While social media feed rankings are primarily driven by engagement signals rather than any explicit value system, the resulting algorithmic feeds are not value-neutral: engagement may prioritize specific individualistic values. This paper presents an approach for social media feed value alignment. We adopt Schwartz's theory of Basic Human Values -- a broad set of human values that articulates complementary and opposing values forming the building blocks of many cultures -- and we implement an algorithmic approach that models and then ranks feeds by expressions of Schwartz's values in social media posts. Our approach enables controls where users can express weights on their desired values, combining these weights and post value expressions into a ranking that respects users' articulated trade-offs. Through controlled experiments (N=141 and N=250), we demonstrate that users can use these controls to architect feeds reflecting their desired values. Across users, value-ranked feeds align with personal values, diverging substantially from existing engagement-driven feeds.

While generative AI tools are increasingly adopted for creative and analytical tasks, their role in interpretive practices, where meaning is subjective, plural, and non-causal, remains poorly understood. This paper examines AI-assisted tarot reading, a divinatory practice in which users pose a query, draw cards through a randomized process, and ask AI systems to interpret the resulting symbols. Drawing on interviews with tarot practitioners and Hartmut Rosa’s Theory of Resonance, we investigate how users seek, negotiate, and evaluate resonant interpretations in a context where no causal relationship exists between the query and the data being interpreted. We identify distinct ways practitioners incorporate AI into their interpretive workflows, including using AI to navigate uncertainty and self-doubt, explore alternative perspectives, and streamline or extend existing divinatory practices. Based on these findings, we offer design recommendations for AI systems that support interpretive meaning-making without collapsing ambiguity or foreclosing user agency.

CHI ’25, Yokohama, Japan

How does the visual design of digital platforms impact user behavior and the resulting environment? A body of work suggests that introducing social signals to content can increase both the inequality and unpredictability of its success, but has only been shown in the context of music listening. To further examine the effect of social influence on media popularity, we extend this research to the context of algorithmically-generated images by re-adapting Salganik et al's Music Lab experiment. On a digital platform where participants discover and curate AI-generated hybrid animals, we randomly assign both the knowledge of other participants' behavior and the visual presentation of the information. We successfully replicate the Music Lab's findings in the context of images, whereby social influence leads to an unpredictable winner-take-all market. However, we also find that social influence can lead to the emergence of local cultural trends that diverge from the status quo and are ultimately more diverse. We discuss the implications of these results for platform designers and animal conservation efforts.

How can social media platforms fight the spread of misinformation? One possibility is to use newsfeed algorithms to downrank content from sources that users rate as untrustworthy. But will laypeople be handicapped by motivated reasoning or lack of expertise, and thus unable to identify misinformation sites? And will they "game" this crowdsourcing mechanism in order to promote content that aligns with their partisan agendas? We conducted a survey experiment in which =984 Americans indicated their trust in numerous news sites. To study the tendency of people to game the system, half of the participants were told their responses would inform social media ranking algorithms. Participants trusted mainstream sources much more than hyper-partisan or fake news sources, and their ratings were highly correlated with professional fact-checker judgments. Critically, informing participants that their responses would influence ranking algorithms did not diminish these results, despite the manipulation increasing the political polarization of trust ratings.

We introduce TuringBox, a platform to democratize the study of AI. On one side of the platform, AI contributors upload existing and novel algorithms to be studied scientifically by others. On the other side, AI examiners develop and post machine intelligence tasks to evaluate and characterize the outputs of algorithms. We outline the architecture of such a platform, and describe two interactive case studies of algorithmic auditing on the platform.

OBJECTIVE: Hospital-acquired pressure ulcers (HAPUs) have a mortality rate of 11.6%, are costly to treat, and result in Medicare reimbursement penalties. Medicare codes HAPUs according to Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Patient-Safety Indicator 3 (PSI-03), but they are sometimes inappropriately coded. The objective is to use electronic health records to predict pressure ulcers and to identify coding issues leading to penalties. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We evaluated all hospitalized patient electronic medical records at an academic medical center data repository between 2011 and 2014. These data contained patient encounter level demographic variables, diagnoses, prescription drugs, and provider orders. HAPUs were defined by PSI-03: stages III, IV, or unstageable pressure ulcers not present on admission as a secondary diagnosis, excluding cases of paralysis. Random forests reduced data dimensionality. Multilevel logistic regression of patient encounters evaluated associations between covariates and HAPU incidence. RESULTS: The approach produced a sample population of 21 153 patients with 1549 PSI-03 cases. The greatest odds ratio (OR) of HAPU incidence was among patients diagnosed with spinal cord injury (ICD-9 907.2: OR = 14.3; P < .001), and 71% of spinal cord injuries were not properly coded for paralysis, leading to a PSI-03 flag. Other high ORs included bed confinement (ICD-9 V49.84: OR = 3.1, P < .001) and provider-ordered pre-albumin lab (OR = 2.5, P < .001). DISCUSSION: This analysis identifies spinal cord injuries as high risk for HAPUs and as being often inappropriately coded without paralysis, leading to PSI-03 flags. The resulting statistical model can be tested to predict HAPUs during hospitalization. CONCLUSION: Inappropriate coding of conditions leads to poor hospital performance measures and Medicare reimbursement penalties.

Consider two simple polygons with equal area. The Wallace-Bolyai-Gerwien theorem states that these polygons are scissors congruent, that is, they can be dissected into finitely many congruent polygonal pieces. We present an interactive application that visualizes this constructive proof.

The human willingness to pay costs to benefit anonymous others is often explained by social preferences: rather than only valuing their own material payoff, people also care in some fashion about the outcomes of others. But how successful is this concept of outcome-based social preferences for actually predicting out-of-sample behavior? We investigate this question by having 1067 human subjects each make 20 cooperation decisions, and using machine learning to predict their last 5 choices based on their first 15. We find that decisions can be predicted with high accuracy by models that include outcome-based features and allow for heterogeneity across individuals in baseline cooperativeness and the weights placed on the outcome-based features (AUC=0.89). It is not necessary, however, to have a fully heterogeneous model -- excellent predictive power (AUC=0.88) is achieved by a model that allows three different sets of baseline cooperativeness and feature weights (i.e. three behavioral types), defined based on the participant's cooperation frequency in the 15 training trials: those who cooperated at least half the time, those who cooperated less than half the time, and those who never cooperated. Finally, we provide evidence that this inclination to cooperate cannot be well proxied by other personality/morality survey measures or demographics, and thus is a natural kind (or "cooperative phenotype").