We are the Social Futures Lab at @uwcse! We are reimagining social and collaborative systems to empower people and improve society.
Seattle, WA
Joined August 2020
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Social Futures Lab retweeted
Can AI tell when to speak up in a group chat? 🙅♀️ Not yet.
⏰ 46.4% of the time, LLMs post a message before anyone in the group would welcome it, even when the message is helpful.
That's not the AI collaborator people can comfortably work with.
🧵
Social Futures Lab retweeted
Excited to share what I was up to this past summer at Handshake AI Research! We conducted a large-scale human evaluation (n=2383) of LLMs for tutoring and found they can significantly improve students' scores on the GRE via tailored instruction. Paper, dataset, code in 🧵
Today we establish that AI is as good as expert human tutors for immediate GRE learning gains (p=.015, n=2,383 students, study conducted July-Sep 2026).
One hour with an expert GRE tutor: $75.
One equivalent hour with an AI tutor: 7 cents .
918x cheaper, equivalent learning (p=.044, n = 140).
In 5 of 7 academic topics, the top AI tutor beat the expert human tutors on average.
How we measured it: pre-test -> 1 hour with (AI or human or no) tutor -> post-test.
There are no LLM judges. Learning gains are post-pre. Everything is real students.
Why we did this:
> 1 trillion USD is being spent per year on machines making machines better. StudentBench shows us how to shift these resources so machines also make humans better.
Why I did this:
I grew up in rural Kentucky. My dad, grandad, and great grandad were all mailmen. Getting into a good college changed my life. Now we have done a rigorous study to help AI labs evaluate LLMs and help show how bright AI can be for students of all incomes.
I believe in good science that leads to the democratization of opportunity.
The research paper behind StudentBench: arxiv.org/abs/2609.28470
Data, code, details: in this thread
If you're wondering what I'm selling, sorry to disappoint: we released all study data for free on Hugging Face, and made studentbench.org free to use. Enjoy.
lots more in the video / thread!!
Social Futures Lab retweeted
Congrats to @SocFuturesLab members and collaborators @upcycledwords and William Fang, part of the AI for Human Autonomy cohort! & thanks to @cosmos_inst - IMO this topic is so important and undersupported atm, and it's cool to see funding specifically for building prototypes!
Congratulations to our 80 new Cosmos grantees!
Our largest cohort to-date will be building prototypes for AI that supports human autonomy or truth-seeking (in partnership with @TheFIREorg.)
The projects range from wearable AI for memory and cryptographic tools for scientific collaboration to a benchmark based on pre-1940 thought on machines and autonomy.
Our grantees come from sixteen countries, including the US, UK, Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Korea, Costa Rica, India, and Czechia.
They join a community of Cosmos grantees and fellows whose projects have grown into companies, non-profit research organizations, and papers published at leading venues like ICML, COLM, and IEEE.
Read what all eighty are working on: blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/…
Social Futures Lab retweeted
Social media algorithms face a misalignment problem. One strategy is for people to more explicitly tell algorithms what they want. But this hasn't worked in practice---too much work, hard to articulate, goes stale. Then fast-paced videos and engagement bait reel you back in.
Social media feeds optimize for engagement. But how do we align them with what people actually want to see?
In our #UIST2026 paper, we introduce Compass 🧭, a system that helps users continuously reflect on and align their feeds with their evolving preferences 🧵
Social Futures Lab retweeted
Live coding, but make it poetry.
Live Poetry is a system for performing poetry as a live process. This collaborative poetic instrument utilizes grammars (sets of visible, editable rules) to assemble phrases in real time alongside sound and image.
Social Futures Lab retweeted
Social media feeds optimize for engagement. But how do we align them with what people actually want to see?
In our #UIST2026 paper, we introduce Compass 🧭, a system that helps users continuously reflect on and align their feeds with their evolving preferences 🧵
UW profiles our student researcher Andrew Shaw! Read about how he is carrying forward his family's legacy as refugees from Vietnam to graduates at UW that inspired Andrew's research in human rights and ethics married with CS: washington.edu/boundless/a-u…
Social Futures Lab retweeted
What could governing a community language model look like? A community garden? 📚A free little library?
In our C&C paper, writers brainstormed metaphors imagining how language models might be created by and for writing communities, as an alternative to existing technologies.
Social Futures Lab retweeted
I'll be at #CVPR2026 this week, June 5–9, presenting :
📜Agile Deliberation: Concept Deliberation for Subjective Visual Classification (Highlight 🌟)
⏲️Poster Session 1 | June 5, 10:45–12:45
🗺️Board #443, ExHall A-F
Happy to chat — come by our poster or DM if you're interested
Social Futures Lab retweeted
I'm thrilled to share that Hedwig won the industry spotlight award at @CAISconf!
@trq212 gave an amazing talk, and it was great to meet him as his writings heavily influenced aspects of our project!
We’ve been invited to present at the AI Engineer World’s Fair, see you there!
Social Futures Lab retweeted
Sense of community is the "glue" that holds online communities together! But what factors affect sense of community online? Come to my talk @icwsm tomorrow morning at 8:30 to learn more! 🧵
Social Futures Lab retweeted
If you're attending @CAISconf in San Jose, be sure to check out our new work led by Tanjal Shukla on AI agents that can adapt their autonomy based on user interactions! Both Tanjal and @leijiewang17 are attending, so pls stop by our poster and ask for a demo 🧑💻🚀
Social Futures Lab retweeted
.@upcycledwords wants AI tools to feel like getting your hands dirty in a studio.
her interface Atelier ditches the text prompt for a messy, free-form canvas. designed for maximum chaos and play.
Social Futures Lab retweeted
Congrats to @kjfeng_ on passing his dissertation defense, titled "Designing for Interactive Systems Powered by Generally Capable AI"!! Kevin is @SocFuturesLab's 3rd PhD graduate! Thanks to his all-star committee for thoughtful Q's - David McDonald, @emtseng, @dsweld, & @makoshark
Social Futures Lab retweeted
Feeling FOMO that I can't be at #CHI2026 this year but please check out all the great work that our @SocFuturesLab + friends are presenting (see below for threads). And say hi to @kjfeng_ @upcycledwords, Katie Yurechko, and Tony Zhou who are at the conference!
Social Futures Lab retweeted
Cocoa is accepted to #chi2026 as a 🏆best paper (top 1% of submissions)! See you in Barcelona 🎉🇪🇸
Social Futures Lab retweeted
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
Social Futures Lab retweeted
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
Social Futures Lab retweeted
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 ⚖️
