Social Futures Lab

We are the Social Futures Lab at @uwcse! We are reimagining social and collaborative systems to empower people and improve society.

[Leijie Wang @leijiewang17]

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

[Tanjal Shukla @TanjalShukla]

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!

[Galen Weld @galenweld]

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! 🧵

[Kevin Feng @kjfeng_]

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 🧑‍💻🚀

[Gopal @gopalkraman]

.@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.

[Amy Zhang @amyxzh]

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

[Amy Zhang @amyxzh]

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!

[Kevin Feng @kjfeng_]

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

[Jolie @joliegans]

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

[Alicia Guo @upcycledwords]

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

[Quan Ze Chen @cquanze]

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 ⚖️

[Kevin Feng @kjfeng_]

📢 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.

🧵👇

[Galen Weld @galenweld]

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. 🧵

[Andre Ye @andreiskiii]

[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

[Kevin Feng @kjfeng_]

🤖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!

📜 https://t.co/sRWbI6nbPt
🧵👇

[Ruotong Wang @RuotongWang1]

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)

[Allen School @uwcse]

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. https://t.co/FHbj3elLnN #HuskyExperience

[Andre Ye @andreiskiii]

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 :)

[Leijie Wang @leijiewang17]

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)

[Quan Ze Chen @cquanze]

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)