Tiziano Piccardi

I am Tiziano Piccardi, currently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in the HCI group advised by Michael Bernstein, and an incoming Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Johns Hopkins University.

My research lies at the intersection of HCI, AI, and Social Computing. I study sociotechnical systems such as social media and Wikipedia, and I design ways to improve them.

I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science at EPFL in the Data Science Lab with Robert West in the Data Science Lab. During my studies, I spent time at HP Labs (Palo Alto, US) and Xerox Research (Grenoble, France).

Earlier in my career, I co-founded a startup (Widerun), which combined virtual reality with fitness.

Join the group

I’m always excited to connect with students and researchers passionate about HCI, AI, and social computing, especially those interested in rethinking how online platforms are designed. Here are the current opportunities to work with me:

Prospective PhD Students

I am recruiting PhD students to join my new group at Johns Hopkins starting Fall 2026. To be considered, please apply before December 15th, 2025 through the JHU Computer Science PhD program and list me as a potential advisor: Link

Prospective Postdocs

If you are interested in a postdoctoral position in my group, please feel free to contact me directly by email.

Teaching

Applied Data Analysis (CS-401), 2016-2020 (EPFL Teaching Excellence Award)
Business design for IT services (CS-490), 2017-2020
Practice of object-oriented programming (CS-108), 2021

Research - Google Scholar

Preprints

  • Social Media Algorithms Can Shape Affective Polarization via Exposure to Antidemocratic Attitudes and Partisan Animosity
    Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Saveski, Chenyan Jia, Jeffrey Hancock, Jeanne L. Tsai, Michael S. Bernstein.
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14652

  • Reranking Social Media Feeds: A Practical Guide for Field Experiments
    Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Saveski, Chenyan Jia, Jeffrey Hancock, Jeanne L. Tsai, Michael S. Bernstein.
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19571

Publications

  • Alexandria: A Library of Pluralistic Values for Realtime Re-Ranking of Social Media Feeds
    Akaash Kolluri, Renn Su, Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, Dora Zhao, Tiziano Piccardi, Michael S. Bernstein
    ICWSM ‘26 Proc. of Conference on Web and Social Media
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14652

  • Burst: Collaborative Curation in Connected Social Media Communities
    Yutong Zhang, Taeuk Kang, Sydney Yeh, Anavi Baddepudi, Lindsay Popowski, Tiziano Piccardi, Michael S. Bernstein
    CSCW ‘25 Proc. of Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19768

  • Web2Wiki: Characterizing Wikipedia Linking Across the Web
    Veniamin Veselovsky, Tiziano Piccardi, Ashton Anderson, Robert West, Akhil Arora
    ICWSM ‘26 Proc. of Conference on Web and Social Media
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15837

  • Navigating Knowledge: Patterns and Insights from Wikipedia Consumption
    Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West.
    Book chapter - Handbook of Computational Social Science, 2025
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00939

  • In-class Data Analysis Replications: Teaching Students while Testing Science Kristina Gligoric*, Tiziano Piccardi*, Jake Hofman, Robert West. * Equal contribution
    Harvard Data Science Review, 2024
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16491 - Slides

  • AnthroScore: A Computational Linguistic Measure of Anthropomorphism
    Myra Cheng, Kristina Gligoric, Tiziano Piccardi, Dan Jurafsky
    EACL ‘24 Proc. of European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02056

  • Curious Rhythms: Temporal Regularities of Wikipedia Consumption
    Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Gerlach, Robert West.
    ICWSM ‘24 Proc. of Conference on Web and Social Media
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09497 - Poster

  • Embedding Societal Values into Social Media Algorithms
    Michael Bernstein, Angèle Christin, Jeffrey Hancock, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Chenyan Jia, Michelle Lam, Nicole Meister, Nathaniel Persily, Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Saveski, Jeanne Tsai, Johan Ugander, Chunchen Xu.
    Journal of Online Trust and Safety - Vol. 2, No. 1 (2023)
    https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v2i1.148

  • CoMPosT: Characterizing and Evaluating Caricature in LLM Simulations
    Myra Cheng, Tiziano Piccardi, Diyi Yang.
    EMNLP 2023 Proc. of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11501

  • How We Use Wikipedia: Studying Readers’ Behavior with Navigation Traces
    Tiziano Piccardi.
    EPFL - Thesis
    https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/294559 - PDF - Slides

  • A Large-Scale Characterization of How Readers Browse Wikipedia
    Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Gerlach, Akhil Arora, Robert West.
    TWEB 2022
    (IC2S2 ‘23 Conference on Computational Social Science)
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11848 - Poster

  • Going down the Rabbit Hole: Characterizing the Long Tail of Wikipedia Reading Sessions
    Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Gerlach, Robert West.
    WikiWorkshop ‘22 @ Proc. of The World Wide Web Conference (Companion)
    (IC2S2 ‘23 Conference on Computational Social Science)
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.06932 - Slides - Poster

  • Homepage2Vec: Language-Agnostic Website Embedding and Classification
    Sylvain Lugeon*, Tiziano Piccardi*, Robert West. * Equal contribution
    ICWSM ‘22 Proc. of Conference on Web and Social Media
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.03677.pdf - Talk - Poster - Github

  • Wikipedia Reader Navigation: When Synthetic Data Is Enough
    Akhil Arora, Martin Gerlach, Tiziano Piccardi, Alberto García Durán, Robert West.
    WSDM ‘22 Proc. of Conference on Web Search and Data Mining https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.00812 - Talk

  • A Large Scale Study of Reader Interactions with Images on Wikipedia
    Daniele Rama, Tiziano Piccardi, Miriam Redi, Rossano Schifanella.
    EPJ Data Science
    (IC2S2 ‘21 Conference on Computational Social Science) https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01868

  • On the Value of Wikipedia as a Gateway to the Web
    Tiziano Piccardi, Miriam Redi, Giovanni Colavizza, Robert West.
    WWW ‘21 Proc. of The World Wide Web Conference
    (IC2S2 ‘21 Conference on Computational Social Science) https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.07385 - Talk

  • Crosslingual Topic Modeling with WikiPDA
    Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West.
    WWW ‘21 Proc. of The World Wide Web Conference
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11207 - Blog post - Talk - Github

  • Reader Engagement with Wikipedia’s Medical Content
    Lauren A. Maggio, Ryan M. Steinberg, Tiziano Piccardi, John M. Willinsky.
    eLife 2020
    https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52426

  • Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia
    Tiziano Piccardi, Miriam Redi, Giovanni Colavizza, Robert West.
    WWW ‘20 Proc. of The World Wide Web Conference
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08614 - Talk

  • WikiHist.html: English Wikipedia’s Full Revision History in HTML Format
    Blagoj Mitrevski*, Tiziano Piccardi*, Robert West. * Equal contribution
    ICWSM ‘20 Proc. of Conference on Web and Social Media
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10256 - Talk

  • Structuring Wikipedia Articles with Section Recommendations
    Tiziano Piccardi, Michele Catasta, Leila Zia, Robert West.
    SIGIR ‘18 Proc. of Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    http://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05995 - Slides - Poster

  • Quootstrap: Scalable Unsupervised Extraction of Quotation-Speaker Pairs from Large News Corpora via Bootstrapping.
    Dario Pavllo, Tiziano Piccardi, Robert West.
    ICWSM ‘18 Proc. of Conference on Web and Social Media
    https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02525

  • Toward a mixed-initiative QA system: from studying predictors in Stack Exchange to building a mixed-initiative tool
    Gregorio Convertino, Massimo Zancanaro, Tiziano Piccardi, Felipe Ortega.
    International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 99
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.10.008

  • Towards crowd-based customer service: a mixed-initiative tool for managing Q&A sites
    Tiziano Piccardi, Gregorio Convertino, Massimo Zancanaro, Ji Wang, Cedric Archambeau.
    CHI ‘14 Proc. of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2557202- Pitch

Other peer-reviewed work

  • Characterizing Image Accessibility on Wikipedia across Languages
    Elisa Kreiss, Krishna Srinivasan, Tiziano Piccardi, Jesus Adolfo Hermosillo, Cynthia Bennett, Michael S Bernstein, Meredith Ringel Morris, Christopher Potts.
    WikiWorkshop 2023 PDF