Tiziano Piccardi joins the Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor of computer science and a member of the Data Science and AI Institute (DSAI).
Piccardi received his PhD in data science from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2022. Before joining Hopkins, he was a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford University’s Human-Computer Interaction Group.
Tell us a little bit about your research.
Tell us about a project you are excited about.
Rapid progress in AI is transforming digital spaces, creating both new risks and new opportunities. I firmly believe that capabilities like understanding nuances in text or simulating how different people might respond to content give us huge opportunities to expand our design space and envision better platforms. In a recent study, we used AI to identify social media posts that can lead to affective polarization and to design an alternative solution to mitigate the problem. In the same spirit, I’m excited to design ways to support better feed-ranking systems. This includes a couple of directions: understanding the gap between what we say we want from our online experience (e.g., looking at friends’ updates) and what actually captures our attention (e.g., doomscrolling), and simulating online behavior and discourse to predict how content may affect us.
Why this? What drives your passion for your field?
We don’t always realize it, but we spend an incredible amount of our time on these platforms—people are spending more and more time on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, X, and similar platforms. For example, according to Pew Research, more than half of Americans say that they sometimes get news from social media, and 21% say they do so often! At this scale, small design changes can make a massive difference not only for individuals, but also for society. Beyond user satisfaction, unintended design consequences can directly affect outcomes like our well-being, mental health, and how we perceive society and others.
These are high-stakes problems, and I’m passionate about finding solutions that preserve the real advantages these platforms provide while limiting unwanted consequences.
What classes are you teaching?
This fall, I’m teaching a graduate-level class on Social Computing, the goal of which is to learn the state of the art by reading and discussing foundational papers in this space. We will cover topics like peer production, social media feed ranking, virality, online moderation, and trolling, and how they impact platform design and online experiences. I envision this class as a research-oriented learning experience, in which students will identify an open problem and develop a research proposal to address it. Because my research is broadly in human-computer interaction, I will co-teach a large undergraduate class in the spring, Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction, where we cover the basics of interaction design. This is a design class, so beyond regular lectures, students work in groups to develop an original product idea and go through the full process of collecting user needs, prototyping, and testing.
Why are you excited to be joining the Johns Hopkins Department of Computer Science?
Besides Johns Hopkins University’s reputation, which doesn’t need an introduction, I’m particularly excited about two things: the department’s growth and its collaborative environment. It’s an exciting time to join Johns Hopkins, with its DSAI bringing new faculty, ideas, and energy to the department. When I visited the department for the first time, I remember often hearing about how collaborative Johns Hopkins is. Now that I’ve been here for some time, I can confirm this is a strong cultural trait of the university and critical to the interdisciplinary work that I do.
Besides your work, what are some of your other hobbies and passions?
Chances are you’d find me at my laptop even when I’m not working. I love coding personal projects like home automation tools, games, and apps. Before joining Johns Hopkins as faculty, I worked in different tech roles, including as a software engineer and a video game designer, and I still enjoy keeping those skills active whenever I have the chance. Besides that, I’m passionate about paleontology and history; I collect fossils and historical objects and am slowly creating a mini museum, which you can hopefully visit one day.