Please join us before the talk at 2pm outside of LL2.224 for refreshments

Title: Re-inventing the attention machine

Speker Bio: Ziv Epstein, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI

Abstract: Today, social media feeds exert influence on us and our societies by directing our attention toward a small subset of the available content. Both the algorithms underlying these feeds and the user experience are optimized primarily for engagement. But whose values do they amplify? At what cost? In this talk, I will discuss two projects. The first explores the role of attention and distraction in browsing patterns online and how to design mitigations to fight misinformation at scale by shifting attention to accuracy. The second explores how to measure which human values are being algorithmically amplified by social media algorithms, and if those align with people's own values. Together, this work underscores the promise of re-designing social media to empower users by aligning systems with their values.

Speker Bio: Ziv Epstein is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. In his research, he focuses on translating insights from design and the social sciences into the development of sociotechnical systems such as generative AI and social media platforms. Ziv has published papers in venues such as the general interest journals Nature, Science and PNAS, as well as top-tier computer science proceedings such as CHI and CSCW. His work has also received widespread media attention in outlets like the New York Times, Scientific American, and NPR.