People
Faculty
Di Zhang
Di Zhang 张迪 is a professor and chair of the Department of International Communication at School of Journalism and Communication, Renmin University of China. He obtained his doctoral degree in mass communication at Newhouse School, Syracuse University. His research interests include public relations, health communication and international communication.
Na Ta
Na Ta 塔娜 is an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Renmin University of China. She got her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University. Her research interests include online social networks, platformization and new media, computational communication, and intelligent communication (algorithms, agents, etc.). Her research has been published in journals of multiple disciplinaries including computer science, communication, psychology and others. She can be reached via tanayun@ruc.edu.cn.
Yiyan Zhang
Yiyan Zhang 张伊妍 is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Renmin University of China. She got her Ph.D. degree in Emerging Media Studies from Boston University and her bachelor's degree in advertising and economy from Peking University Her research focuses on mediated and dynamic communication effects between citizens, news media, and government bodies on emerging media in the global contexts. Yiyan’s previous studies connect a large variety of computational methods, especially natural language processing, online survey, and social network analysis. Her research has been published in journals including but not limited to Communication Research, Information, Communication & Society, Journalism Studies, International Journal of Communication, The Social Science Journal, and Mass Communication and Society.Speakers
Zhuo Chen
Dr. Zhuo Chen is an Assistant Professor at the HSBC Business School, Peking University. His research investigates the socioeconomic and political implications of communication technologies.
Chris Bail
Chris Bail is Co-Founder of SICSS and Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University where he directs the Polarization Lab. He is also affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Data Science Program, the Duke Network Analysis Center, and serves on the Advisory Council of the National Science Foundation's SBE Directorate. His research examines political polarization, culture and social psychology using tools from the field of computational social science. He is the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism "How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing".
Chris J. Vargo
Dr. Chris J. Vargo is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, specializing in data analytics and mass communication. He is the founder and director of the contextual advertising startup, socialcontext.ai. Chris has published research in numerous notable journals, including Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. He currently teaches analytics to undergraduates and in the Master of Science in Data Science program, focusing on content analytics and advanced computational methods.
Hai Liang
Dr. Liang is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He serves as the associate director of the Computational Social Science Laboratory at CUHK and is an affiliated member of the Web Mining Laboratory at City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include computational social science, political communication, and digital public health. Dr. Liang has authored dozens of journal articles, many of which have been published in leading communication journals such as the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and New Media & Society.
Lei Guo
Dr. Lei Guo is a professor at the School of Journalism, Fudan University (Shanghai). Previously, she was an associate professor in the Division of Emerging Media Studies at College of Communication, Boston University (BU), USA. She was also an affiliated faculty member at BU’s Department of Computer Science. In 2020, she was appointed as a founding faculty member at BU’s newly launched Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. Her research focuses mainly on the development of media effects theories, news and information flow, and computational social science methodologies. Her studies have been published in a number of leading peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Communication, Communication Research, New Media and Society, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ).
Marin Hilbert
Martin Hilbert is Professor at the University of California, Davis, where he chairs the campus wide emphasis in Computational Social Sciences. He studies the societal implications of digitalization in complex social systems. He holds doctorates in Economic and Social Sciences (2006), and in Communication (2012). His work is recognized in academia for the first study that assessed how much information there is in the world; in public policy for having designed the first digital action plan with the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean at the United Nations; and in the popular media for having alerted about the intervention of Cambridge Analytica in the campaign of Donald Trump a year before the scandal broke. Before he joined academia he served as Economic Affairs Officer of the United Nations Secretariat for 15 years, where he created the Information Society Program for Latin America and the Caribbean. Prof. Hilbert provided technical assistance in the field of digital development to more than 20 countries and dozens of publicly traded companies as digital strategist. His work has been published in the most recognized academic journals, such as Science, Psychological Bulletin, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and World Development, and regularly appears in popular magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Economist, NPR, BBC, Die Welt, among others.
Noshir Contractor
Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management and Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is also the President-Elect-Select of the International Communication Association (ICA).Professor Contractor has been at the forefront of three emerging interdisciplines, they are network science, computational social science and web science. He is investigating how social and knowledge networks form – and perform – in contexts including business, scientific communities, healthcare and space travel. His research has been funded continuously for 25 years by the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, NASA, DARPA, Army Research Laboratory and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Xiaofan Liu
Dr. Liu Xiaofan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong. He obtained his Bachelor's and Doctoral degrees in Electronic and Information Engineering from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He previously served as an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University. His research focuses on the analysis and modeling of human behavior on mobile devices, the dark web, and blockchain.
Yilang Peng
Yilang Peng (PhD, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania) is an assistant professor in the Department of Financial Planning, Housing and Consumer Economics at the University of Georgia. His scholarship is at the intersection of computational social science, visual communication, science communication, and social media analytics. His research combines computer vision methods, surveys, and experiments to investigate the production and effects of visual messages across different communication contexts.
Yuan Yuan
Yuan Yuan is an Assistant Professor in the Management Information Systems area at Purdue University's Daniels School of Business. His academic focus is on computational social science, particularly the application of advanced computational techniques such as machine learning and causal inference to understand social and organizational networks better. He completed his PhD at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research often involves collaboration with tech industry leaders, including Microsoft and Meta, providing practical perspectives to his academic investigations. Yuan's publications span across diverse academic venues. His work has appeared in interdisciplinary journals such as Nature Communications and Communications Physics. He has also been published in top management journals, including Management Science, and has presented his research at leading Computer Science conferences such as EC and TheWebConf.
Lun Zhang
Lun Zhang is currently an associate professor at Beijing Normal University. She obtained her PhD degree in communication (2011) from City University of Hong Kong. Her current research projects focus on news consumption on mobile Internet and knowledge sharing on social media sites. Her research outputs appeared in Computers in Human Behavior, Information Processing & Management, Internet Research and other leading journals in the field of information science and communication.Teaching Assistants
Lihua Du
Lihua Du 杜莉华 is a doctoral student at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Renmin University of China, majorly studying health communication. To be specific, she focuses on correction of health misinformation and doctor-patient communication in the context of intelligent communication. Before joining Renmin University of China, she received her B.A. degree in journalism from Lanzhou University and M.A. degree in communication from Wuhan University. In terms of correction of health misinformation, she focuses on intergenerational differences in processing health misinformation on Chinese social media. Her current research is focused on doctor-patient communication in the context of intelligent communication, aims to examine the factors influencing doctors' social media usage behavior. Her research combines a variety of methods (i.e., self-report, in-depth interview, regression analysis) to expand the deeper understanding of health misinformation dissemination and doctor-patient relationship in the era of intelligence.
Cong Lin
Cong Lin 林聪 is a master student at the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China. He got his bachelor's degree in sociology from Renmin University of China. His acedemic interests include computational social science, visual communication, and social inequality.
Yi Li
Yi Li 李逸 is a master student at the school of journalism and communication ar Remin University of China. His academic interests focus on how individuals coexist with algorithm and media, especially how we utilize them to overcame the social inequality.
Ruhao Liu
Ruhao Liu 刘入豪 is a doctoral candidate at Renmin University of China. With a particular interest in considering how intelligent technology can realize social welfare, she is passionate about studying the social and psychological effects of AI and immersive technology, especially in mental health and social interactions. Her current research is focused on how virtual influencers and digital agents affect public opinion. Before entering Renmin University of China, she received her bachelor's degree in advertising and law from the South China University of Technology. She can be reached at Jacquelineliu@ruc.edu.cn.Participants
Zhenhui Chai
ZhenHui Chai received the B.E. degree in Electronic and Information Engineering from Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, China in 2021. He is currently working toward the M.A. degree in Journalism with the School of Communication and Journalism, Communication University of Zhejiang, Hangzhou, China. His research interests include commputational communication and natural language processing.
Qiuyi Chen
Qiuyi Chen is currently pursuing her PhD at the School of Journalism, Fudan University. Her research focuses on the intersection of network science and political communication, health communication, and media effects. Her latest project revolves around misinformation and its correction.
Xinyu Cheng
Xinyu Cheng is a Ph.D student in global communication at Shandong University. She studies international communication and political communication and she is currently working on the picture of information dissemination on social media in China by the method of social network and sentiment measurement. Prior to that, she completed her master’s degree at the University of Sheffield and was concerned about refugee-related coverage and identity construction between the British media and the Arab media. She is also interested in digital field experiments and text as data.
Siling Dong
Siling Dong is a master student in Communication at the Communication University of China. Her current research includes intercultural communication and digital sociology. She is also interested in computational social science.
Shuqi Dou
Shuqi Dou is a PhD student in international communication at School of Journalism and Communication, Renmin University of China. Her research interests are international communication and intercultural communication, especially international fake news in global sphere and social media.
Yibin Fan
Yibin Fan is a PhD student in communication at Univeristy of Washington, Seattle. His research interest is focused on the political communication processes in online communities, mostly using computational methods. He is also affiliated with the Community Data Science Collective, which is a cross-institutional research lab with a focus on understanding the dynamics of online communities.
Jiankun Gong
Jiankun Gong, Phd, Assistant Professor at Xiamen University Malaysia. My work has been published in top tier journals like Social Media +Society, Journalism Practice, Journalism, Digital Journalism. I am a peer reviewer for more than 20 SSCI journals and I sit in Editorial board of Young Consumers. Also, I am Emerald Publishing representative. My research orbits digital journalism and its societal ramifications. The abrupt rise of social media has drastically revamped the media landscape and the ways in which people perceive the world. Central to my research agenda is the investigation of the impact of the emerging communication technologies on information production, dissemination, and audiences’ perceptions of reality. Using survey, experiment, and computational methodologies, my previous and recent studies are committed to exploring the role of emerging media in the context of health and politics.
Gu Gong
Gu Gong is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication at Peking University, China. His research aims to identify and analyze diverse behavioral and psychological patterns of user subgroups in mobile media and communication. He is particularly interested in utilizing computational methods to explore how people interact with emerging media platforms & digital technologies and their social consequences.
Lingchen Gu
Lingchen Gu is a Lecturer in the School of Information Science and Engineering at Shandong Normal University. She received the B.S. degree in electronic information science and technology and the Ph.D. degree in information and communication engineering from Shandong University. Her current research interests include deep learning and multimedia data analysis, such as large-scale multimedia indexing and retrieval.
Huimin He
Huimin Callie HE is master student of computational communication at Shenzhen University. She studies online expression and information flow using data from social media and tools from economics. Callie is passionate about building the field of opinion dynamics, her current research focuses on the gender narratives and moralization of online discussion.
Xin Jin
Xin Jin, Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Media, Chongqing Normal University, China, Ph.D. in Communication, Communication University of China, his main research interests are Health Communication and Visual Communication based on computational sociology.
Tobias Kamelski
Tobias Kamelski is a PhD student in Sociology at Lingnan University. He researches the habitus of visual self-presentation in online dating. His research interests include mediated impression management as well as sexual and gendered behaviour in digital spaces. He specializes in reconstructive research methods and their digital augmentation.
Zhanghao Li
Li Zhanghao is a doctoral student in computational communication at Beijing Normal University. His research leverages social bot field experiments and other methods to study the information environment of social media platforms and explore the complex relationship between social media and democracy, such as echo chambers, polarization, etc.
hua li
Hua Li is a lecturer at the Center for Computational Communication Research of Beijing Normal University. He obtained a MA from the School of Journalism and Communication of Renmin University of China, and a PhD from the School of Journalism and Communication of Jinan University.
Xiao Shi
Xiao Shi is a lecture in the School of Management Engineering at the Capital University of Economics and Business. She received her Ph.D. degree in Management Science & Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China. Her research focuses on online users’ behavior in social media, including knowledge payment, privacy management, AI-human interaction and etc.
Ge Shi
Ge Shi is a lecturer at Nanjing University of Technology, majoring in Geographic Information Systems. Her research areas mainly include urban computing, digital humanities, and smart cities. She obtained a master's degree from Michigan State University in the United States and was sent by the National Endowment Commission to Purdue University for one year during her doctoral studies.
Yunfei Wang
Yunfei Wang received B.A. in Communication from Tsinghua U and is going to join the M.A. program in Computational Social Science at UChicago. Her research interest lies in network analysis, support communication, social media, social capital, and knowledge science. Her previous and current studies try to answer how network structure influences the reception of online social support, and what factors have impacts on help-seeking information diffusion. She plans to extend her research to knowledge creation in network-based systems in the future.
Jiasheng Xiao
Jiasheng XIAO is a 2nd-year PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research primarily explores how bureaucrats handle information and the impact of institutions on their choices. In his current research, he is looking into the mechanisms by which policy crisis intelligence is gathered, filtered, interpreted, and circulated inside the Chinese bureaucracy.
Zehang Xie
Xie Zehang, a Ph.D student at the School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His main research interests are the psychology and behavior of new media users (with a recent focus on virtual companionship in human-computer interaction), and digital publishing.
Jinghong Xu
Dr. Jinghong Xu is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of Beijing Normal University. His research interests include new media and internet governance, health communication, intercultural communication, film and television study, and game research. He can be reached at 123abctg@163.com.
Lihan Yan
Lihan Yan is a first-year Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Communication at Nanjing University. I hold my M.A. degree from the City University of Hong Kong and hold B.A. degree from the Central South University of China. My research interests focus on computational communication, science of science.
Yang Yang
Yang Yang is a lecturer in the Department of Big Data Management and Application, at Beijing Technology and Business University. She received her Ph.D. in business management from the University of Science and Technology of China with co-training from the University of Washington in 2022.
Hanlu Yu
Hanlu Yu is a master student in psychology at Renmin University of China. Her research interests focus on understanding children's social development and moral psychology. Recently, she has become interested in the role of social media in social support.
Xiaoxue Zhang
Xiaoxue Zhang is a PhD candidate at the School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua university. Her research focuses on popular culture, online privacy and game. She seeks to use computational techniques, such as natural language processing and network analysis, to solve social science problems.
Duo Zhang
Duo Zhang is a doctoral student of Zhejiang University, majoring in journalism and Communication studies. His research interests include media sociology，intelligent communication and human-computer interaction.
Yanling Zhao
Yanling Zhao is a PhD student in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University. Her research mainly employ computational methods such as natural language processing, both supervised and unsupervised machine learning combined with surveys and experiments to study the political communication, media effects in the digital media era and mis/disinformation.