About
What We Study
AI is changing how people learn, decide, and get help. At AI4Impact Lab, we study that change with curiosity and care, and we leverage AI to make a measurable difference in people’s lives. Our work focuses on civic participation, access to services, and well-being.
Who We Are
Led by Faculty Director Robb Willer, we are an interdisciplinary group spanning sociology, psychology, political science, computer science (NLP/ML, HCI), and policy. Mixed project teams, methodologists and engineers working alongside practitioners, carry ideas from design to deployment with government and nonprofit partners. We emphasize transparent methods, privacy-respecting data practices, equity-focused evaluation, and mentoring for students and fellows who want to do public-interest AI research.
How We Work
We start from a simple premise: evidence should lead innovation. We pair practical prototyping with rigorous evaluation and policy translation, co-design with communities, run preregistered studies and field pilots, and open-source what we can so others can build on what works. We also use forecasting and interview-anchored generative agents to prioritize promising ideas before larger human studies, so we study the right things, with the right safeguards, at the right scale.