Research Initiatives
CITS is exploring initiatives in the following areas as it prepares to relaunch programming in 2025. Included are questions that are motivating us. If you are also interested in these questions, we would love to hear from you.
Human-AI Interaction
How do we adapt to the growing inability to distinguish machine from human?
Which core patterns of human social interaction transfer over to human-machine interaction? Which human cognitive biases are AIs adopting?
Wellbeing and Adolescent Mental Health
Much research has been done on the relationship between adolescent mental health and social media. How might the mental health of adolescents be protected in the face of the rising prevalence of AI?
Can AI be used to positively impact adolescent mental health?
Privacy and Data
The Internet up to this point has made personal information a profitable commodity. Can AI be used to remedy the privacy mess?
How can we harness the power of AI to analyze data without sacrificing more privacy, as in the case of health and medical information?
AI and Work
How does AI change the nature of work?
What happens when many sectors undergo automation at once?
How do we re-skill the workforce in response?
Under what conditions would UBI be needed?
Falsehoods and Deception
What tools can we develop to fight the spread of misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories and deception via social media platforms?
Are people capable of navigating a public sphere full of falsehoods? If not, what should governments do?
What happens if the public comes to mistrust all information, right or wrong, because of the prevalence of deepfakes?
Bias and Inequality
How does technology perpetuate or amplify existing social biases and inequalities?
Is there a future where AI could intelligently identify and overcome biased information on which it is trained?
What happens if some AIs are intentionally trained to have biases and ideological perspectives?
AI, Education, and Teaching
Should schools still be teaching writing? How must the classroom be rethought?
What now counts as original work?
How can AI improve learning?
AI & Environment/Energy
How should AI be regulated to account for its harmful environmental impacts?
Are there uses of AI that could produce environmental benefits that outweigh its costs?
How does AI affect global energy markets?
Research Publications
Select Recent Work from UCSB Scholars
Alghamdi, Wael, Hsiang Hsu, Haewon Jeong, Hao Wang, P Winston Michalak, Shahab Asoodeh, and Flavio P Calmon. “Beyond Adult and COMPAS: Fairness in Multi-Class Prediction.” arXiv.Org, 2022. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2206.07801.
Almog, David, Romain Gauriot, Lionel Page, and Daniel Martin. “AI Oversight and Human Mistakes: Evidence from Centre Court.” Working Paper, 2024. https://danielmartin.research.st/media_files/8745.
Bimber, Bruce, Julien Labarre, Daniel Gomez, Ilia Nikiforov, and Karolina Koc-Michalska. “Media Use, Feelings of Being Devalued, and Democratically Corrosive Sentiment in the US.” The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612241253455.
Casillas, D. Inés. “Listening to Don Cheto on U.S. Spanish-Language Radio.” In The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies. New York: Routledge, 2022. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003002185
Chen, Cheng, Mengqi Liao, Joseph B Walther, and S. Shyam Sundar. “When an AI Doctor Gets Personal: The Effects of Social and Medical Individuation in Encounters With Human and AI Doctors.” Communication Research, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502241263482.
Cho, Alexander. The Passionate Terrain: Queer Youth of Color, Affect, and the Shape of Social Media. Book in progress.
Delmas, Hugues, et al. “A Review of Automatic Lie Detection from Facial Features.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, vol. 48, no. 1, 2024, pp. 93–136, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-024-00451-2.
Endacott, Camille G., and Paul M. Leonardi . "Chapter 19: Artificial intelligence as a mechanism of algorithmic isomorphism". Research Handbook on Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making in Organizations. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803926216.00029.
Golatkar, Aditya, Alessandro Achille, Luca Zancato, Wang Yu-Xiang, Ashwin Swaminathan, and Stefano Soatto. “CPR: Retrieval Augmented Generation for Copyright Protection.” arXiv.Org, 2024. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2403.18920.
Guo, Wenbo, Xian Wu, Usmann Khan, and Xinyu Xing. “EDGE: Explaining Deep Reinforcement Learning Policies.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, edited by M. Ranzato, A. Beygelzimer, Y. Dauphin, P. S. Liang, and J. Wortman Vaughan, 34:12222–36. Curran Associates, Inc., 2021. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2021/file/65c89f5a9501a04c073b354f03791b1f-Paper.pdf.
Hauser, Klay Max, Christos Mousas, Nicoletta Adamo, Minsoo Choi, Richard Mayer, and Fangzheng Zhao. “The Effect of Dynamic Facial Asymmetries on the Perceived Believability, Appeal, and Naturalness of Animated Agents.” ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3675231.3675246.
Holt, Jennifer. Cloud policy: A history of regulating pipelines, platforms, and data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 2024.
Huang, Zexi, Mert Kosan, Sourav Medya, Sayan Ranu, and Ambuj Singh. "Global counterfactual explainer for graph neural networks." In Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pp. 141-149. 2023.
Jiang, Julie, Luca Luceri, Joseph Walther, and Emilio Ferrara. “Social Approval and Network Homophily as Motivators of Online Toxicity.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.07779, 2023.
Liu, Alan. “Messages and values in the age of machine learning: From postcards to social media.” Prace Kulturoznawcze, 26, no. 4. (2022): 125–129. DOI: 10.19195/0860-6668.26.4.8.
Ludwig, Jason. “Politics—Not tech—Can save black jobs from AI. Public Books.” Public Books, Feb 2, 2024. https://www.publicbooks.org/politics-not-tech-can-save-black-jobs-from-ai/.
Manda, Haarika, Varshika Srinivasavaradhan, Laasya Koduru, Kevin Zhang, Xuanhe Zhou, Udit Paul, Elizabeth Belding, Arpit Gupta, and Tejas N. Narechania. “Measuring Broadband Policy Success.” Harvard Law Review Blog, July 16, 2024. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4897245.
McCray, Patrick. “Dirty digits and ‘pleasant landscapes’ Jason A. Heppler’s Silicon Valley and the environmental inequalities of high-tech urbanism.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 23, 2024.
Moyer, Illan, Samuelle Bourgault, Devon Frost, and Jennifer Jabobs. “Don’t mesh around: Streamlining manual-digital fabrication workflows with domain-specific 3D scanning.” ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Oct. 2024.
Offert, Fabian & Thao Phan.“A Sign That Spells: DALL-E 2, Invisual Images and The Racial Politics of Feature Space.” arXiv Preprint (2022). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.06323.
Parks, Lisa, Julia Velkova & Sander deRidder, eds. Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations. University of Illinois Press: Champaign, Urbana, 2023.
Qian, Jing, and Xifeng Yan. "Language Model Detoxification in Dialogue with Contextualized Stance Control." In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pp. 5548-5558. 2022
Raley, Rita & Jennifer Rhee. “Critical AI: A field in formation.” American Literature 95, no. 2 (2023): 185–204. DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10575021.
Sakr, Laila Shereen. Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Databodies, and Archives. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2023.
Saxon, Michael, and William Yang Wang. "Disparities in Text-to-Image Model Concept Possession Across Languages." In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 1870-1870. 2023
Twine, France Winddance. Geek Girls: Inequality and Opportunity in Silicon Valley. New York: NYU Press, 2022.
Venegas, Cristina, Cheryl Martens & Elsa Tapuy, eds. Digital Activism, Community Media, and Sustainable Communication in Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Walther, Joseph, and Ronald Rice. Social Processes of Online Hate. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2024.
Wolfers, Lara N, Robin L Nabi, and Nathan Walter. “Too Much Screen Time or Too Much Guilt? How Child Screen Time and Parental Screen Guilt Affect Parental Stress and Relationship Satisfaction.” Media Psychology, 2024, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2024.2310839.
Xu, Wenda, Guanglei Zhu, Xuandong Zhao, Liangming Pan, Lei Li, and William Wang. "Pride and Prejudice: LLM Amplifies Self-Bias in Self-Refinement." In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 15474-15492. 2024.
Yoon, Youngseok, Dainong Hu, Iain Weissburg, Yao Qin, and Haewon Jeong. “ReDiFine: Reusable Diffusion Finetuning for Mitigating Degradation in the Chain of Diffusion.” arXiv.Org, 2024. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2407.17493.