Robert Wolfe
I’m an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University in the School of Communication and Information (SC&I), where I study modern general-purpose AI systems, and how people perceive and interact with these technologies. My research considers:
- Human-AI interaction on large-scale platforms, including in public, networked environments like X / Twitter where a model may serve as a de facto voice of the platform.
- Public attitudes toward emerging technologies like AI, including with respect to contested subjects like privacy, bias, and future of work.
- Small-scale approaches to generative AI that can help organizations avoid dependence on proprietary technologies, especially in situations where sensitive data is involved, or reproducibility is paramount.
- Effects of AI on the future of expertise and expert labor, including the adoption strategies and concerns of organizations employing expert workers.
- Quantitative methods for measuring societal attitudes reflected in the geometry of machine-learned representations, most often related to socially consequential demographic characteristics such as race and ethnicity, nationality, age, and gender.
I am best reached by email at robert.wolfe[at]rutgers.edu.
news
| Jun 24, 2026 | Our research on the future of expertise and the expert data gig economy won the Best Paper Award at CHIWORK 2026! Had a great time in Linz, Austria presenting the work and getting to know a new scholarly community. This paper is yet another fruitful collaboration with the inimitable Aayushi Dangol, now of foundry10. |
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| May 29, 2026 | Our research on the social roles played by Grok on X / Twitter was published at at ICWSM 2026. Proud to have worked with Martin Saveski, Nic Weber, and co-first-author Katelyn Mei on this study. Katelyn will also be presenting the paper’s findings at IC2S2 in July 2026! |
| Aug 26, 2025 | Excited to share that two new papers probing social norms surrounding human interactions with AI chatbots have been accepted to AIES 2025. The first is a study drawing on the principles of Nonviolent Communication to inform AI-mediated interactions, and the second is a study of privacy norms among U.S. users of LLM-based chatbots. Congrats to the amazing group of students whose work in the User Empowerment directed research group made the second study possible, and especially to first author Sarah Tran! |