Michiel Bakker

Assistant Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

[last name]@mit.edu

Hi! I'm an Assistant Professor at MIT with appointments in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), the business school (Sloan), and the Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) in the MIT Media Lab. I'm also a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind.

My research focuses on large language models (LLMs), AI safety, the societal impacts of AI, and AI's role in both human-human and human-computer interaction. If you're a student and would like to work with me, I'd love to hear from you via [last name] [at] mit [dot] edu.

Previously, I was a Computer Science PhD student at MIT, working with Alex "Sandy" Pentland at the MIT Media Lab. I also hold a bachelor's and master's degree in physics from TU Delft, where I worked on quantum computing at QuTech and IBM Quantum.

Publications

Most recent publications on Google Scholar.
indicates equal contribution.

Supernotes: Driving Consensus in Crowd-Sourced Fact-Checking

Soham De, Michiel A. Bakker, Jay Baxter, Martin Saveski

arXiv preprint. 2024.

AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

Michael Henry Tessler, Michiel A. Bakker, Daniel Jarrett, Hannah Sheahan, Martin J. Chadwick, Raphael Koster, Georgina Evans, Lucy Campbell-Gillingham, Tantum Collins, David C. Parkes, Matthew Botvinick, Christopher Summerfield

Science. 2024.

How large language models can reshape collective intelligence

Jason W. Burton, Ezequiel Lopez-Lopez, Shahar Hechtlinger, Zoe Rahwan, Samuel Aeschbach, Michiel A. Bakker, Joshua A. Becker, Aleks Berditchevskaia, Julian Berger, Levin Brinkmann, Lucie Flek, Stefan M. Herzog, Saffron Huang, Sayash Kapoor, Arvind Narayanan, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Taha Yasseri, Pietro Nickl, Abdullah Almaatouq, Ulrike Hahn, Ralf H. J. M. Kurvers, Susan Leavy, Iyad Rahwan, Divya Siddarth, Alice Siu, Anita W. Woolley, Dirk U. Wulff, Ralph Hertwig

Nature Human Behavior. 2024.

How will advanced AI systems impact democracy?

Christopher Summerfield, Lisa Argyle, Michiel A. Bakker, Teddy Collins, Esin Durmus, Tyna Eloundou, Iason Gabriel, Deep Ganguli, Kobi Hackenburg, Gillian Hadfield, Luke Hewitt, Saffron Huang, Helene Landemore, Nahema Marchal, Aviv Ovadya, Ariel Procaccia, Mathias Risse, Bruce Schneier, Elizabeth Seger, Divya Siddarth, Henrik Skaug Sætra, Michael Henry Tessler, Matthew Botvinick

arXiv preprint. 2024.

Language agents as digital representatives in collective decision-making

Daniel Jarrett, Miruna Pislar, Michiel A. Bakker, Michael Henry Tessler, Raphael Koster, Jan Balaguer, Romuald Elie, Christopher Summerfield, Andrea Tacchetti

NeurIPS'23 Workshop on Foundation Models for Decision Making. 2023.

Scaffolding cooperation in human groups with deep reinforcement learning

Kevin McKee, Andrea Tacchetti, Michiel A. Bakker, Jan Balaguer, Lucy Campbell-Gillingham, Richard Everett, Matthew M. Botvinick

Nature Human Behavior. 2023.

Fine-tuning language models to find agreement among humans with diverse preferences

Michiel A. Bakker, Martin J. Chadwick, Hannah R. Sheahan, Michael Henry Tessler, Lucy Campbell-Gillingham, Jan Balaguer, Nat McAleese, Amelia Glaese, John Aslanides, Matthew M. Botvinick, Christopher Summerfield

NeurIPS'22: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 2022.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Improving Fairness in Budget-Constrained Decision Making using Confidence Thresholds

Michiel A. Bakker, Duy Patrick Tu, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alex Pentland, Kush R. Varshney, Adrian Weller

AIES'21: Fifth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. 2021.

Active Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making

Alejandro Noriega-Campero, Michiel A. Bakker, Bernardo Garcia-Bulle, Alex Pentland

AIES'19: Third AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. 2019.

AI and the Future of Digital Public Squares

Beth Goldberg, Diana Acosta-Navas, Michiel A. Bakker, Ian Beacock, Matt Botvinick, Prateek Buch, Renée DiResta, Nandika Donthi, Nathanael Fast, Ravi Iyer, Zaria Jalan, Andrew Konya, Grace Kwak Danciu, Hélène Landemore, Alice Marwick, Carl Miller, Aviv Ovadya, Emily Saltz, Lisa Schirch, Dalit Shalom, Divya Siddarth, Felix Sieker, Christopher Small, Jonathan Stray, Audrey Tang, Michael Henry Tessler, Amy Zhang

arXiv preprint. 2024.

Supernotes: Driving Consensus in Crowd-Sourced Fact-Checking

Soham De, Michiel A. Bakker, Jay Baxter, Martin Saveski

arXiv preprint. 2024.

AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

Michael Henry Tessler, Michiel A. Bakker, Daniel Jarrett, Hannah Sheahan, Martin J. Chadwick, Raphael Koster, Georgina Evans, Lucy Campbell-Gillingham, Tantum Collins, David C. Parkes, Matthew Botvinick, Christopher Summerfield

Science. 2024.

How large language models can reshape collective intelligence

Jason W. Burton, Ezequiel Lopez-Lopez, Shahar Hechtlinger, Zoe Rahwan, Samuel Aeschbach, Michiel A. Bakker, Joshua A. Becker, Aleks Berditchevskaia, Julian Berger, Levin Brinkmann, Lucie Flek, Stefan M. Herzog, Saffron Huang, Sayash Kapoor, Arvind Narayanan, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Taha Yasseri, Pietro Nickl, Abdullah Almaatouq, Ulrike Hahn, Ralf H. J. M. Kurvers, Susan Leavy, Iyad Rahwan, Divya Siddarth, Alice Siu, Anita W. Woolley, Dirk U. Wulff, Ralph Hertwig

Nature Human Behavior. 2024.

How will advanced AI systems impact democracy?

Christopher Summerfield, Lisa Argyle, Michiel A. Bakker, Teddy Collins, Esin Durmus, Tyna Eloundou, Iason Gabriel, Deep Ganguli, Kobi Hackenburg, Gillian Hadfield, Luke Hewitt, Saffron Huang, Helene Landemore, Nahema Marchal, Aviv Ovadya, Ariel Procaccia, Mathias Risse, Bruce Schneier, Elizabeth Seger, Divya Siddarth, Henrik Skaug Sætra, Michael Henry Tessler, Matthew Botvinick

arXiv preprint. 2024.

Statistical discrimination in learning agents

Edgar A. Duenez-Guzman, Kevin R. McKee, Yiran Mao, Ben Coppin, Silvia Chiappa, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, Michiel A. Bakker, Yoram Bachrach, Suzanne Sadedin, William Isaac, Karl Tuyls, Joel Z. Leibo

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 2024.

Language agents as digital representatives in collective decision-making

Daniel Jarrett, Miruna Pislar, Michiel A. Bakker, Michael Henry Tessler, Raphael Koster, Jan Balaguer, Romuald Elie, Christopher Summerfield, Andrea Tacchetti

NeurIPS'23 Workshop on Foundation Models for Decision Making. 2023.

Scaffolding cooperation in human groups with deep reinforcement learning

Kevin McKee, Andrea Tacchetti, Michiel A. Bakker, Jan Balaguer, Lucy Campbell-Gillingham, Richard Everett, Matthew M. Botvinick

Nature Human Behavior. 2023.

Fine-tuning language models to find agreement among humans with diverse preferences

Michiel A. Bakker, Martin J. Chadwick, Hannah R. Sheahan, Michael Henry Tessler, Lucy Campbell-Gillingham, Jan Balaguer, Nat McAleese, Amelia Glaese, John Aslanides, Matthew M. Botvinick, Christopher Summerfield

NeurIPS'22: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 2022.

Quantifying the importance and location of SARS-CoV-2 transmission events in large metropolitan areas

Alberto Aleta, David Martín-Corral, Michiel A. Bakker, Ana Pastore y Piontti, Marco Ajelli, Maria Litvinova, Matteo Chinazzi, Natalie E. Dean, M. Elizabeth Halloran, Ira M. Longini Jr, Alex Pentland, Alessandro Vespignani, Yamir Moreno, Esteban Moro

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 2022.

Modelling Cooperation in Network Games with Spatio-Temporal Complexity

Michiel A. Bakker, Richard Everett, Laura Weidinger, Iason Gabriel, William S. Isaac, Joel Z. Leibo, Edward Hughes

AAMAS'21: Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. 2021.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Improving Fairness in Budget-Constrained Decision Making using Confidence Thresholds

Michiel A. Bakker, Duy Patrick Tu, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alex Pentland, Kush R. Varshney, Adrian Weller

AIES'21: Fifth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. 2021.

Algorithmic Targeting of Social Policies: Fairness, Accuracy, and Distributed Governance

Alejandro Noriega-Campero, Bernardo Garcia Bulle-Bueno, Luis Fernando Cantu, Michiel A. Bakker, Alex Pentland

FAccT'20: ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 2020.

VizNet: Towards A Large-Scale Visualization Learning and Benchmarking Repository

Kevin Z. Hu, Neil Gaikwad, Madelon Hulsebos, Michiel A. Bakker, Emanuel Zgraggen, César A Hidalgo, Tim Kraska, Guoliang Li, Arvind Satyanarayan, Cagatay Demiralp

CHI'19: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2019.

Sherlock: A Deep Learning Approach to Semantic Data Type Detection

Madelon Hulsebos, Kevin Z. Hu, Michiel A. Bakker, Emanuel Zgraggen, Tim Kraska, César A Hidalgo, Çagatay Demiralp

KDD'19: Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 2019.

VizML: A Machine Learning Approach to Visualization Recommendation

Kevin Z. Hu, Michiel A. Bakker, Stephen Li, Tim Kraska, César A. Hidalgo

CHI'19: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2019.

Atomic-scale imaging of a 27-nuclear-spin cluster using a quantum sensor

Mohamed H. Abobeih, Joe Randall, Conor E. Bradley, Hans P. Bartling, Michiel A. Bakker, Maarten J. Degen, Mark Markham, Daniel J. Twitchen, Tim H. Taminiau

Nature. 2019.

A 10-qubit solid-state spin register with quantum memory up to one minute

Conor E. Bradley, Joe Randall, Mohamed H. Abobeih, Remon C. Berrevoets, Maarten J. Degen, Michiel A. Bakker, Mark Markham, Daniel J. Twitchen, Tim H. Taminiau

Physical Review X. 2019.

Measuring fine-grained multidimensional integration using mobile phone metadata: the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey

Michiel A. Bakker, Daoud A. Piracha, Patricia J. Lu, Keis Bejgo, Mohsen Bahrami, Yan Leng, Jose Balsa-Barreiro, Julie Ricard, Alfredo J.Morales, Vivek K. Singh, Burcin Bozkaya, Selim Balcisoy, Alex Pentland

Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios, Springer. 2019.

DADI: Dynamic Discovery of Fair Information with Adversarial Reinforcement Learning

Michiel A. Bakker, Duy Patrick Tu, Humberto Riverón Valdés, Krishna P. Gummadi, Kush R. Varshney, Adrian Weller, Alex Pentland

NeurIPS Workshop on Human-Centric Machine Learning. 2019.

Active Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making

Alejandro Noriega-Campero, Michiel A. Bakker, Bernardo Garcia-Bulle, Alex Pentland

AIES'19: Third AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. 2019.

On Fairness in Budget-Constrained Decision Making

Michiel A. Bakker, Humberto Riverón Valdés, Duy Patrick Tu, Krishna P. Gummadi, Kush R. Varshney, Adrian Weller, Alex Pentland

KDD Workshop on Explainable AI. 2019.

One-second coherence for a single electron spin coupled to a multi-qubit nuclear-spin environment

Mohamed H. Abobeih, Julia Cramer, Michiel A. Bakker, Norbert Kalb, Daniel J. Twitchen, Matthew Markham, Tim H. Taminiau

Nature Communications. 2018.

Prediction Propagation for Domain Adaptation

Bjarke Felbo, Michiel A. Bakker, Abhimanyu Dubey, Sadhika S. Malladi, Alex Pentland, Iyad Rahwan

ICML 2018 Workshop on Learning with Limited Labels. 2018.

Validity of the single-particle description and noise resilience for multielectron quantum dots

Michiel A. Bakker, Sebastian Mehl, Tuukka Hiltunen, David P. DiVincenzo

Physical Review B. 2015.

Tipsy single soft photon detector and Trixy ultrafast tracking detector

Harry van der Graaf, Michiel A. Bakker, Hong W. Chan, Eduardo Charbon, Fabio Santagata, Pasqualina M. Sarro, Dennis R. Schaart

Journal of Instrumentation. 2013.

Experience

Full Resume in PDF.

Website Design

Based on the homepage of my collaborator (and friend!) Martin Saveski.