Katharina Reinecke
September 19, 2025
Q&A: UW professor’s book explores how ‘technology is never culturally neutral’

In her new book, Katharina Reinecke explores how “digital culture shock” manifests in the world, in ways innocuous and sometimes harmful.
August 6, 2025
With just a few messages, biased AI chatbots swayed people’s political views

University of Washington researchers recruited self-identifying Democrats and Republicans to make political decisions with help from three versions of ChatGPT: a base model, one with liberal bias and one with conservative bias. Democrats and Republicans were both likelier to lean in the direction of the biased chatbot they were talking with than those participants who interacted with the base model.
June 1, 2022
VoxLens: Adding one line of code can make some interactive visualizations accessible to screen-reader users

VoxLens users can gain a high-level summary of the information described in a graph, listen to a graph translated into sound or use voice-activated commands to ask specific questions about the data, such as the mean or the minimum value.
March 10, 2021
Helpful behavior during pandemic tied to recognizing common humanity

A new University of Washington study finds that an identification with all humanity, as opposed to identification with a geographic area like a country or town, predicts whether someone will engage in “prosocial” behaviors particular to the pandemic, such as donating extra masks or coming to the aid of a sick person.
May 6, 2020
Should you help a sick person? UW psychology, computer science faculty study ‘moral dilemmas’ of COVID-19

A new international study led by the University of Washington aims to gauge the perception of ethical situations as the COVID-19 pandemic evolves around the world.