Mor Naaman

AI Everywhere all at Once: Revisiting AI-Mediated Communication

5/21, 11:00am – 12:00pm, Academic Building East 2400

When we first defined AI-Mediated Communication (AIMC) in 2019, it felt mostly like an academic concept — maybe even theoretical. Needless to say, just a few years later, AI is now increasingly present in our human-to-human communication, from our interpersonal exchanges, to our work artifacts, to our online communities and media. In this talk, I will revisit several of the influential studies we performed in the area of AIMC, including online experiments showing how AI suspicion can reduce interpersonal evaluations and trust; and how AI assistants can covertly shift our communication language, content, and even our attitudes. I will then revisit our definition of AI-Mediated Communication, given the expansive scope of AI’s impact on our communication and information ecosystem that emerged since the launch of ChatGPT. I will outline directions for future research, but also highlight the challenges involved.

Speaker Bio

Mor Naaman is the Don and Mibs Follett professor of Information Science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. He currently serves as Cornell Tech’s Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs. Mor leads a research group looking at topics at the intersection of technology, media and democracy. The group applies multidisciplinary techniques — from machine learning to qualitative social science — to study our information ecosystem and its challenges, with a special focus on AI-mediated communication and its impact on society. Before Cornell, Mor was on the faculty at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, led a research team at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Stanford University InfoLab, and played professional basketball for Hapoel Tel Aviv. He is also a former startup co-founder, and advises startup companies in social computing and related areas. He is a recipient of a NSF Early Faculty CAREER Award, research awards and grants from numerous corporations including Microsoft, Meta and Google, and multiple best paper awards.  

 

Lee Giles

Coming Soon

5/21, 3:00pm – 4:00pm, Academic Building East 2400  

 

Jenn Wortman Vaughan

Fostering Appropriate Reliance on LLM-Infused Search Engines

5/22, 11:00am – 12:00pm, Academic Building East 2400

Search engines powered by large language models (LLMs) are known to produce erroneous responses that sound fluent and convincing, raising the risk that users will rely on these responses as if they were correct. Mitigating such overreliance is a key challenge in responsible AI. In this talk, I will describe two projects that explore how to foster appropriate reliance on LLM-infused search engines. The first project explores how users perceive and act upon LLMs’ expressions of uncertainty. The second explores the impact of explanations (that is, supporting details for answers), inconsistencies in these explanations, and links to sources on users’ reliance and accuracy answering questions. Both projects highlight the importance of user testing before deploying LLMs at scale.

Speaker Bio

Jenn Wortman Vaughan is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, New York City. She currently focuses on Responsible AI—including transparency, interpretability, fairness, and AI evaluation—as part of MSR’s FATE group. Jenn’s research background is in machine learning and algorithmic economics, but she now frequently incorporates techniques from HCI into her research in order to better understand the interaction between people and AI systems. Jenn came to MSR in 2012 from UCLA, where she was an assistant professor in the computer science department. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, and subsequently spent a year as a Computing Innovation Fellow at Harvard. She is the recipient of Penn’s 2009 Rubinoff dissertation award for innovative applications of computer technology, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and a variety of best paper awards. Jenn co-founded the Annual Workshop for Women in Machine Learning (WiML), which has been held each year since 2006, served as Program Co-chair of NeurIPS 2021, and is currently serving as Program Co-chair of FAccT 2025.  

 

Dame Wendy Hall

Generative AI: Fact or Fiction

5/21, 3:00pm – 4:00pm, Academic Building East 2400

We are all aware of the wave of Generative AI hysteria that has rolled around the world since the release of ChatGPT by Open AI in Nov 2022. Ai researchers were aghast and often side lined as leaders of the big tech companies made claims that we didn’t recognise as reality and held sway with the politicians to steer regulation and ethical debates to their benefit. But we all recognise the amazing technological breakthroughs that have taken place in both the big tech companies and university research labs to take us to the verge of an AI revolution that if we manage it well will lead to profound breakthroughs in science that we could not have imagined before. This talk will look at how this story has evolved, attempt to sort the fact from the fiction and consider how we navigate a way ahead that harnesses the power of this new technology whilst mitigating against the serious risks we face if the technology becomes more foe than friend. But these questions are not just about the technology, they are fundamentally socio-technical questions which require an interdisciplinary approach to both research and education. The talk will also explore the importance of the Web and the Internet in AI futures and why, as Jim Hendler famously said, Web Science is important now more than ever.

Speaker Bio

Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng is Regius Professor of Computer Science, Associate Vice President (International Engagement) and is Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton. She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year’s Honours list and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the ACM. Dame Wendy was co-Chair of the UK government’s AI Review, which was published in October 2017 and a member of the AI Council. She is currently the co-Chair of the ACM Publications Board and Editor-in-Chief of Royal Society Open Science. She is an advisor to the UK government and many other governments and companies around the world and in 2023 was appointed to the United Nations high-level advisory body on artificial intelligence. Her latest book, Four Internets, co-written with Kieron O’Hara, was published by OUP in 2021.

www.damewendydbe.com