Computing platforms shape our interactions with other people: how we collaborate, how we socialize, and even how we govern. By changing these computing platforms, we change human behavior: as Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” How do we design these computing systems effectively and responsibly? My research in human-computer interaction advances systems, designs, and models for social computing systems. In doing so, I aim to shed light on long-standing research questions: How do we cross the gap between social scientific knowledge and concrete system designs that manifest this knowledge into pro-social interactions? How can we model human attitudes and behavior to help us craft technology and social policy? How should we design our computational tools if we want them to be successfully embedded into society?

Alexandria: A Library of Pluralistic Values for Realtime Re-Ranking of Social Media Feeds

Akaash Kolluri*, Renn Su*, Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, Dora Zhao, Tiziano Piccardi, Michael Bernstein

ICWSM 2026

Reranking Partisan Animosity in Algorithmic Social Media Feeds Alters Affective Polarization

Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Saveski, Chenyan Jia, Jeffrey Hancock, Jeanne L. Tsai, and Michael Bernstein

Science 2025

Finetuning LLMs for Human Behavior Prediction in Social Science Experiments

Akaaash Kolluri, Shengguang Wu, Joon Sung Park, Michael Bernstein

EMNLP 2025

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Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work

Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein

MIT Press 2025national bestseller

Creating General User Models from Computer Use

Omar Shaikh, Shardul Sapkota, Shan Rizvi, Eric Horvitz, Joon Sung Park, Diyi Yang, Michael Bernstein

UIST 2025best paper honorable mention

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Knoll: Creating a Knowledge Ecosystem for Large Language Models

Dora Zhao, Diyi Yang, Michael Bernstein

UIST 2025

Burst: Collaborative Curation in Connected Social Media Communities

Yutong Zhang, Taeuk Kang, Sydney Yeh, Anavi Baddepudi, Lindsay Popowski, Tiziano Piccardi, Michael Bernstein

CSCW 2025

LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method

Jacy Reese Anthis, Ryan Liu, Sean M. Richardson, Austin C. Kozlowski, Bernard Koch, James Evans, Erik Brynjolfsson, Michael Bernstein

ICML Position Papers 2025

Aligning Language Models with Demonstrated Feedback

Omar Shaikh, Michelle Lam, Joey Hejna, Yijia Shao, Justin Cho, Michael Bernstein, and Diyi Yang

ICLR 2025

Balancing Producer Fairness and Efficiency via Prior-Weighted Rating System Design

Thomas Ma, Michael Bernstein, Ramesh Johari, and Nikhil Garg.

ICWSM 2025

More than Marketing? On the Information Value of AI Benchmarks for Practitioners

Amelia Hardy, Anka Reuel, Kiana Jafari Meimandi, Lisa Soder, Allie Griffith, Dylan M. Asmar, Sanmi Koyejo, Michael Bernstein, Mykel J. Kochenderfer

IUI 2025

Commit: Online Groups with Participation Commitments

Lindsay Popowski, Yutong Zhang, Michael Bernstein

CSCW 2024best paper honorable mention

Chillbot: Content Moderation in the Backchannel

Joseph Seering, Manas Khadka, Nava Haghighi, Tanya Yang, Zachary Xi, Michael Bernstein

CSCW 2024best paper honorable mention

The Algorithm and the Org Chart: How Algorithms Can Conflict with Organizational Structures

Melissa A. Valentine, Amanda L. Pratt, Rebecca Hinds, Michael S. Bernstein

CSCW 2024

Constructing a Classification Scheme - and Its Consequences: A Field Study of Learning to Label Data for Computer Vision in a Hospital Intensive Care Unit

Melissa A. Valentine, Roger E. Bohn, Amanda L. Pratt, Prachee Jain, Sara J. Singer, Michael Bernstein

CSCW 2024

Clarify: Improving Model Robustness With Natural Language Corrections

Yoonho Lee, Michelle Lam, Helena Vasconcelos, Michael Bernstein, Chelsea Finn

UIST 2024

Internal Fractures: The Competing Logics of Social Media Platforms

Angèle Christin, Michael S. Bernstein, Jeffrey T. Hancock, Chenyan Jia, Marijn N. Mado, Jeanne L. Tsai, and Chunchen Xu

SM+S 2024

Concept Induction: Analyzing Unstructured Text with High-Level Concepts Using LLooM

Michelle S. Lam, Janice Teoh, James Landay, Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bernstein

CHI 2024

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Rehearsal: Simulating Conflict to Teach Conflict Resolution

Omar Shaikh, Valentino Chai, Michele Gelfand, Diyi Yang, and Michael Bernstein

CHI 2024

Form-From: A Design Space of Social Media Systems

Amy X. Zhang, Michael Bernstein, David Karger, and Mark Ackerman

CSCW 2024

Embedding Democratic Values into Social Media AIs via Societal Objective Functions

Chenyan Jia*, Michelle S. Lam*, Minh Chau Mai, Jeff Hancock, Michael S. Bernstein

CSCW 2024best paper

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

Joon Sung Park, Joseph O'Brien, Carrie Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Percy Liang, Michael Bernstein

UIST 2023best paper

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Cura: Curation at Social Media Scale

Wanrong He, Mitchell L. Gordon, Lindsay Popowski, Michael Bernstein

CSCW 2023best paper

Commentary: Embedding Societal Values into Social Media Algorithms

Michael Bernstein, Angèle Christin, Jeffrey Hancock, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Chenyan Jia, Michelle S. Lam, Nicole Meister, Nathaniel Persily, Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Saveski, Jeanne Tsai, Johan Ugander, Chunchen Xu

JOTS 2023

On Second Thought, Let’s Not Think Step by Step! Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot Reasoning

Omar Shaikh, Hongxin Zhang, William Held, Michael Bernstein, and Diyi Yang

ACL 2023

Model Sketching: Centering Concepts in Early-Stage Machine Learning Model Design

Michelle S. Lam, Zixian Ma, Anne Li, Izequiel Freitas, Dakuo Wang, James A. Landay, Michael S. Bernstein

CHI 2023

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Breaking Out of the Ivory Tower: A Large-scale Analysis of Patent Citations to HCI Research

Hancheng Cao, Yujie Lu, Yuting Deng, Daniel McFarland, Michael Bernstein

CHI 2023best paper

Explanations Can Reduce Overreliance on AI Systems During Decision-Making

Helena Vasconcelos, Matthew Jörke, Madeleine Grunde-McLaughlin, Tobias Gerstenberg, Michael Bernstein, Ranjay Krishna

CSCW 2023best paper honorable mention