I am Tiziano Piccardi, an 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 methods to improve them.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in the HCI group advised by Michael Bernstein. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science at EPFL in data science advised by 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 looking for PhD students, master, and undergraduate students interested to work with me.

Master and undergraduate students

If you are a master’s or undergraduate student at JHU interested in research opportunities with me, please send me an email. Please note, at this time, I do not have the capacity to advise students who are not enrolled at JHU.

Teaching

JHU

Intro to HCI (EN.601.490/690), Spring 2026

EPFL

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

• 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

• Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization
  Tiziano Piccardi, Martin Saveski, Chenyan Jia, Jeffrey Hancock, Jeanne L. Tsai, Michael S. Bernstein.
  Science 2025
  https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu5584

• 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