2024 Conference

NEW DIRECTIONS 2024

The Digital Business Institute at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business is excited to announce its hosting of the 8th annual Psychology of Technology Institute’s “New Directions in Research on the Psychology of Technology” conference, which will be held on October 12-13, 2024. The conference theme this year will be “The Quantified Society”. The event will bring together a unique mix of industry leaders, behavioral scientists, technologists, and those in the AI community who are especially interested in creating a healthy psychological future for the increasingly common use of AI in daily life.

Hotel accommodations can be made at Hotel Commonwealth by calling (866) 784-4000 and asking for the BU Questrom - Psychology of Technology Conference room block, or using the dedicated booking link. The last day to reserve guestrooms in the group block is Wednesday, September 11th, 2024.

Boston Visitor Recommendations: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1GB2-mElQYB-UYH6sqXc0vmZY9nad28k&usp=sharing


CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS

 
 
 
 
 

Schedule

Please note that all the times indicated in the schedule are provided in Eastern Time.

SUnday, October 13, 2024

08:30am – 09:00am Check-in & Coffee/Pastries

09:00am – 10:30am Panel 6: LLMS

  • Carey Morewedge, “LLMs Improve Hypothesis Generation by Reducing Effort"

  • Kurt Gray, “AI as a Moral Expert”

  • Sudeep Bhatia, “The structure of everyday choice: Insights from 100K decision problems”

  • Emily Saltz

10:30am – 11:00am Break

11:00am – 12:00pm Session 7: Data Blitz

  • Jonas Paul Schoene, “On the Validity and State-of-the-Art of Measuring the Well-Being of Populations in the US and UK with Twitter”

  • Julia Coff, “Molded by the Ghost: How Physicians Use–and Cease Using–Predictive AI to Learn a Mental Model”

  • Michalis Mamakos, “Moralizing partisanship when surrounded by co-partisans versus in mixed company”

  • Ari Dyckovsky, “Resilience to financial crisis: A case study of cryptocurrency communities over the FTX collapse”

  • Dan-Mircea Mirea, “Depression is associated with higher sensitivity to social media rewards”

  • Matthew Leitao, “The Impact of AI (Versus Doctors) on the Effectiveness of a Sleep Intervention”

  • Benjamin Silver, “Perceptions of AI moderators and the spread of misinformation in closed group chats”

  • Jeremy Babb, “Can AI help us to become better givers?”

12:15pm – 01:15pm Lunch

01:15pm - 02:00pm Keynote: Luis von Ahn, Duo Lingo

02:00pm - 02:15pm Break

02:15pm – 03:30pm Session 8: Policy

  • Andrea Liebman, “Building resilience: Lessons from Sweden's approach to psychological defense”

  • Andy Schwartz

03:30pm – 03:45pm Break

03:45pm – 04:45pm Roundtable moderated by Chloe Autio

04:30pm – 05:30pm Concluding Remarks/Wrap-up

 

Saturday, October 12, 2024

08:15am – 08:45am Check-in & Coffee/Pastries

08:45am – 09:00am Welcome Remarks

09:00am – 10:15am Panel 1: Quantifying X

  • Yoel Roth

  • Jennifer Allen, “Quantifying the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical Content on Facebook”

  • Karim Kassam, “From Data to Decisions, Examples from Professional Sports”

10:15am – 10:45am Break

10:45am – 12:00pm Panel 2: Quantifying What We Want

  • Ellen Haller

  • Paul Stillman, “Using Mouse-Tracking to Uncover The Dynamics of Self-Control"

12:00pm – 01:00pm Lunch

01:15pm – 02:00pm Session 3: Data Blitz

  • Aaron Nichols, “Certifiably True: The Impact of Self-Certification on Misinformation”

  • Jiani Xue, “How Consumers Photograph Products for Positive versus Negative Reviews”

  • Asaf Mazar, “Lagging Behind: Brief Loading Delays Undermine Online Learning”

  • Stephan Carney, “Made with AI: Consumer Engagement with Media Containing AI Disclosures”

  • Ian Anderson, “Are Addiction Narratives Harming Social Media Users' Ability to Manage their Use?”

2:15pm - 3:30pm Panel 4: Recomendation Systems

  • Smitha Milli, “Bridging-Based Ranking for Social Media”

  • Guy Aridor, “The Value of Belief Data in Online Recommendation Systems”

  • Jonathan Stray

03:30pm – 03:45pm Break

03:45pm – 05:15pm Panel 5: Goodhart’s Law

  • Chien-Ju Ho, “The Consequences of AI Training on Human Decision Making”

  • Tara Behrend, “The Psychology of Workplace Surveillance and Police Body-Worn Camera Adoption”

  • Madeleine Daepp, “The Business of Generative Propaganda”

  • Madhav Kumar, “Algorithmic Pricing and Consumer Sensitivity to Price Volatility”

05:15pm – 05:30pm Break

05:30pm – 06:30pm Happy Hour/Poster Session


PArtial list of speakers

Luis von Ahn is an entrepreneur and consulting professor at Carnegie Mellon University who is considered one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. He is known for co-inventing CATPCHAs, being a MacArthur Fellow, and selling two companies to Google in his 20s.

He is currently the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, a language-learning platform created to bring fee language education to the world. With over 500 million users, it is now the most popular language-learning platform and the most downloaded education app in the world.

Luis has been named one of the 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science Magazine, one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover, and one of the Top Young Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, one of the 100 Most Innovative People in Business by Fast Company Magazine, and in 2018 won the Lemelson-MIT prize. In 2023 Luis was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame, and in 2024, recieved the GSV Lifetime Achievement Award.

You can find Luis on X as @LuisvonAhn and LinkedIn as linkedin.com/in/luis-von-ahn-
duolingo/

 

Jennifer Allen is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in the Computational Social Science Lab. In 2025, she will join NYU Stern as an Assistant Professor of Technology, Operations and Statistics. She holds a PhD in Marketing from MIT Sloan School of Management, supervised by David Rand. Her work focuses on digital persuasion, misinformation, and the wisdom of crowds.

 

Guy Aridor is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management and a research affiliate at CESifo. His research employs tools from economics and quantitative marketing to investigate policy and antitrust issues in the digital economy, as well as the effects of new technologies on consumer behavior. He has a particular interest in consumer privacy, recommendation systems, and social media platforms. He holds a PhD in economics from Columbia University and a BA in pure/applied mathematics, computer science, and economics from Boston University.

 

Sudeep Bhatia is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He uses computational modeling, behavioral experiments, and large-scale digital data, to study how people think and decide. For the past decade, his research has focused on integrating psychological theory with advances in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, to build accurate models of human cognition and behavior.

 

Tara Behrend is the John R Butler II Professor of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University, and Director of the MSU Future of Work Initiative. She is an organizational psychologist whose work focuses on the psychological effects of emerging workplace technologies, including topics such as digital surveillance, virtual reality for training, and AI feedback. She is Past-President of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and serves on the National Academies Board on Human-Systems Integration.

Dr. Madeleine I. G. Daepp is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, where she studies the collaborative deployment of novel technologies in shared public spaces. Through her research, she seeks to bridge the divides between the needs of civil society organizations and the promise of novel technologies and big data. She holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia, and a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis.

 

Kurt Gray is Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina, where he directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab, which studies the psychology of morality, religion, politics, and AI. He also leads the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, which explores new ways to reduce polarization. Next year he will be moving to Ohio State University. He is the author of the forthcoming book Outraged: Why we Fight about Morality and Politics, and How to Find Common Ground.

 

Chien-Ju Ho is an assistant professor in Computer Science & Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2015 and spent three years visiting the EconCS group at Harvard from 2012 to 2015. He is the recipient of the Google Outstanding Graduate Research Award at UCLA in 2015. His work was nominated for Best Paper Award at WWW 2015 and HCOMP 2021. His research broadly connects to the fields of machine learning, optimization, behavioral sciences, and algorithmic economics. He is interested in investigating the interactions between humans and AI, including enabling AI algorithms to learn from humans (e.g., in the context of crowdsourcing) and designing AI algorithms to assist human decision-making (e.g., through information design and environment design).

 

Madhav Kumar is a Post Doctoral Associate at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research addresses fundamental marketing problems in online platforms such as pricing, recommendations, and targeting. He is also the Head of Research at Catalan.ai where he designs and deploys pricing algorithms.

 

Andrea Liebman is the Head of The Digital Hub at The Swedish Psychological Defence Agency (MPF). Her work focuses on the intersection of social media, AI, new technologies, strategic communications, and malign information influence. Before joining MPF, she was the Head of Communications at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. In addition, Mrs. Liebman has advised international organizations like the United Nations and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in digital strategies and strategic communications. She holds two master's degrees, in journalism and international relations.

 

Smitha Milli is a Research Scientist at Meta Fundamental AI Research (FAIR). Before that, they were a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell Tech, and before that they received their BS and PhD in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

 
 

Carey K. Morewedge is a Professor of Marketing and Everett W. Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar in the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. His research examines the psychology of judgment and decision making and how to improve it. The substantive focus of his work explores psychological determinants of value and how they influence the perception of money, goods, and new technologies (e.g., digital goods, algorithms, and artificial intelligence). Professor Morewedge has published more than 70 articles and chapters in journals, including Science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychological Science, Nature Human Behavior, Nature Medicine, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His popular writing has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review. The United States Government uses interventions Professor Morewedge developed to reduce cognitive bias in intelligence analysis and management. Professor Morewedge has received more than $2.4 million in external research funding and awards for his work, including the 2022 Best Paper award from the Journal of Consumer Research, the 2010 Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, recognition as an inaugural Scholar of the Marketing Science Institute, an Idea of the Year award from The New York Times, and inclusion in Poets and Quant's Top 40 under 40 Business School Professors.

 

H. Andrew Schwartz is the Director of the Human Language Analysis Beings (HLAB), an interdisciplinary lab housed in Computer Science at Stony Brook University (SUNY). Before that, he co-founded the World Well-Being Project, now a consortium of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Stony Brook University, and Stanford University focused on developing large-scale language analyses that reveal differences in health, personality, and well-being. He was a recipient of the Young Faculty Award from DARPA in 2020 and Outstanding Paper Award from Association for Computational Linguistics in 2023. Andrew is an active member in the fields of natural language processing, psychology, and health informatics as well as consultant in AI-Language Modeling. He is the co-creator of the new R-Text package as well as the creator and co-maintainer of the Differential Language Analysis ToolKit (DLATK), used in hundreds of studies.

 

Paul Stillman is an Assistant Professor in Marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. His research seeks to understand how best to motivate consumers to engage with their long-term goals rather than succumbing to immediate gratification. To this end, he (1) develops novel theoretical models of self-control and motivation, and (2) translates insights from these models into actionable tools for marketers and consumers. This includes investigating what effectively motivates abstinence from unhealthy choices, developing computational models of motivation to understand how to promote engagement, and developing more nuanced accounts of self-control. Underlying much of his research is the use and development of complex statistical and computational tools (e.g., dynamic approaches to studying choice, generative network models, and machine learning/AI tools), which allow him to provide new insights into old questions. Overall, he aims to empower consumers to reach their goals efficiently and sustainably.