Research
1. Fostering user agency over information environments
Many people feel disempowered over their information environments, in part because technology companies optimize for user engagement over deliberate intent. How can people regain agency and transparency over their information environments?
Current themes news and mental health · social media and wellbeing · personalized and agentic feeds
Example papers
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Reactive Writers: How Co-Writing with AI Changes How We Engage with Ideas
CHI 2026
Interviews with 19 writers and an analysis of 1,291 AI co-writing sessions show that people start reacting to the AI’s suggestions before forming their own ideas, while still feeling in control of the text.
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An Article a Day: Towards Personal Informatics for Healthy News Consumption
CHI 2024 Extended Abstracts
Twelve avid news readers reflect on a dashboard of their own reading data. They want to feel informed without sacrificing their mental health, and self-tracking tools could help with both.
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Bonsai: Intentional and Personalized Social Media Feeds
CHI 2026
A system that lets people build their own feeds by describing what they want in plain language. In a multi-week study, Bluesky users found new content and filtered out toxic posts, though curating took more effort than usual.
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2. Designing trustworthy AI-mediated information ecosystems
AI increasingly shapes how people gauge the credibility and quality of civic information online. How can we calibrate user trust in AI-generated and AI-mediated information? And how can we help information stewards – like journalists, content creators, and moderators – better represent their epistemic work processes to lay audiences?
Current themes credibility, trust, and provenance of AI content · generative AI search · AI tools for information workers
Example paper
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“Ownership, Not Just Happy Talk”: Co-Designing a Participatory Large Language Model for Journalism
FAccT 2025
Twenty interviews with reporters, editors, labor organizers and newsroom leaders shape the design of a journalist-controlled large language model, and the organizational structures it would need.
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3. Understanding online attention and informedness
People’s online information environments are crucial to shaping their perceptions of the world and the ways they contribute to society, but online information exposure is often siloed or opaque. What civic information do people actually encounter online, in what contexts, and how do they make sense of it?
Current themes news knowledge index · attention to online news · local news availability
Example paper
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When Curiosity Gaps Backfire: Effects of Headline Concreteness on Information Selection Decisions
Scientific Reports 2025
A registered report and meta-analysis of 8,977 headline experiments. Headlines that give just the right amount of information draw the most clicks; headlines that are too vague or too concrete both lose readers.
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