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Joe Bak-Coleman

Joe Bak-Coleman is a computational social scientist and an incoming Associate Research Scholar at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University. He earned his PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University in 2020, working with Iain Couzin and Dan Rubenstein, and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public. His research focuses on understanding how collectives make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Hes particularly interested in understanding what makes collective decision-making work and how it can go awry. Over the past decade, he has worked on collective decision-making in a range of contexts from animal groups and social media to metascience.

Twitter: @jbakcoleman Github: @josephbb

Assembly Fellowship Project:

Tackling the challenges posed by social media through evidence-based policy and intergovernmental agreements depends on consolidating our understanding of technological change at a global scale. Working with RSM Faculty Director James Mickens and other co-authors, Joe Bak-Coleman argued in Nature that an intergovernmental body—similar to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)is necessary to confront changes to our digital ecosystem.

Associated Works

What Generative AI Reveals About the Limits of Technological Innovation

Assembly Fellow Joe Bak-Coleman discusses the lack of guardrails protecting society from harmful technologies in light of the widespread and rapid adoption of generative AI.

TikTok’s API Guidelines Are a Minefield for Researchers

RSM Assembly Fellow Joe Bak-Coleman explains in Tech Policy Press why TikTok’s API guidelines may pose difficulties for academic researchers.

Collective decision strategies in the presence of spatio-temporal correlations

RSM Assembly Fellow Joe Bak-Coleman and colleagues share new findings that demonstrate how spatio-temporal cues affect collective decision-making.

On Elon Musk’s Vision of Twitter as a Hive Mind

Assembly Fellow Joe Bak-Coleman digs into the idea of Twitter as a "collective, cybernetic super-intelligence."

Collective wisdom in polarized groups

RSM Assembly Fellow Joe Bak-Coleman and colleagues develop and test a theoretical framework for understanding "the wisdom of the crowd" in polarized groups.

Combining interventions to reduce the spread of viral misinformation

RSM Assembly Fellow Joe Bak-Coleman and colleagues demonstrate that using interventions in tandem is the best way to mitigate the effects of viral misinformation.

Social Media as a Crisis Discipline

Invited workshop brings activists, scholars, and practitioners together from across disciplines, sectors, and countries