Refreshments are available starting at 10:30 a.m. The seminar will begin at 10:45 a.m.
Abstract
The design of online platforms plays a critical role in shaping public discourse—yet these same platforms can unintentionally contribute to misinformation, polarization, and social harm. Tiziano Piccardi’s research investigates how to reorient these platforms toward positive societal outcomes by re-imagining the algorithmic and design principles at their core. In this talk, Piccardi will present AI-driven designs that (1) reduce the harmful societal effects of social media and (2) enhance the reliability of open knowledge platforms like Wikipedia. He will introduce a framework for running large-scale algorithmic reranking field experiments without platform collaboration and share results from a large-scale experiment on X (formerly Twitter), where a large language model-based system reranked feeds in real-time to mitigate political polarization. Piccardi will then discuss tools and studies that have shaped Wikipedia’s design, reinforcing its role as the world’s largest online encyclopedia and a trusted global information source accessed by millions daily. By translating research into deployable tools and real-world applications, Piccardi’s work demonstrates how embedding societal values into platform design can foster healthier online information environments.
Speaker Biography
Tiziano Piccardi is a postdoctoral scholar in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, working in its human-computer interaction group. He earned his PhD in data science from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Piccardi’s research focuses on social computing and web research, aiming to improve the design of online platforms, including social media and open knowledge ecosystems. He is a long-term formal collaborator with Wikimedia Research, contributing to the enhancement of Wikipedia. He is also a fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation and Stanford Impact Labs.