Ashton Anderson

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. I'm broadly interested in research at the intersection of AI, data, and society. I run the Computational Social Science Lab.

Background

Publications

Maia-2: A Unified Model for Human-AI Alignment in Chess, Zhenwei Tang, Difan Jiao, Reid McIlroy-Young, Jon Kleinberg, Siddhartha Sen, and Ashton Anderson. NeurIPS 2024.
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Disclosures & Disclaimers: Investigating the Impact of Transparency Disclosures and Reliability Disclaimers on Learner-LLM Interactions, Jessica Y. Bo, Harsh Kumar, Michael Liut, and Ashton Anderson. HCOMP 2024.
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SPIN: Sparsifying and Integrating Internal Neurons in Large Language Models for Text Classification, Difan Jiao, Yilun Liu, Zhenwei Tang, Daniel Matter, Jürgen Pfeffer, and Ashton Anderson. ACL Findings 2024.
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Designing Skill-Compatible AI: Methodologies and Frameworks in Chess, Karim Hamade, Reid McIlroy-Young, Siddhartha Sen, Jon Kleinberg, Ashton Anderson. ICLR 2024.
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ICL-Markup: Structuring In-Context Learning using Soft-Token Tags, Marc-Etienne Brunet, Ashton Anderson, and Rich Zemel. NeurIPS: R0-FoMo Workshop 2023.
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People Perceive Algorithmic Assessments as Less Fair and Trustworthy Than Identical Human Assessments, Lillio Mok, Sasha Nanda, and Ashton Anderson. CSCW 2023.
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Echo Tunnels: Polarized News Sharing Online Runs Narrow but Deep, Lillio Mok, Michael Inzlicht, and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2023.
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Reddit in the Time of COVID, Venia Veselovsky and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2023.
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Implications of Model Indeterminacy for Explanations of Automated Decisions, Marc-Etienne Brunet, Ashton Anderson, and Rich Zemel. NeurIPS 2022. Oral presentation.
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Mimetic Models: Ethical Implications of AI that Acts Like You, Reid McIlroy-Young, Jon Kleinberg, Siddhartha Sen, Solon Barocas, and Ashton Anderson. AIES 2022.
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Anticipated versus Actual Effects of Platform Design Change: A Case Study of Twitter's Character Limit, Kristina Gligoric, Justyna Czestochowska, Ashton Anderson, and Robert West. CSCW 2022.
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Learning Models of Individual Behavior in Chess, Reid McIlroy-Young, Russell Wang, Siddhartha Sen, Jon Kleinberg, and Ashton Anderson. KDD 2022.
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Quantifying the Creator Economy: A Large-Scale Analysis of Patreon, Lana El Sanyoura and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2022.
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The Dynamics of Exploration on Spotify, Lillio Mok, Samuel F. Way, Lucas Maystre, and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2022.
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Measuring Alignment of Online Grassroots Political Communities with Political Campaigns, Cameron Raymond, Isaac Waller, and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2022.
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Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms, Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson. Nature, 2021.
pdf | code and data

Detecting Individual Decision-Making Style: Exploring Behavioral Stylometry in Chess, Reid McIlroy-Young, Russell Wang, Siddhartha Sen, Jon Kleinberg, Ashton Anderson. NeurIPS 2021.
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Success stories cause false beliefs about success, George Lifchits, Ashton Anderson, Daniel G. Goldstein, Jake M. Hofman and Duncan J. Watts. Judgment and Decision Making (JDM), 2021.
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Imagine All the People: Characterizing Social Music Sharing on Reddit, Veniamin Veselovsky, Isaac Waller, Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2021.
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Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments, Kristina Gligorić, George Lifchits, Robert West, Ashton Anderson. PLOS One.
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Where To Next? A Dynamic Model of User Preferences, Francesco Sanna Passino, Lucas Maystre, Dmitrii Moor, Ashton Anderson, Mounia Lalmas. WWW 2021.
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The Complementary Nature of Perceived and Actual Time Spent Online in Measuring Digital Well-being, Lillio Mok and Ashton Anderson. CSCW 2021.
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Aligning Superhuman AI with Human Behavior: Chess as a Model System, Reid McIlroy-Young, Siddhartha Sen, Jon Kleinberg, Ashton Anderson. KDD 2020.
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Algorithmic Effects on the Diversity of Consumption on Spotify, Ashton Anderson, Lucas Maystre, Rishabh Mehrotra, Ian Anderson, Mounia Lalmas. WWW 2020.
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Causal Effects of Brevity on Style and Success in Social Media, Kristina Gligorić, Ashton Anderson, Robert West. CSCW 2019.
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Generalists and Specialists: Using Community Embeddings to Quantify Activity Diversity in Online Platforms, Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson. WWW 2019.
pdf | slides | interactive web demo

Understanding the Origins of Bias in Word Embeddings, Marc-Etienne Brunet, Colleen Alkalay-Houlihan, Ashton Anderson, Rich Zemel. ICML 2019.
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From “Welcome New Gabbers” to the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting: The Evolution of Gab, Reid McIlroy-Young and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2019 (poster paper).
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Personal Bests as Reference Points, Ashton Anderson and Etan Green. PNAS, 2018.
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How Constraints Affect Content: The Case of Twitter's Switch from 140 to 280 Characters, Kristina Gligorić, Ashton Anderson, Robert West. ICWSM 2018.
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Mapping the Invocation Structure of Online Political Interaction, Manish Raghavan, Ashton Anderson, Jon Kleinberg. WWW 2018.
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Auditing Search Engines for Differential Satisfaction Across Demographics, Rishabh Mehrotra, Ashton Anderson, Fernando Diaz, Amit Sharma, Hanna Wallach, Emine Yilmaz. WWW 2017.
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Assessing Human Error Against a Benchmark of Perfection, Ashton Anderson, Jon Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan. KDD 2016. (and invited journal version in TKDD Special Issue on Best Papers of KDD 2016).
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Exploring limits to prediction in complex social systems, Travis Martin, Jake M. Hofman, Amit Sharma, Ashton Anderson, Duncan J. Watts. WWW 2016
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Global Diffusion via Cascading Invitations: Structure, Growth, and Homophily, Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec, Mitul Tiwari. WWW 2015.
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The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion, Sharad Goel, Ashton Anderson, Jake Hofman, Duncan J. Watts. Management Science, 2015.
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Political Ideology and Racial Preferences in Online Dating, Ashton Anderson, Sharad Goel, Gregory Huber, Neil Malhotra, Duncan J. Watts. Sociological Science, 2014.
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Engaging with Massive Online Courses, Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Jure Leskovec. WWW 2014. Best Paper runner-up.
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The Dynamics of Repeat Consumption, Ashton Anderson, Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins, Sergei Vassilvitskii. WWW 2014.
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Steering User Behavior With Badges, Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Jure Leskovec. WWW 2013.
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Discovering Value from Community Activity on Focused Question-Answering Sites: A Case Study of Stack Overflow,
Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Jure Leskovec. KDD 2012.
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Towards a Computational History of the ACL: 1980 – 2008, Ashton Anderson, Dan McFarland, and Dan Jurafsky.
ACL 2012 Special Workshop on Rediscovering 50 Years of Discoveries
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Effects of User Similarity in Social Media, Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Jure Leskovec. WSDM 2012.
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Internal Implementation, Ashton Anderson, Yoav Shoham, Alon Altman. AAMAS 2010.
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