Three 91爆料 faculty members have been awarded early-career fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The new Sloan Fellows, announced Feb. 18, are , the Clare Boothe Luce assistant professor of electrical & computer engineering and bioengineering, , an assistant professor of chemistry, and , an assistant professor of computer science in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.听

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, and including this year鈥檚 fellows, 131 faculty from 91爆料 have received a Sloan Research Fellowship, according to the Sloan Foundation.听

Sloan Fellowships are open to scholars in seven scientific and technical fields 鈥� chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics 鈥� and honor early-career researchers whose achievements mark them among the next generation of scientific leaders.听

The 126鈥�鈥痺ere selected by researchers and faculty in the scientific community. Candidates are nominated by their peers, and fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars based on each candidate鈥檚 research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. Each fellow will receive $75,000 to apply toward research endeavors.听

This year鈥檚 fellows come from 51 institutions across the United States and Canada.听

Orsborn鈥檚 research aims to understand how neurons in our brains work together to let us learn to move in many different ways. She uses engineering technologies like brain-computer interfaces to manipulate how neural activity relates to movement, which gives researchers new ways to link neural activity to computations related to how they believe the brain may perform. She also uses collaborations with theorists to build models that help researchers bridge from experimental data to computational principles.听

鈥淲e can quickly adapt our tennis skills to the pickleball court, but it also takes years to perfect a piano concerto,鈥� Orsborn said. 鈥淥ur flexibility likely comes from our brain’s ability to learn in many ways, but we don’t understand how neurons actually implement different learning computations. I hope to build bridges between computational principles and biological implementation, which will ultimately help us build therapies to restore movements lost due to injuries like stroke.鈥�听

Xiao鈥檚 research program designs new porous materials to address unsolved challenges in clean energy and chemical sustainability. These include developing new porous adsorbents that can use renewable electricity to drive chemical processes, as well as new porous catalysts that can convert sustainable feedstocks into useful products.听

鈥淧orous materials are the bedrock of industrial heterogeneous catalysis and chemical separations. Many of the chemicals we use in our daily lives have, at some point, been purified or chemically transformed within nano-sized pores,鈥� Xiao said. 鈥淕oing forward, new breakthroughs in porous materials synthesis are needed to harness renewable energy sources and chemical feedstocks. With the support of this award, along with the collaborative ecosystem at the 91爆料, we hope to realize these synthetic breakthroughs faster, better and more cheaply.鈥�听

Zhang’s research reimagines the design of online social platforms to empower the public to take control of their online experiences. Inspired by offline public institutions and political theory, she creates novel social computing systems for collaborative governance of online communities and AI. She also develops tools for personal and collective customization on social media and approaches for encouraging pro-social public discourse.听

鈥淒igital platforms comprise socio-technical infrastructure that are crucial to the lives of millions, yet today they are governed and designed by a select few,鈥� Zhang said. 鈥淎s a result, many people do not see themselves represented in the decisions made and possible configurations supported by the major platforms they鈥痷se. But putting the onus on end users to figure it out themselves can be overwhelming. I develop toolkits and interactive techniques informed by user needs to scaffold the process of customization, enabling both flexibility and ease of use.鈥�听

Contact Orsborn at aorsborn@uw.edu; Xiao at djxiao@uw.edu; and Zhang at axz@cs.uw.edu. 听

Major platform social media is in an upheaval. Bluesky and Meta鈥檚 Threads want to be Twitter. LinkedIn鈥檚 . Meanwhile, Twitter has become X. And X wants to be 鈥� possibly including job listings, payment and ride-hailing 鈥� even as . Amid this, after announces the impending death of social media.

The turmoil has many people reconsidering what they want out of social media at scale: Can it be better? Four researchers at the 91爆料 have approached this question from different angles.

, a 91爆料 assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, was the senior author of two papers at the in Minneapolis last week. One about where articles on social media came from, with the aim of curbing misinformation; the other looks at affects social media users.

For the last couple years, , a 91爆料 doctoral student in the Information School who researches online harassment, has written a that often focuses on the trouble with social media. , a 91爆料 doctoral student in the Allen School, studies how people enter dissociative states on social media. , a 91爆料 assistant professor in the iSchool, is researching tools to on social media.

91爆料 News talked with the four of them about what鈥檚 wrong with social media and how it might improve.

What are some significant problems you see with major social media platforms?

Amy X. Zhang:听 A big problem to me is the centralization of power 鈥� that the platforms can decide what content should be shown and what should get posted to the top of one feed for millions of people. That brings up issues of accountability and of localization to specific communities or cultures. A singular perspective 鈥� oftentimes coming from, for example, workers in Silicon Valley 鈥� won鈥檛 fit for lots of people. Alongside this is the homogenization of our digital social experiences, which don鈥檛 come close to the richness and vividness of our actual social lives.

Katherine Cross: Amy is quite right. I would add that open platforms 鈥� which anyone can join and on which everyone talks to everyone, constantly 鈥� allow for the most rapid acceleration of virality, far beyond anything that has existed previously. It also means that if someone is trying to start a harassment campaign, they can easily spread it virally to thousands of users. Those of us who remember LiveJournal know that earlier iterations of the Internet were no stranger to drama and harassment. But the design of earlier platforms provided a great many speed bumps for toxicity and abuse. A lot of that friction has gone away as a condition of the design of open platforms. So whether it鈥檚 Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook, these platforms allow for the most rapid acceleration of the worst aspects of our internet use.

Amanda Baughan: Some other problems are the many mechanisms that seek to draw people in and keep them on a site. These can be notifications that are personalized to the content that you like or the time you normally open the app; the infinite feeds that keep you scrolling; and the rewards structure that keeps you on the hunt for content that might scratch your brain in the way that you find most appealing. Even though social media could be a great tool for connection or self-expression, people are often in an adversarial relationship with these interfaces that are trying to keep them stuck.

Martin Saveski: I will add that these platforms are designed for very shallow connections. Right now, I鈥檓 asking: How can we design platforms with scale but still provide an environment where people can communicate and connect more deeply? After Twitter open-sourced its feed algorithm and many of the Facebook files were released, we know what we鈥檇 previously guessed: They primarily optimize for engagement. So how do we do that better? It’s clear that there is value in engagement. But perhaps there are other things that we could be thinking about when designing the experience.

How are you trying to make large social media platforms better for the people using them?

KC: My work is trying to do at least two things, practically. I鈥檓 looking at the lives and travails of content moderators, the people whose jobs it is to make the internet more usable for ordinary people. They deserve better working conditions and more mental health support. The second part is 鈥� I hate to make it seem so simple 鈥� almost an exhortation to spend less time on open platforms. As long as we have open platforms, the only effective solution for a number of problems is to simply get people to use these platforms less.

AB: I’ve been thinking a lot about our experiences online as dissociative, rather than addictive. Dissociation can be part of healthy cognitive functioning. Daydreaming, for example, is considered dissociation. But when you combine people鈥檚 reduced self-reflection and self-monitoring on a platform designed to keep them on a site, people start to sink more time into the platform than they really want to. This explains part of why people have these fraught relationships with their social media 鈥� neither satisfied, nor willing to quit. So I鈥檝e looked at designs that might help people re-engage their self-monitoring and disrupt dissociation. For example, platforms could separate content into smaller chunks, which is currently available on X; add a 鈥測ou’re all caught up鈥� label; or tell users they鈥檝e been scrolling for a certain amount of time.

AXZ: I鈥檝e been looking at what it would mean to decentralize these major platforms鈥� power by building tools for users or communities who don鈥檛 have lots of time and resources. For instance, if you are getting harassed and you’re developing word lists and blocking harassers, can we that lets you share that with people in a similar situation? I’m also really interested in , like WhatsApp or Signal. Right now, because of encryption, nobody’s moderating content. The platform can’t do it, and there aren鈥檛 tools for users or communities to do it. So you just have massive issues with abuse on these platforms.

MS: Recently I’ve worked with collaborators at Stanford to think about how to . Intentionally or not, algorithms reflect values. We found that if we encode democratic values in platforms鈥� algorithms, we see a reduction in polarization, but people are still reasonably engaged. Now we’re launching a larger field experiment to study how people are affected if we sort their feeds differently or remove some types of information from them?

What do you see as the potential for large social media?

AXZ: I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Twitter. It has been great for my career in many ways. I used to spend lots of time sharing my research, hearing about other people’s research, sometimes even starting collaborations. Twitter has been the de facto place for academic sharing and conversation, but should it be? Is it a place where junior scholars feel welcome to participate? Is it inclusive of everyone’s voices? Is it what we really want out of a forum for scholarly communication? In some ways, yes. But in many ways, no. Twitter has had so many problems over the years with harassment. If we were to design something that reflects the values of an academic community, which does want to be inclusive and to share its research with the world, what could that look like? I don’t know exactly, but I do think it takes some rethinking.

KC: Again, I agree completely with Amy. Twitter could, in theory, be good for sharing articles. Occasionally, when an article of mine really caught fire, it was partially because it was getting shared a lot on a platform like Twitter. But I鈥檝e watched online harassment dynamics play out between journalists or academics. For example, I followed a lot of epidemiologists and public health experts, all of whom had expertise on COVID-19. And I watched as their excessive use of Twitter led them to degenerate into these warring camps. I鈥檝e spoken to many of these people privately, and they said that it corroded actual academic relationships. That’s where I feel that the professional benefits are sometimes overstated.

These platforms can also be good for interpersonal relationships. I’ve made a lot of friends through Twitter. It has occasionally helped my career. It’s useful for networking in very small minority communities, like the transgender community, or any number of other groups of people who make up 1% of the population. It鈥檚 also been great for private crowdfunding because of the ease of virality on an open platform. But I still think that there is something to be said for recouping some of these benefits on smaller, more closed platforms.

Given all the turmoil with major platforms lately, are you hopeful about any of the changes you’re seeing either in platforms or in how the public is relating to these platforms?

MS: In an interesting way, the fact that Musk closed Twitter鈥檚 data access has encouraged researchers to think beyond Twitter. I’m personally very excited about new social media platforms 鈥� especially Bluesky, because people can own their data and also control what they see in their feeds without it being so centralized. Hopefully, that will lead to a better version of whatever we鈥檝e had.

AB: The recent changes of Twitter have shown how much platform design and governance can have a huge impact on people’s experiences. I’ve seen the quality of my feed get much worse, and it’s led me to log off much more quickly. So I hope that this has led people 鈥� who aren’t just social media researchers 鈥� to question how these platforms are made and how they want to use them.

KC: I effectively stopped using Twitter when Musk took over, but earlier this year, I gave up on it completely. I think that, like Amanda, I take hope from the fact that a lot of people are clearing away their preconceptions about social media being inevitable and fixed. I always try to teach my students that no technology鈥檚 form is inevitable. We have a say over its shape.

AXZ: When I started grad school, Facebook was the dominant thing. It was so hard for me to imagine a world without it, or without the social networking paradigm of people following each other. I just assumed that this was the future. Now we鈥檙e in this fragmented landscape. People are leaving Facebook for other platforms, then leaving those platforms for even other platforms. We lose something with that fragmentation, for sure. When Twitter first appeared, there was some excitement about its role for democracy, that it could be 鈥渢he global town square.鈥� It was perhaps naive of us to think that, and we’ve learned the downsides. Now we鈥檙e correcting toward a fragmented landscape, which is maybe more reflective of how we interact socially and is perhaps healthier.

KC: In my dissertation, I argue that social media has often been anti-political. During the previous in 2009, for instance, there was so much hope that Twitter and open platforms like it were going to be self-organizing networks that could change the world. What we began to get were things like the , during which , but not the endurance of democracy, because the latter requires a public to be able to deliberate. In theory, Twitter can get masses of people out onto the streets, which is extraordinarily important. But it gives them no mechanism for deciding what to do with all that power that they have gained. And it’s why these movements often dissolve. These platforms are very good at provoking internecine conflict, but not good at providing a space for safe, effective deliberation to do or become something new as a collective.

For more information, contact Baughan at baughan@cs.uw.edu, Cross at kcross1@uw.edu, Saveski at msaveski@uw.edu and Zhang at axz@cs.uw.edu.