity! But what if we could leverage computational and legal tools to "debug" or "lint" AI rules/laws for ambiguity? 🧵!

I am in (for the very first time) Taiwan!!! I've been wanting to come here ever since CSCW 2022 was supposed to be here and then went remote last-minute due to COVID restrictions at the time. Let me know if you have any unusual/random/out-of-the-way recommendations!

#UWAllen’s @edlazowska.bsky.social ‬has been a fixture on the WA innovation scene longer than Microsoft. After nearly half a century as UW educator, researcher & local tech champion, he’s logging off from official duties—but not shutting it down just yet. #UWserves www.geekwire.com/2025/after-4...

📢 New paper, published by @knightcolumbia.org We often talk about AI agents augmenting vs. automating work, but how exactly can different configurations of human-agent interaction look like? We introduce a 5-level framework for AI agent autonomy to unpack this. 🧵👇

In an essay for our AI & Democratic Freedoms series, @kjfeng.me, @axz.bsky.social (both of @socialfutureslab.bsky.social), & David W. McDonald outline a framework for levels of #AI agent autonomy that can be used to support the responsible deployment of AI agents. knightcolumbia.org/content/leve...

If you're at #ICWSM, be sure to swing by the spotlight session after lunch to check our our work on Reddit rules with @axz.bsky.social , @timalthoff.bsky.social and Leon Leibmann! Leon is presenting an analysis of 68k rules across 5 yrs, connecting them to important community outcomes. 

Super surprised and honored to receive the single Best Paper award at #ICWSM this year (out of 138 papers) for my work with @lleibm.bsky.social, @axz.bsky.social, @timalthoff.bsky.social on Reddit Rules! bsky.app/profile/gale...

Check out this paper being presented at #FAccT2025 in the "Normative Challenges to AI" session on Wed at 11! Teanna is a rising star in the field of data ethics - she's just wrapping up her first year of PhD but it's already her 2nd paper at FAccT!

This upcoming #FAccT2025 paper was w/ an amazing duo of undergrads @andreiskiii.bsky.social @andrewshawuw.bsky.social & deeply fuses philosophy with human-AI interaction design. "Unsettling the hegemony of intention" indeed! 😛 It also won the undergrad thesis award at UW 🏅 arxiv.org/abs/2502.15242

Excellent story in @theverge.com today on the impact of AI-Mediated Communication. Quotes me but the best line is the closer from the writer, Sara Parker.

NEW! ✨️African Data Ethics: A Discursive Framework for Black Decolonial Data Science✨️ is a theorectical knowledge contribution that presents one of the first collations of African data ethics perspectives for the pluralistic AI ethics community.

What are the African values and ethical theories that can inform responsible data science practices in Africa?...We conduct a thematic analysis [and]...derived an ethical framework consisting of six major principles rooted in the realities of data science work in Africa arxiv.org/html/2502.16...

Peony season is best season (also overlaps with lychee season 😍)

I saw Nils Frahm for the first time last night at the Paramount, and it was mindblowingly good. There were two standing ovations! If curious, I found an online recording of his concerts which is pretty similar to what we saw (tho better live of course): www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPz...

I enjoyed reading and providing some feedback on this report. It's got a lot of practical, common sense ideas and recommendations for addressing online abuse by looking at solutions to spam - give it a read!

"Our results suggest that a social media message would have to be sent by more than 47 constituents for it to exceed the value of a single face-to-face meeting." academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

I discovered something called drip dashi while I was in Japan (which is exactly what it sounds like), and it is blowing my mind! I brought some packets to enjoy at home but they're about to be gone and I can't seem to get it in the US 😩 shimantodomeki.localinfo.jp/shopItems/23...

🤖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 🧵👇

See our upcoming work at #chi2025 on RAG-based techniques for contextualizing AI generations into a group setting by leveraging the group’s history! ⬇️

Putting it out there - I'll be headed to #chi2025 next week but will only be around Sat night - Mon night if you'd like to catch up! In particular, I'm interested in chatting with potential post-docs in the areas of AI and social media governance + human-AI agent / team-AI interaction. Email/DM me!

Another fantastic paper focused on the safety experiences of young users, led by Jina Yoon and collaborating with @axz.bsky.social, will be presented at CSCW 2025. joseph.seering.org/papers/Yoon_...

Looking for feed creators out there to speak with us about your experience!

I'm so grateful to the British Computing Society & Bloomberg for honouring me with the Karen Spärck Jones Award 🙏 I gave the award lecture on LLMs’ Utilisation of Parametric & Contextual Knowledge at #ECIR2025 today (slides: isabelleaugenstein.github.io/slides/2025_...) www.bcs.org/membership-a...

If you study networks, or have been stuck listening to people who study networks for long enough (sorry to my loved ones), you may have heard that open triads – V shapes – in social networks tend to turn into closed triangles. But why does this happen? In part, because people repost each other.

Announcing the “Unheard” Initiative -- together with @fractalecho.bsky.social and with the sponsorship of AccessSIGCHI, @acm-sigchi.bsky.social and @sigaccess.bsky.social we're launching a new talk series for folks with disability/travel restrictions. Please volunteer! tinyurl.com/unheard-init...

Great exploration of different ways to design systems that give people more control over their algorithms arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03247 by @leijiew.bsky.social, @cqz.bsky.social, @axz.bsky.social, and a couple of others

We're still working on the dream of enabling anyone to be able to create their own filters on social media for personal moderation or feed curation! Can LLM prompting make that dream possible? We find it works better than alternatives but users still struggle with iteration. See more ➡️

Check out our latest work on steerable alignment! We improve on a typical in-context learning approach with semantic retrieval by proposing metrics that instead select examples that best exemplify a group's shared values, enabling inference-time alignment to a particular group. ➡️

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)

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. (🧵/11)

Book announcement: with Melissa Valentine, we are publishing "Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work." It's a leadership book synthesizing a decade of Stanford research on how computing, online platforms, and AI reshape teamwork. Coming October from @mitpress.bsky.social!

Hope you’re enjoying Ai2 ScholarQA as your literature review helper 🥳 We’re excited to share some updates: 🗂️ You can now sign in via Google to save your query history across devices and browsers. 📚 We added 108M+ paper abstracts to our corpus - expect to get even better responses! More below…

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.

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated shortly after midnight. Read our letter to the American people: 18f.org

Don't miss our final OSoMe Awesome Speaker of the year, @axz.bsky.social from the University of Washington will talk about “Platform Designs and Tools to Support Users in Addressing Misinformation on Social Media” -- details below!

Platforms are shifting toward community-driven content moderation, but are they giving users the right tools to succeed? Join us March 5 at 12PM ET for a talk with Dr. Amy Zhang on how platform design can support users in shaping healthier online spaces. Register now: iu.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

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

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’ news.cs.washington.edu/2025/02/24/a...