Most of us interact with social computing systems daily. Applications like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can make our lives more interesting, productive, and fun; but they can also have the opposite effect. How do we design social computing systems that promote the behaviors that the group wants to see, without enabling and amplifying the behaviors it doesn't?

Join Stanford Associate Professor of Computer Science Michael Bernstein for a discussion of how social systems are designed, with a focus on the fast-growing digital world. Using the concept of “going viral” as a microcosm of the larger world of Social Computing, Professor Bernstein will discuss the practical aspects of social system design, the research that currently fuels our understanding of the phenomenon, and the responsibility that the designers of social systems bear.

Michael Bernstein is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and STMicroelectronics Faculty Scholar at Stanford University, where he is a member of the Human-Computer Interaction group. His research focuses on the design of social computing and crowdsourcing systems. Michael has received eight best paper awards at premier computing venues, and has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. His Ph.D. students have gone on both to industry (e.g., Adobe Research, Facebook Data Science, entrepreneurship) and faculty careers (e.g., Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley). Michael holds a bachelor's degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, as well as a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.