Amy Li

Qian Yang, Jessie Jia, Elaine Tsai et al.

Interactive, multi-agent social simulation systems have shown promise for helping users practice navigating various complex social situations across domains. This paper asks: To what extent can such systems help young adult (YA) bystanders speak up publicly against cyberbullying, a task often thwarted by complex, multi-party social dynamics? We created Upstanders' Practicum, a multi-AI-agent social media simulation powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), as a probe and observed 34 YAs freely practicing public bystander intervention across three iteratively refined versions. We found that practicing public bystander intervention in the simulation was helpful, but after participants made three attention shifts: (1) from inattention to paying true attention, (2) from self-focus ("I don't usually do this'') to attending to those directly involved, and (3) from resolving the private conflict between bully and victim ("maybe I could set up the meeting between them'') to addressing the broader audience online ("public comment is about norm-setting"). Only after these shifts did practice in the simulation start to help: participants then saw a reason to speak up publicly and, through continued practice, crafted tactful public messages without explicit instruction. These findings illuminate new design and research opportunities for bystander education beyond social skill instruction, namely, designing for true attention, for fostering a vocal upstander identity, and for seeing bystander intervention as public norm setting. In addition, we open-source Truman Agents (cornell-design-aigroup.github.io/TrumanAgents/), the first-of-its-kind multi-LLM-agent social media simulation platform that Upstanders' Practicum builds upon, for future cyberbullying and social media research.

Amy Li, Sihang Liu, Yi Ding

This paper represents the first effort to quantify uncertainty in carbon intensity forecasting for datacenter decarbonization. We identify and analyze two types of uncertainty -- temporal and spatial -- and discuss their system implications. To address the temporal dynamics in quantifying uncertainty for carbon intensity forecasting, we introduce a conformal prediction-based framework. Evaluation results show that our technique robustly achieves target coverages in uncertainty quantification across various significance levels. We conduct two case studies using production power traces, focusing on temporal and spatial load shifting respectively. The results show that incorporating uncertainty into scheduling decisions can prevent a 5% and 14% increase in carbon emissions, respectively. These percentages translate to an absolute reduction of 2.1 and 10.4 tons of carbon emissions in a 20 MW datacenter cluster.