Social Futures Lab

Cocoa is accepted to #chi2026 as a 🏆best paper (top 1% of submissions)! See you in Barcelona 🎉🇪🇸

Meet the Computational Poet. @upcycledwords is one of the most talented wordsmiths I know. She’s an artist who presents our relationship with language itself: the urge to overexplain, the pain of killing your darlings, the use of models to finish your sentence. Through her work, you can visualize that feeling of the single keystroke that makes a stanza bloom or collapse. She’s also a PhD student who studies how creative writers use AI in practice. We talk about poems that rearrange themselves, a shared inspiration of @zachlieberman, fertile nonsense, and how to write beside the machine. Enjoy

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

Online groups and communities often need to make decisions around social concepts like what content is appropriate. But how do we ensure these decisions are aligned across human decision-makers or even AI systems? We explore this in our work (CI '25): 📜 Case Law Grounding ⚖️

📢 New paper, published by @knightcolumbia. 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. 🧵👇

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

[FAccT 2025 paper!] 🧵 Remember the March 2024 Gemini controversy? People were upset when it generated "diverse" but historically inappropriate images—like Black Founding Fathers and female Asian Nazis. This sparked our research... 1/6

🤖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)

Inspired by his father’s study of neural networks, #UWAllen and @UWPhilosophy major @andreiskiii taught himself the subject on his way to enrolling in @UW at age 15. He just won a @PDSoros Fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. at @MITEECS in #AI. pdsoros.org/fellows/andre-… #HuskyExperience

I am so honored and excited to be a 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and work on human-AI interaction at @MITEECS! I look forward to joining the incredible community of PD Soros fellows. Huge thanks to my advisors @amyxzh @RanjayKrishna & Rose Novick for their amazing mentorship :)

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 you a YouTube content creator? Curious about a simpler way to handle your comments? Join our study to try a new tool for managing your comments! 🕒 1-hour Zoom session 💰 $20 gift card for participation 👉 Sign up here: forms.gle/RuuAWoLE6zRkHe… More details below.

When it comes to social platforms, @UW #UWAllen professor & 2025 @SloanFoundation #SloanFellow @amyxzh seeks to empower users and “make our online spaces as rich and varied as our offline ones.” Learn more about her work in the @SocFuturesLab: news.cs.washington.edu/2025/02/24/all… #UWdiscovers

Congrats to @andreiskiii for being named a Hertz Fellow finalist (and only finalist from UW)! hertzfoundation.org/news/52-finali…

Zhang, whose research aims to empower people to take control of their online social experiences, is one of three @UW faculty recognized with Sloan Fellowships this year, joined by @neuroamyo in neuroscience and @UWChemistry’s @thexiaolab: washington.edu/news/2025/02/1… #UWdiscovers /2

Huge congratulations to @UW @uwengineering #UWAllen professor @amyxzh of the @SocFuturesLab and Ph.D. alum @LydiaChilton of @ColumbiaCompSci on their selection as 2025 @SloanFoundation #SloanFellows in computer science! #ThisIsUW sloan.org/fellowships/20… 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 to balance human & AI agency in complex human-AI workflows. 🧵

Tomorrow at #GROUP2025, @jinayoon_ 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. Each community became its own case study on the ways to design...