---
id: people/michael-bernstein
about:
  label: Michael S. Bernstein
  description: >-
    Stanford computer scientist who studies how computing shapes social
    behaviour and co-created generative agents, simulations of people built on
    language models; a co-founder of Simile.
  tags:
    - human-computer interaction
    - generative agents
    - social computing
person:
  affiliation: Stanford University
  role: computer scientist
  homepage: 'https://hci.stanford.edu/msb/'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: 'Michael Bernstein, Stanford HCI'
      url: 'https://hci.stanford.edu/msb/'
    - title: 'Michael Bernstein''s Profile, Stanford Profiles'
      url: 'https://profiles.stanford.edu/michael-bernstein'
    - title: Simulating human behavior | Simile
      url: 'https://www.simile.com/'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Michael Bernstein teaches computer science at Stanford University, where he is also a senior fellow of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.[^1,2] He studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford and took his master's and PhD in computer science at MIT.[^1] He designs social and interactive computing systems.[^1] One question his research asks is how modelling human attitudes and behaviour can help in crafting technology and social policy.[^1] His book Flash Teams (MIT Press) was a national bestseller, and he has received a Sloan Fellowship and the Computer History Museum's Tech for Humanity Prize.[^2]

With Joon Sung Park, Percy Liang and others he built Social Simulacra, "creating populated prototypes for social computing systems" (UIST 2022), and generative agents, simulations he describes as the highest-cited research in the history of UIST.[^1] He is a co-founder of Simile, where he is chief data officer.[^1,3]

On the wiki he is an author of [Generative Agents](/engines/generative-agents/) and of [Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People](/articles/park-generative-agents-1000-people/), and a founder of [Simile](/engines/simile/).