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 👀

🤖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)

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.

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

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

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

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

🤔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.

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

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

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! 🤔

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* ➡️

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...

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

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... about.fb.com/news/2024/02...

Hi! I (+ @axz.bsky.social and a couple others) am conducting a study on new tools for content curation in social media feeds, esp Bluesky! We’d love to have you participate. It’ll take around 45 minutes and you’ll get a $20 USD gift card. More details + sign up here: forms.gle/yrAzteTqFqMP....

Check out this curriculum for grades 6-12 on online behavior from the @socialfutureslab.bsky.social "This lesson will help students understand how their choices and interactions in online environments affect their lives." social.cs.washington.edu/sfl-curricul...

Want to help with an experiment in online community governance? @axz.bsky.social and PolicyKit are seeking builders to help with platform integrations, as well as stewards who might want to try out PolicyKit in their communities.

Have you ever noticed that nearly every online group is set up as a top-down autocracy? @axz.bsky.social of @socialfutureslab.bsky.social tells us about her team's computer-assisted gov tool, PolicyKit

✨ I'm interviewing creative writers who use AI in their practice! ✨ Paid interviews ($40) will also include a writing session - if you are interested please fill out the form: forms.gle/T9hU1eGACLGf...

Some photos of talks from @socialfutureslab.bsky.social to close out CSCW 2023! First up was @shagun.bsky.social's talk on Monday where he presented on personal content moderation tools. More in this blog post: medium.com/acm-cscw/per...

And from Kevin Feng, David McDonald, & @axz.bsky.social, “Teachable Agents for End-User Empowerment in Personalized Feed Curation.” The authors explore how users can be empowered to articulate their content preferences in online social settings. knightcolumbia.org/content/teac...

If you’re attending the Trust and Safety Research conference, look out for the following two presentations: 1) Leijie Wang presenting tmrw on his SOUPS paper on privacy issues with reporting systems, and 2) Armin Namavari with a lightening talk about a new governance system for E2EE apps!

Congrats to Leijie on his presentation on privacy considerations when reporting in E2EE platforms at #soups2023! Check out the paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.10478.pdf

New paper from our lab on reporting systems! arxiv.org/abs/2306.10478 Have you ever tried to report something on social media? What do you think gets shared and who do you think sees the report? We seek to understand what ppl *think actually happens* when they report something. 1/n

My dept at UW made a short video of the class I taught this spring on social computing with @kjfeng.bsky.social https://youtu.be/9AWkEKRuDZg My students blew me away with their projects and insightful discussion! If curious, our syllabus: https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse481p/23sp/

If you’re at TrustCon, go check out a session on Wed led by @jina.bsky.social from @socialfutureslab.bsky.social on “Reframing Teen Trust & Safety: Interviews With Young Online Community Moderators“! https://www.trustcon.net/trustcon2023/agenda

Social Futures Lab's first PhD graduate!!

Also keep an eye out for our forthcoming paper that dives deeper into many of the ideas I talked about 👀

Listen to @kjfeng.bsky.social talk about his work on social media feed curation using machine teaching at the Knight Institute workshop on Algorithmic Amplification and Society! He was on a panel "Empirical look at user behavior" moderated by Mor Naaman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00pH6U_-s7g

New research from our lab @socialfutureslab.bsky.social presented at ACM FAccT yesterday by first author Teanna Barrett, in collaboration with @cqz.bsky.social: Skin Deep: Investigating Subjectivity in Skin Tone Annotations for Computer Vision Benchmark Datasets https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09072

Some new work from our lab relevant to those of you thinking about AI harms in the here and now! If you're worried about manipulated or synthetic image/video media spreading misinformation on social media, one approach that may get us out of the losing battle of detection is provenance.

Our stellar undergrads in SFL presenting on the great research they did this year! First up we have the UW research symposium, with Pranati, Shreya, and Khushi sharing a poster on a new remote work tool, Andre on medical image uncertainty, and Simona on combating VR harassment!

Worried about a proliferation of synthetic and manipulated media taking over our online social spaces? Check out some new research from our lab on interventions using provenance against misinformation!

We have some new research out! We took an in-depth look at tools for *personalizing content moderation*, such as those nifty content filtering settings for nudity, etc. here in Bluesky. In one paper, we interviewed social media users about their perceptions of these: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10374

Someone at the symposium I'm at (https://knightcolumbia.org/events/optimizing-for-what-algorithmic-amplification-and-society) said it was "a coachella for tech policy" which I think is pretty accurate 💻🪩

Newest member alert!! Check out @aguo.bsky.social’s awesome work! We are super excited to have her join us!