The Peacemaking Machine with MIT and Deepmind’s Michael Henry Tessler and Michiel A. Bakker

The Peacemaking Machine with MIT and Deepmind’s Michael Henry Tessler and Michiel A. Bakker

Thursday, February 27, 4 p.m.

In-person at Northeastern’s campus, location TBD

Join the Burnes Center for Social Change for The Peacemaking Machine—a conversation with MIT and Deepmind’s Michael Henry Tessler and Michiel A. Bakker, to discuss how AI can transform democratic deliberation. They will unveil their groundbreaking “Habermas Machine,” tested with over 5,700 UK participants. They will explain how they constructed their experiments to test the role of AI in supporting greater consensus-building, and how the AI-enabled moderation system outperformed human mediators, helping groups reach consensus on controversial issues while safeguarding minority viewpoints. With profound implications for bridging divides in our hyper-partisan era, the research highlights AI’s potential to streamline community engagement, enhance fairness, and foster more effective public dialogue. We’ll dive into the broader impact of this groundbreaking work and discuss what our future research agenda on AI and deliberation should look like. Co-sponsored by the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University and the Internet Democracy Initiative.

Michael Henry (“MH”) Tessler is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, working on the safety, alignment, and societal impacts of advanced AI systems. Before being an AI researcher, MH was a Computational Cognitive Scientist as a postdoc at MIT and PhD student in Psychology at Stanford. Before that, he studied Cognitive Neuroscience at the NIH, and before that, mathematics at the University of Virginia.

Michiel Bakker (www.miba.dev) is an AI researcher specializing in AI alignment, the societal implications of artificial intelligence, and its role in shaping human-human and human-computer interactions. He is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and an Assistant Professor at MIT. Michiel earned his PhD and master’s degree in Computer Science from MIT and holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Physics from Delft University of Technology.