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Ken Holstein

@kenholstein.bsky.social
1.1K followers 408 following 21 posts

HCI Prof at CMU HCII: thecoalalab.com Research on: - technologies to augment human thinking and learning - participatory & responsible AI - human-AI interaction

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Reposted by Ken Holstein
Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
I find this chart by Anthropic about theoretical vs. actual AI usage, from @pbump.com's latest newsletter, very funny, and I think it's worth explaining why, and also please push back on any of this if you disagree, as I may write about it in the future. 🧵
"Theoretical capability and observed usage by occupational category" a chart by Anthropic, showing that (in theory I guess) management, biz and finance, computers and math, architecture and engineering life & social sciences, the law, arts and media, sales and office & admin could all be using AI a lot but somehow aren't
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Ken Holstein @kenholstein.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
The CoALA Lab is moving to Switzerland! 🇨🇭 After several amazing years at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, this August I will join the faculty of EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences (@icepfl.bsky.social) in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The CoALA Lab logo displayed above the text "CoALA @ EPFL", over a photo from the Lausanne region in Switzerland that shows the lake, alps, greenery, and villages.
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Tzu-Sheng Kuo 郭子生 @tskuo.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
🔮 How can we empower online communities to design AI agents tailored to their unique needs and norms? In our #CHI2026 paper, we introduce #Botender, a system that enables collaborative design of AI agents through 🔥case-based provocation🔥
Botender helps communities iteratively align their AI agents with their collective intents through case-based provocations.
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Shaily @shaily99.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
🎭 How do LLMs (mis)represent culture? 🧮 How often? 🧠 Misrepresentations = missing knowledge? spoiler: NO! At #CHI2026 we are bringing ✨TALES✨ a participatory evaluation of cultural (mis)reps & knowledge in multilingual LLM-stories for India 📜 arxiv.org/abs/2511.21322 1/10
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Ken Holstein @kenholstein.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
I am recruiting a postdoc in HCI & AI!
 Interested in augmenting human thinking and learning, futures of work & education, participatory AI, collective intelligence, or related topics? Please get in touch! This 2-year position will be based at a top university in Europe (email or DM for more info)
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Hanna Wallach @hannawallach.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Microsoft Research NYC is hiring a researcher in the space of AI and society!
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Ken Holstein @kenholstein.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Submit to the 6th Human-Centered Explainable AI (HCXAI) workshop at CHI 2026 in Barcelona! 🗓️ Deadline: Feb 19, 2026 📝 2-5 page single column papers (excluding refs) 🌐 hcxai.jimdosite.com
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Ken Holstein @kenholstein.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
The Tools for Thought workshop at #CHI2026 is now accepting submissions! (due Feb 12, 2026 AoE) We invite work that explores how to effectively design, evaluate, or apply *AI-based tools that augment and protect human cognition*. For more, see: ai-tools-for-thought.github.io/workshop/
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Manoel Horta Ribeiro @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
In a new blog post, I contrast two flavors of empiricism: the one practiced in the social sciences and the one practiced in ML/CS. I argue that we need both, given that CS is increasingly about "claims," and not just constructing artifacts. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...
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Jenn Wortman Vaughan @jennwv.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
In case you missed it in the flurry of NeurIPS activity, @hannawallach.bsky.social and I recorded a (video) podcast on women in ML, friendship, research, and careers.
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Jenn Wortman Vaughan @jennwv.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
Spread the word! 📢 The FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics) group at @msftresearch.bsky.social in NYC is hiring interns and postdocs to start in summer 2026! 🎉 Apply by *December 15* for full consideration.
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J. Nathan Matias @natematias.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Can public involvement in AI evaluation improve the science? Or does it compromise quality, speed, cost? In @pnas.org, Megan Price & I summarize challenges of AI evaluation, review strengths/weaknesses, & suggest how participatory methods can improve the science of AI www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
How public involvement can improve the science of AI | PNAS
As AI systems from decision-making algorithms to generative AI are deployed more widely, computer scientists and social scientists alike are being ...
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Wesley Hanwen Deng @wesleydeng.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
I am beyond trilled to present two 🏆 award-winning papers 🏆 @acm-cscw.bsky.social this year CSCW in beautiful Bergen, Norway!! Broadly, I'm excited to chat about responsible AI, AI auditing and red-teaming, and human-AI interaction. Say hi if we run into each other!
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B. Prendergast @renderg.host · 16/10/2025
Inspired by a post by @bayesianboy.bsky.social , I wrote something on the differences between information and insight — and why understanding remains a very human act
renderghost.leaflet.pub
The point is to understand
Machines can’t make sense of the world for us.
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Luke Guerdan @lukeguerdan.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
A subtle aspect of predictive modeling is target variable construction: the process of translating a latent, unobservable concept like "healthcare need" into a prediction target But how does target variable construction unfold in practice, and how can we better support it going forward? #CSCW2025 🧵
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Michelle Lam @mlam.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
LLM safety work often reasons over high-level policies (be helpful & polite), but must tackle on-the-ground cases (unsolicited money advice when stocks are mentioned). This can feel like driving on an unfamiliar road guided by a generic driver’s manual instead of a map. We introduce: Policy Maps 🗺️
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Alexandra Olteanu @aolteanu.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
There is a lot of talk and effort to figure out how genAI is different (I am also guilty of this!) -- the reality is that genAI is not that different and genAI is not that new either; it was hard to evaluate in the past, and it is still as hard to evaluate now #facct2025
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Hanna Wallach @hannawallach.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
Check out the camera-ready version of our ICML position paper ("Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems Is a Social Science Measurement Challenge") to learn more!!! arxiv.org/abs/2502.00561 (6/6)
arxiv.org
Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems Is a Social Science Measurement Challenge
The measurement tasks involved in evaluating generative AI (GenAI) systems lack sufficient scientific rigor, leading to what has been described as "a tangle of sloppy tests [and] apples-to-oranges com...
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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
Somewhat oddly, the Trump regime's initial moves to cut science funding went very broad. This is catalyzing solidarity & advocacy around the value of science (see comms featuring cancer cures & tech innovation). But their next move may be to try to drive a wedge b/w "good science" & "bad science".
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Amy J. Ko @amyko.phd · 12/05/2025
How's fascism going for you? medium.com/bits-and-beh...
medium.com
How is fascism going for you? Here’s how it’s going for me.
A catalog of impacts thus far from this administration’s horrors.
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Alt CDC (they/them) @altcdc.altgov.info · 24/03/2025
Securing your phone before entering the USA. 🧵 At CDC we travel around the globe to confront health threats and have never worried about returning home. Yet more researchers, including US Citizens, are having their phones searched at Customs. security.ucop.edu/resources/tr...
security.ucop.edu
Returning to the U.S.
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
Unidentified men grabbing someone off the street and putting her in a car because she wrote an op-Ed. This as flatly authoritarian as anything we’ve seen in this country in a very long time.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
1. @alisongopnik.bsky.social, Cosma Shalizi, James Evans and myself have a new piece in Science on "AI" Large Models, pushing back against much of the collective wisdom about what they can and can't do. Official below, unpaywalled at henryfarrell.net/large-ai-mod... . So why this now?
science.org
Large AI models are cultural and social technologies
Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past
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Tzu-Sheng Kuo 郭子生 @tskuo.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
How can we help communities collaboratively shape policies that impact them? In our #CHI2025 paper, we present PolicyCraft, a system that supports ✨collaborative policy design✨ through case-grounded deliberation. (🧵/11)
ACM CHI 2025
PolicyCraft: Supporting Collaborative and Participatory Policy Design through Case-Grounded Deliberation
Tzu-Sheng Kuo, Quan Ze Chen, Amy X. Zhang, Jane Hsieh, Haiyi Zhu, Kenneth Holstein
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Alicia DeVrio @uhleeeeeeeshuh.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
How can we better think and talk about human-like qualities attributed to language technologies like LLMs? In our #CHI2025 paper, we taxonomize how text outputs from cases of user interactions with language technologies can contribute to anthropomorphism. arxiv.org/abs/2502.09870 1/n
Image of the first page of the CHI 2025 paper titled "A Taxonomy of Linguistic Expressions That Contribute To Anthropomorphism of Language Technologies" by authors Alicia DeVrio, Myra Cheng, Lisa Egede, Alexandra Olteanu, & Su Lin Blodgett
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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
"18F works just how Musk + team pretend that they want gov't to work. But when his team found it, they destroyed it. 18F’s work is evidence that gov't works well, which undermines their msg that it doesn’t. 18F’s parent agency, the [GSA], turns a profit as an agency. So it has to be destroyed too."
donmoynihan.substack.com
Requiem for 18F
A small government unit did what DOGE is pretending to do
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Raelin @raelinm.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
#Pittsburgh friends, Join me on Friday #standupforscience2025. Our city will be devastated if our universities lose critical funding. Our universities are top 10 employers, the entire city’s economy is dependent on science funding. www.eventbrite.com/e/stand-up-f...
eventbrite.com
Stand Up for Science 2025 - Pittsburgh, PA
Stand up for science with us on March 7th, 2025, because science is for everyone! More info at www.standupforscience2025.org
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Anna Kawakami @anna-kawakami.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
🏛️ How can we ensure that AI enhances, rather than harms, public services? In our policy memo, published with the Federation of American Scientists (@scientistsorg.bsky.social), we provide recommendations for how the fed gov't could help state & local agencies make better AI procurement decisions.🧵
fas.org
Expanding Local Government Capacity for AI Procurement and Use
As new waves of AI technologies continue to enter the public sector, touching a breadth of services critical to the welfare of the American people, this center of excellence will help maintain high st...
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Patrick Bahners @pbahners.bsky.social · 23/02/2025
Joseph Ura: “A president refusing to abide by the law or the Constitution and ignoring court orders to stop his illegitimate actions would be a constitutional crisis like a bank robbery is a cash flow crisis.” www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...
theatlantic.com
‘Constitutional Crisis’ Is an Understatement
It’s the hottest, and most useless, buzz phrase of the moment.
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cookiesforbfast @cookiesforbfast.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
Friendly reminder to get your free Covid tests before they throw them away. Covidtests.gov wapo.st/42VLGQh
wapo.st
U.S. weighs destroying $500 million in stockpiled covid tests
The government is reviewing proposals to shut down the program that ships free covid tests to American households and has been considering destroying 160 million tests.
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L.D. Burnett @ldburnett.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
for pity’s sake, I am BEGGING university leaders to stop framing this issue in terms of what this will cost the university. people dont care! EXPLAIN WHAT THIS WILL COST THE PUBLIC: closed hospitals and clinics, skipped treatments, loss of access to experimental drugs, unemployment, recession
sreenshot from the new york times reporting that Stanford University’s provost is talking about how the loss of funding from national institutes of health funding will cost the university $160 million. that’s not the way to get this changed — the people think “stanford is rich; no big deal.” leaders need to talk about what this will cost the public
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René Walter @rawx.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
"AI ... becomes a tool for replacing politics. The Trump administration frames generative #AI as a remedy to 'government waste.' However, what it seeks to automate is not paperwork but democratic decision-making."
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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 08/02/2025
Scientists and journalists need to figure out right quick how to explain to the average person how a massive change in research indirects will impact the medical care they and their children get (eg at the local children’s hospital), the education their children will get, the price of tuition, etc.
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
What I should have done in the beginning - here's a starter pack of 20-odd experts who journalists or others might want to read/talk to to understand the gutting of the administrative state (as opposed to broad decline of democracy etc). I've focused on academics go.bsky.app/MaC7vnv
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Dr. David Miller 🏳️‍🌈 @davidimiller.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
First off, it's critical to note: NSF is CONGRESSIONALLY MANDATED to evaluate proposals via broader impacts, as defined by this law below. Hence, if the admin wants NSF to deviate, that's called **breaking the law** (important to remind Congress of that) www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/... 2/5
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 24/05/2023
I'm an adventurous eater, but even I draw the line here
Sandwich at Whole Foods labeled "Lorem Ipsum Dolor & Cheddar"
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Dominik Moritz @domoritz.de · 25/01/2025
The moderation approach with custom labelers etc in Bluesky is pretty clever and worth understanding when you use this platform: bsky.social/about/blog/0....
bsky.social
Bluesky’s Stackable Approach to Moderation - Bluesky
Today, we’re open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets a team of moderators or curators collaboratively review reports, create labels, and inspect content on the atproto network. Later this week, we’re op...
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Arvind Narayanan @randomwalker.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Bitter Lesson¹ maximalists seem to ignore the distinction between AI capability improvement and AI-based product development. When it comes to the latter, the Bitter Lesson has never been true, and it would be silly to suggest that it is. ¹ www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/Bit...
incompleteideas.net
The Bitter Lesson
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
Alright it's here! Where we push back against the exploratory-confirmatory distinction that's become canonized in metascience and talk about what we think exploratory research (including exploratory experimentation and modeling) means and why our view is incompatible with 'unplanned data analyses'.
philsci-archive.pitt.edu
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Kevin Feng @kjfeng.me · 23/12/2024
📢📢 Introducing the 1st workshop on Sociotechnical AI Governance at CHI’25 (STAIG@CHI'25)! Join us to build a community to tackle AI governance through a sociotechnical lens and drive actionable strategies. 🌐 Website: chi-staig.github.io 🗓️ Submit your work by: Feb 17, 2025
A poster advertising the first workshop on sociotechnical AI governance with a description of the workshop's core themes and faces of the organizers.
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Yu Lu Liu @liuyulu.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
Human-centered Evalulation and Auditing of Language models (HEAL) workshop is back for #CHI2025, with this year's special theme: “Mind the Context”! Come join us on this bridge between #HCI and #NLProc! Workshop submission deadline: Feb 17 AoE More info at heal-workshop.github.io.
The image includes a shortened call for participation that reads: 
"We welcome participants who work on topics related to supporting human-centered evaluation and auditing of language models. Topics of interest include, but not limited to:
- Empirical understanding of stakeholders' needs and goals of LLM evaluation and auditing
- Human-centered evaluation and auditing methods for LLMs
- Tools, processes, and guidelines for LLM evaluation and auditing
- Discussion of regulatory measures and public policies for LLM auditing
- Ethics in LLM evaluation and auditing

Special Theme: Mind the Context. We invite authors to engage with specific contexts in LLM evaluation and auditing. This theme could involve various topics: the usage contexts of LLMs, the context of the evaluation/auditing itself, and more! The term ''context'' is purposefully left open for interpretation!

The image also includes pictures of workshop organizers, who are: Yu Lu Liu, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Michelle S. Lam, Motahhare Eslami, Juho Kim, Q. Vera Liao, Wei Xu, Jekaterina Novikova, and Ziang Xiao.
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Sireesh Gururaja @siree.sh · 17/12/2024
When I started on ARL project that funds my PhD, the thing we were supposed to build was a "MaterialsGPT". What is a MaterialsGPT? Where does that idea come from? I got to spend a lot of time thinking about that second question with @davidthewid.bsky.social and Lucy Suchman (!) working on this:
The abstract of a paper titled "Basic Research, Lethal Effects: Military AI Research Funding as Enlistment".

In the context of unprecedented U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) budgets, this paper examines the recent history of DoD funding for academic research in algorithmically based warfighting. We draw from a corpus of DoD grant solicitations from 2007 to 2023, focusing on those addressed to researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Considering the implications of DoD funding for academic research, the paper proceeds through three analytic sections. In the first, we offer a critical examination of the distinction between basic and applied research, showing how funding calls framed as basic research nonetheless enlist researchers in a war fighting agenda. In the second, we offer a diachronic analysis of the corpus, showing how a 'one small problem' caveat, in which affirmation of progress in military technologies is qualified by acknowledgement of outstanding problems, becomes justification for additional investments in research. We close with an analysis of DoD aspirations based on a subset of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant solicitations for the use of AI in battlefield applications. Taken together, we argue that grant solicitations work as a vehicle for the mutual enlistment of DoD funding agencies and the academic AI research community in setting research agendas. The trope of basic research in this context offers shelter from significant moral questions that military applications of one's research would raise, by obscuring the connections that implicate researchers in U.S. militarism.
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Ken Holstein @kenholstein.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
I am recruiting a postdoc via the CBI Fellowship Program (carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/...). Interested in designing & evaluating interactive systems for participatory AI, augmented and collective intelligence, responsible AI, or related areas? Please apply and reach out to me via email!
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Lauren Herckis @laurenherckis.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
The HCII at CMU seeks undergrads to do mentored summer research in design, behavioral sciences and computing technology. Stipend & support for housing/travel/food hcii.cmu.edu/summer-resea... Sample topics: Active Learning in STEM AI-Assisted Conflict Resolution Human-Centered Data Science and Viz
hcii.cmu.edu
HCII Summer Undergraduate Research Program | Human-Computer Interaction Institute
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Sauvik Das @sauvik.me · 13/12/2024
Just wrapped up teaching the first ever installment of my "Building Technologies for the Resistance" class — and what a privilege! Students worked to identify unjust power disparities, and explored how different anarchist design principles could be used to help. Syllabus: bit.ly/btr-syllabus
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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 13/12/2024
Always looking for good, clear, compelling essays to help introduce students to the notion that data can’t be “objective” or all-encompassing.
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Arvind Narayanan @randomwalker.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
AI hype is making AI researchers forget painfully learned lessons core to the field. There's an emerging cope that progress in capabilities isn't slowing down—it's just invisible as benchmarks are saturated; vibe checks are useless because models are now superhuman so we can't perceive improvement.
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Ken Holstein @kenholstein.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Come work with @jessicahullman.bsky.social and I as a postdoc! We'll apply approaches from HCI, AI/ML, statistics, and decision theory to design new tools & methods for evaluating human-AI decision-making (e.g., tools to elicit, represent, & validate specifications of real-world decision problems).
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