Associate professor of social computing at UW CSE, leading @socialfutureslab.bsky.social
social.cs.washington.edu
Amy Zhang
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Congrats to @kjfeng.me on passing his dissertation defense, titled "Designing for Interactive Systems Powered by Generally Capable AI"! Kevin is @socialfutureslab.bsky.social's 3rd PhD graduate! Thanks to his all-star committee for thoughtful Qs: David McDonald @emtseng.bsky.social Dan Weld @mako.cc
Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met.
But we're still studying social media like it's 2010.
We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up.
osf.io/preprints/so...
preprint w/ Richard Rogers
Happy start of peony season (and lychee season!) to all who celebrate!
Can researchers & tech professionals connect to catalyze actionable research that supports healthier digital spaces?
We've launched a new report alongside colleagues from the Trust and Safety Foundation, @integrity-inst.bsky.social & more.
www.prosocialdesign.org/blog/connect...
UW CSE News covers our CHI award-winning paper 🥳 news.cs.washington.edu/2026/05/05/a...
Amy Zhang
First, @leijiew.bsky.social led a paper on a HiTL prompt optimization technique that supports steerability and interpretability without sacrificing performance over APO. He built this into a working tool for YTers to author content classifiers for their comments. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Next, @kjfeng.me built a system for LLM policy prototyping - where domain experts can collaboratively work in small groups to author, evaluate, and iterate on LLM policy - out of needs we found running workshops in OpenAI's Democratic Inputs to AI program. arxiv.org/abs/2509.19680
Feeling FOMO that I can't be at #CHI2026 this year but please check out all the great work that our @socialfutureslab.bsky.social + friends are presenting (see below for paper links). And say hi to @kjfeng.me @aliciaguo.com, Katie Yurechko, and Tony Zhou who are at the conference!
Kevin @kjfeng.me also had a Best Paper award for his project on Cocoa, a system for human-agent collaboration on complex tasks via stepwise interactions that delegate agency and enable interleaving of planning & execution: arxiv.org/abs/2412.10999
Finally, we also had a paper with collaborator @tskuo.bsky.social at CMU on enabling collective design of community bots via a system that surfaces provocative hypothetical cases as a way to stress-test and iterate on bot policy: arxiv.org/abs/2509.25492
Amy Zhang
Petter Törnberg
AI agents, or bots, serve important roles in online communities. However, they are often designed by outsiders or a few tech-savvy members, leading to bots that may not align with the broader communit...
At the recent ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), Allen School researchers brought home multiple accolades for their innovative work in human-computer interaction (HCI...
As LLMs gain adoption in high-stakes domains like mental health, domain experts are increasingly consulted to provide input into policies governing their behavior. From an observation of 19 policymaki...arxiv.org
