By Julia Schwarz
Manoel Horta Ribeiro has joined the computer science department as an assistant professor, bringing expertise in social computing and computational social science.
Horta Ribeiro’s research focuses on how people interact with computing tools, everything from social media to crowdsourcing platforms to AI chatbots. His work looks at how people use these platforms and provides solutions to build better systems.
Much of his research involves running field experiments to analyze the effects of different content curation practices. While completing his dissertation at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, he worked with Reddit to show that introducing a post guidance feature improved the quality of comments and decreased work for moderators. He has also worked on examining the effects of YouTube’s recommender system and the impacts of deplatforming.
His more recent work has focused on generative AI. Online platforms are the number one destination for AI-generated text, images and video, Horta Ribeiro said. Knowing what content is AI generated can be nearly impossible in some cases. He is studying how much content on platforms comes from AI tools and working to find ways that platforms can adapt.
"I think in some cases it doesn’t suffice that we are simply aware of the problems," he said. "We also have to build new systems that can endure these challenges."
Part of the goal of his research program, he said, is to gather data that can help contribute to better public policy and political discourse about online platforms. When it comes to other key policy areas like economics and education, huge amounts of data help the public and policymakers make difficult choices. For online platforms, he said, finding data is much more challenging because the information is often proprietary.
"It’s not like we have a census bureau that will hand you the data," he said. "Often, my research involves scraping data or finding ways to get answers to things that are not super straightforward. For this kind of work, some sort of technical expertise goes a long way."
Horta Ribeiro is an associated faculty member at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). While he is a computer scientist, he values the interdisciplinary focus of CITP and the University.
“Princeton is a special place,” Horta Ribeiro said. “There are so many amazing social scientists to collaborate with here.”