Workshop info

August 17–18, 2026 ⋅ Berkeley, CA

Readout blog posts are here!

Questions? email Jessica Dai / jessicadai@berkeley.edu

Logistics

The workshop will take place at Berkeley’s new Gateway building at 2300 Hearst Ave. We’ll be in Room 1420, which is across the plaza from the Gateway Cafe (through the doors to your right, if you’re facing the building from Hearst, or to your left, if you’re facing the building from main campus). For planning purposes, we are a 12-15-minute walk from the Downtown Berkeley BART station and the Women’s Faculty Club.

The space is typically card-access only, but we will have it unlocked during the 9-10am arrival window (and during the lunch break) on both days. Please try to come within that hour! If you are not on the list below and would like to attend, please email Jessica.

Schedule

Each 75-minute session will have three lightning talks + Q&A (15m each) and a 30m panel/ group discussion. I’m hoping this schedule will be roughly final, but let me know if you have any requests for last-min swaps.

Monday, August 17

Time Activity
9:00am breakfast & mingling
10:00am • Crowdsourced Evaluations for Safety and Societal Impact (Jessica Dai)
• Individual Experience vs. the Cochrane Review (Ben Recht) · slides
• Public Feedback and Public Policy: How Collecting and Monitoring AI Public Feedback Can Feed into Meaningful Legal and Regulatory Practice (Deb Raji)
11:15am break
11:30am • AI research has become misaligned with what people want from AI (Emma Pierson) · slides
• Developing Grassroots Capacity for Deliberations on AI (Humphrey Obuobi)
• Data Centers & Democratic Input (Jasmine Sun)
12:45pm catered lunch
2:30pm • The Kinds of Questions Lawyers Ask About AI (Sanjay Krishnan)
• Public Risk Perception: Lessons from Public Health Responses (Tomás León)
• Evaluating AI in Healthcare with End-User Feedback (Irene Chen) · slides
3:45pm break
4:00pm • Caution! AI at Work: Practical Challenges in Identifying and Rectifying Algorithmic Harms at Work (Samantha Dalal)
• Engaging Diverse People in AI Evaluation: Case Studies on AI Auditing and Red-Teaming (Wesley Deng)
5:00pm break/transit time
6:00pm Dinner offsite

Tuesday, August 18

Time Activity
9:00am breakfast & mingling
10:00am • Algorithmic Hooks for Participatory Machine Learning (Ira Globus-Harris) · slides
• Gathering Evidence Under Resource-Information Constraints (Sarah Cen)
• Understanding Human Perception of Representation in Citizens’ Assemblies: An Empirical Study (Evi Micha)
11:15am break
11:30am • Charting the Landscape of Human-AI Interaction Data: User Studies, In-the-Wild Logs, and the Role of Public Feedback (Serina Chang) · slides
• Crowdsourcing as Evaluation, Crowdsourcing as Intervention (Eve Fleisig) · slides
• Towards Participatory, Privacy-Preserving Measurement of Naturalistic AI Use (Cathy Fang)
12:45pm catered lunch
2:30pm • A Public AI Observatory (Shayne Longpre)
• Evaluating AI for Public Benefits and Child Safety (Meghana Kotcherlakota and Andrea Mock)
• Collective Input into AI: Governance and Public Sensemaking (Joal Stein)
3:45pm break
4:00pm We’ll close with a discussion with the whole group on our vision for next steps. Some questions I have in mind…. What concrete medium-term outcomes do we hope for, and what near-term actions need to be taken (and by whom)? What roles should academics, civil society orgs, governments/policymakers, etc. play? If twitter is to be believed, there is soon to be lots (hundreds of millions, perhaps?) of philanthropic capital broadly available. How can “we” access that, and what would “we” do with 0.5, 1, 10, 100 million?
5:30pm workshop ends
Confirmed attendees

We are grateful for support from the Survival & Flourishing Fund.