On Thursday, March 10, 2011 Henry Lieberman, head of the Media Lab's Software Agents research group, along with Karthik Dinakar and Birago Jones, first-year master's students working with Lieberman, joined President and Mrs. Obama, Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at The White House for a Conference on Bullying Prevention.

The conference brought together students, parents, teachers, and others from communities from across the nation who have been affected by bullying, as well as those who are taking action to address it. Participants had the opportunity to talk with the President and representatives from the highest levels of his Administration about how all communities can work together to prevent bullying.

Dinakar, Jones, and Lieberman have created a project, "Computational Empathy: Tackling Cyberbullying" to address the scourge of cyberbullying, which has assumed worrisome proportions with an ever-increasing number of adolescents admitting to having dealt with it either as a victim or bystander. Anonymity and the lack of meaningful supervision in the electronic medium are two factors that have exacerbated this social menace. The project explores computational methods from natural language processing and reflective user interfaces to alleviate this problem. The project is in collaboration with Formspring, a social networking website used by a primarily teenage audience.