Robert Wolfe
I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Information Science at the University of Washington advised by Dr. Bill Howe and Dr. Alexis Hiniker, studying the epistemic risks and opportunities of modern AI systems. Specifically, my research considers:
- Small-scale approaches to generative AI that can help researchers and practitioners avoid dependence on proprietary technologies, especially in situations where sensitive data is involved, or reproducibility is paramount.
- Creating novel dimensions in the design space of generative technologies to help maximize transparency in high-stakes epistemic settings such as fact-checking.
- Understanding the nature of undesirable AI biases related to protected demographic characteristics such as race and ethnicity, nationality, age, and gender, most often in multimodal language-and-image models.
I’m grateful to have been a part of great communities doing critically important work during my time at UW, including Bill Howe’s Volitional AI Lab and Dr. Alexis Hiniker’s User Empowerment Lab. I’m also grateful to have had the chance to learn from and work with an incredible group of faculty members at the iSchool, including most recently Dr. Tanu Mitra. Please don’t hesitate to reach out by email if you’d like to discuss research.
news
| Aug 9, 2024 | I’m excited to be sharing new research at AIES 2024, this October 21-23 in Santa Clara, CA. We’ve made preprints available for our accepted work on representation bias of adolescents, the impact of dataset scale and societal consistency on bias in vision-language models, a new embedding measurement for social science, and a study of how generative AI is used in human-centered data science work. Please get in touch if you’d like to connect in Santa Clara this October! |
|---|---|
| May 31, 2024 | Excited to be presenting two papers in person at ACM FAccT 2024 on June 3 and 4 in Rio de Janeiro. This includes research with Dr. Bill Howe and the Volitional AI Lab about the competitiveness of small open models with large proprietary models like ChatGPT, as well as research with Dr. Tanu Mitra about the impacts and challenges of generative AI in the fact-checking profession. |