Tiziano Piccardi

About Me

I am Tiziano Piccardi, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in the HCI group advised by prof. Michael Bernstein. In fall 2025, I will be joining the Computer Science Department at Johns Hopkins University as an Assistant Professor. 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 got my Ph.D. in CS from EPFL working with prof. Robert West in the Data Science Lab. During my studies, I spent time at HP Labs (Palo Alto, US) and Xerox Research (Grenoble, France).

In the past, I founded a startup (Widerun), which combined virtual reality with fitness.

Contact: [email protected]

Preprints - Google Scholar

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

Workshop/Tutorials/Challenges Organization

Wikimedia Data How-To: Using Public Data from Wikipedia and Its Sister Projects for Academic Research @ ICWSM 2024 Website

Wiki-M3L: Wikipedia and Multi-Modal & Multi-Lingual Research @ ICLR 2022 Website

Ethical Tensions, Norms, and Directions in the Extraction of Online Volunteer Work @ CSCW 2022 website

The Wikipedia Image/Caption Matching Competition Blog post @ Wikimedia.org

Service

ICWSM (2022, SPC 2023-2025), CHI (2024), CSCW (2023),TheWebConf (2019-2025), WSDM (2023), EPJ Data Science, IC2S2 (2021-2024), CIKM (2020, 2021), ECML-PKDD (2020), WikiWorkshop (2018-2023), WebSci (2020-2025), EMNLP (2020), HT (2023), Interacting with Computers, Quantitative Science Studies