Participants by Year
Leadership Team
Chris Bail, Founding Director
Chris Bail is Co-Founder of SICSS and Professor of Sociology, Political Science, 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. He has organized or co-organized six SICSS locations.
Kat Albrecht, Director (North America)
Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies and a Judicial Innovation Fellow at Georgetown Law School. She is a computationally trained legal scholar and social scientist studying how complex data can inform policy with particular emphasis on the nexus between criminal data, fear, and regulation. She is on the data engineering team of the Systematic Content Analysis of Litigation EventS Open Knowledge Network (SCALES OKN), an NSF Convergence Accelerator Project building an AI powered data platform that makes court records public and analyzable. She has convened sites of SICSS since 2018 including SICSS Chicago, SICSS Atlanta, and SICSS South Florida.
Ben Rochford, Program Assistant
Ben Rochford is a Ph.D. Student of Sociology at Duke University. His research in the Duke Polarization Lab leverages computational approaches to study social science questions around online communities, social AI, identity, and culture. He is an alumni of both the Georgia Institute of Technology, and of the Summer Institutes.Advisory Council
Vissého Adjiwanou
Vissého Adjiwanou is a professor of Demography and quantitative and computational methods in the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and adjunct professor at the Department of Demography (Université de Montréal). He is the director of the Laboratoire de recherche sur les dynamiques des populations d’Afrique et de sa diaspora (https://ssapoplab.uqam.ca/). He received an M.A in Statistics from the National School of Statistics and Applied Economics (ENSEA-Cote d’Ivoire), an M.A in Economics of Development at the Centre for Studies and Research on International Development (CERDI- France) and a PhD in Demography from the Université de Montréal (Canada). His research focusses on population issues in sub-Saharan Africa and in Canada, including family dynamics, integration of immigrants and reproductive health. Vissého Adjiwanou has convened sites of SICSS in Cape Town (2018, 2019) and in Montréal (2020, 2021, 2023).
Joshua Becker
Joshua Becker is an Assistant Professor at the UCL School of Management researching collective intelligence with an emphasis on group decision-making. Their research has been published in outlets including Science, Management Science, and Harvard Business Review. Joshua has worked professionally in mediation and communication training and has completed hundreds of mediation sessions. Joshua received a PhD in communication from the University of Pennsylvania and received a BA in philosophy and history of science at St. John's College, Annapolis.
Jennie Brand
Jennie E. Brand is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at UCLA, where she is also Co-Director of the Center for Social Statistics. She studies social stratification and inequality, mobility, social demography, education, and causal inference and machine learning methods. She is President of the Association of Population Centers, Vice-President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28), a member of the Board of Directors for the Population Association of America, and a member of the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was elected to the Sociological Research Association in 2019 and received the American Sociological Association Methodology Leo Goodman Mid-Career Award in 2016. She has served as the Faculty Organizer for SICSS at UCLA in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023.
Chris Callison Burch
Chris Callison-Burch is Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with expertise in natural language processing and crowdsourcing. He has more than 100 publications, served on the editorial boards of the journals Transactions of the ACL (TACL) and Computational Linguistics, and received faculty research awards from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the Sloan Foundation, and DARPA, among others.
Munmun de Choudhury
Munmun De Choudhury is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She employs computational methods to study mental health and psychological well-being using data from social media sites and other digital sources. Her research has appeared in leading journals and conferences, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and distinguished by awards from multiple leading scholarly associations.
Naniette H. Coleman
Naniette H. Coleman is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California Berkeley and a multi-year UC-National Laboratory Graduate Fellow (Los Alamos). Her work sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically, Naniette examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and requirements for organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette is a SICSS-Princeton 2019 alum and the founder of SICSS-Howard/Mathematica, the first and only summer institute at a Historically Black College or University.
Thomas R. Davidson
Thomas R. Davidson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University - New Brunswick. He studies far-right activism, populist politics, and online hate speech using a variety of computational methods. He is a SICSS-Princeton alum and co-led the first WICSS at the University of Arizona in 2021.
Deen Freelon
Deen Freelon is an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He studies political communication using computational methods applied to datasets from Twitter and other digital platforms. His research has been published in prestigious journals such as Science, supported by the Knight Foundation, and distinguished by leading professional associations.
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is Professor of Demography and Computational Social Science in the Department of Sociology and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She is also affiliated with Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. Her research spans different areas within demography, including mortality and population health, gender inequality, family and migration. A central interest of her research has been to leverage computational approaches for demographic research within the growing area of Digital and Computational Demography, and forge links between demography and a growing interdisciplinary community of computational social science. She is the PI of the Digital Gender Gaps project (www.digitalgendergaps.org), which seeks to map global digital gender inequalities and understand the impacts of digitalisation on global sustainable development and gender inequalities. She has co-organized multiple editions of SICSS-Oxford.
Jay Yeon Kim
Jae Yeon Kim is a senior data scientist at Code for America, where he contributes to team efforts to improve safety net experiences and outcomes. He is also a research fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Kim earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley and received the best dissertation award in urban and local politics from the American Political Science Association. Since 2020, he has been working on the Mapping Modern Agora project, which is being incubated at the SNF Agora Institute. This project utilizes big data and machine learning to map civil society in the United States at scale. Kim's research has been published or is forthcoming in many top journals, including Nature Human Behaviour and Scientific Data, among others.
Katherine McCabe
Katherine McCabe is an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University. She applies computational methods to study political psychology, communication, and behavior in American politics. Her work seeks to understand how people’s social identities, attitudes, and personal experiences shape and complicate the ways they engage in politics and make political decisions. She is a SICSS-Princeton alum and co-organizer of SICSS-Rutgers.
Sendhil Mullainathan
Sendhil Mullainathan is the Romans Family Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, his research examines how machine learning can be used to improve social policies— especially those related to medicine— and uncover biomedical insights from large-scale health data.
Matti Nelimarkka
Matti Nelimarkka leads the Helsinki Social Computing Group, an interdisciplinary group examining both computers and society. They explore digital democracy and politics in the digital era as well as computational techniques in social sciences, especially workflows and connections between social science theories and code. He is affiliated with the Faculty of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Aalto University and Futurice, a Finnish software consultancy.
Emmanuel Ọlámíjùwọ́n
Emmanuel Ọlámíjùwọ́n is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Data Literacy at the University of St Andrews. His current interdisciplinary research focuses on the drivers of social inequalities (online + offline) and how they shape population health, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. He is driven to find more accessible ways to communicate with data and share data science skills.
Étienne Ollion
Étienne Ollion is Professor of Sociology at l'École polytechnique and a Research Director at CNRS in Paris, where he leads the CSS initiative. His research focuses on contemporary politics. Methodologically, he integrates computational social sciences (massive digital data and AI) with more classic data sources and methods. He has been teaching computational sciences in the last 10 years, and has convened SICSS-Paris twice.
Jennifer Pan
Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science, Communications, and Sociology at Stanford University. She studies authoritarian politics using experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets in China and Saudi Arabia. Her work has been published in prestigious journals such as Science, supported by the National Science Foundation, and recognized by awards from the International Communication Association.
Matthew Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he is affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers: the Office of Population Research, the Center for Information Technology Policy, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of the forthcoming book *Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.*.
malebo sephodi
malebo sephodi (she/they) is a South African Feminist writer and interdisciplinary scholar. She is associated with Tayarisha, a centre for digital governance based at Wits School of Governance; Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study and the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation- both based at the University of Johannesburg and Centre for IT and National Development in Africa (based at the University of Cape Town). She organises postgraduate research support seminars for various African university students. She is a doctoral candidate in the Information Systems Department at the University of Cape Town and is interested in the intersections of society and digital technology. She has organised two SICSS locations.
Duncan Watts
Duncan Watts is the Stevens University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also professor of Computer and Information Science (SEAS), Communications (Annenberg), and Operations, Information, and Decisions (Wharton). Watts is a founding figure in the field of computational social science. His work in social network theory, collective dynamics, and diffusion models has been cited more than 100,000 times.
Akın Ünver
Akın Ünver is an associate professor of international relations at Ozyegin University in Istanbul, Turkey. His research interests lie at the intersection of organized violence and computational research methods. He serves as an associate editor of the Global Studies Quarterly, and a fellow of Carnegie's Digital Democracy Network.
Mike Yeomans
Michael Yeomans is an Assistant Professor in Strategy and Organisational Behaviour at Imperial College Business School. His research uses natural language processing to study conversational decision-making. His work shows how conversation technology can help us understand our decisions with other people, and how to make them better. He has published in many esteemed journals, and is the author of several open-source software packages in the R language. He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.2025
UCLA
All Participants
Jennie Brand
Jennie E. Brand is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is Co-Director of the Center for Social Statistics (CSS) at UCLA. She has been Chair of the Methodology Section and the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and Vice-President of the Board of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28). She previously served on the councils of the ASA Methodology, Sociology of Education, and Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility sections. She was elected to the Sociological Research Association (SRA), an honor society for excellence in research, in 2019, and received the ASA Methodology Leo Goodman Mid-Career Award in 2016, and honorable mention for the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility William Julius Wilson Mid-Career Award in 2014. Prof. Brand is a member of the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was previously a member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey (GSS). She is Associate Editor of AAAS’s Science Advances, the open access extension of Science magazine, and serves on the editorial boards of Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, Sociological Methods and Research, Sociological Science, and Sociology Compass. She also previously served on the boards of American Sociological Review, Demography, and SAGE Research Methods. Prof. Brand studies social stratification and inequality, mobility, social demography, education, and methods for causal inference.
Ian Lundberg
Ian Lundberg is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. His research develops statistical methods and applies those methods to questions about inequality, poverty, and mobility. After completing his PhD in sociology at Princeton University, Ian spent one year as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Ian enjoys hiking, surfing, and making oatmeal with blueberries.
Christina Wilmot
Christina Wilmot is a Ph.D. student in sociology at UCLA. Previously, she studied computer science and worked as a software engineer at Google. She is interested in the varying intersections of technology and society, including using novel computational methods to analyze social information, studying online social behavior, and looking at the effects of the adoption of new technologies on a society. She also aims to make computational methods more accessible to social researchers from a variety of substantive and methodological fields.
Keri Lintz
Keri Lintz is a PhD student in Public Affairs ...
Kelsey Figone
Kelsey Figone is a PhD student in Economics ...2024
AMU/Law
All Participants
Wojciech Biernacki
Wojciech Biernacki is an extramural PhD researcher and cooperator at the European Law Chair at the Faculty of Law and Administration at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and an attorney’s assistant. In his research, he focuses on intellectual property rights, mostly copyright, and issues related to data processing and data ownership. He is familiar with the basics of Python, PHP, and MySQL databases.
Paulina Klisowska
Paulina Klisowska is a graduate at the Faculty of Law and Administration (of AMU). She holds a Master’s degree in European Law and is a third year Law student. She has carried out research on the protection of minor users of social media and was a speaker at the webinar organized under the Jean Monnet Chair Digital Single Market and the Free Flow of Information (dig_INFlow). Her academic interests are focused on the functioning of the artificial intelligence algorithms and their impact on privacy and personal data protection.
Lukasz Szoszkiewicz, PhD
Lukasz Szoszkiewicz is an Assistant Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University, Data Coordinator within the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty. A former participant of SICSS-Law 2021 (Maastricht University) and SICSS-AMU/Law organizer in 2022. His research interests include international protection of human rights and data science. Knows basics of Python and has advanced knowledge of SPSS.
Jedrzej Wydra
Jędrzej Wydra is a PhD student at the Laboratory of Criminalistics at Adam Mickiewicz University. He holds both a Master's degree in Law and a Master's degree in Mathematics. He completed specialization in Bayesian Statistics overseen by the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is skilled in R and Python programming; he is also certified as a professional data analyst. As a lawyer, he investigates the computational aspects of time-of-death estimation and deontic logic. As a mathematician, he focuses on functional data analysis and modal logic. He participated in over one hundred data science projects.
Dr. David Reichel
Dr. David Reichel has been working for almost two decades with human rights related data in an international context. He works as a project manager at the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), based in Vienna, where he is responsible for managing research projects in relation to artificial intelligence and online content moderation. Until 2014, he worked in the research department of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). He has taught several courses on quantitative methods at Vienna University and has published widely on topics such as human rights, citizenship and migration statistics.
Prof. Łucja Biel
Prof. Łucja Biel is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw. She specializes in corpus linguistics, legal translation, and translation technology. As the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Specialised Translation, she is actively involved in the academic community, holding memberships in various international organizations. Her research focuses on the language of EU law and the pedagogy of specialized translation. She has contributed significantly to translation studies through numerous publications, projects, and teaching activities, aiming to bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical applications in translation.
Dr. Monika Leszczyńska
Dr. Monika Leszczyńska is an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School and an Assistant Professor of Empirical Legal Research at the Maastricht University Faculty of Law. Monika studies how the institutions of contract law interact with individual contractual behavior in an increasingly data-driven economy. In her work, she employs various empirical methods such as behavioral experiments, vignette studies as well as systematic content analysis, and computational methods.
Neel Guha
Neel Guha is a JD candidate at Stanford Law School and a PhD candidate at Stanford Computer Science. His computer science research focuses on (1) methods for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, and (2) benchmarking large language models for applications in the legal domain. His legal research focuses on governance questions related to AI, and the deployment of technology in the practice of law.Dr. Elizabeth Barry
Dr. Marta Nawrocka-Świętkowiak
Dr. Marta Nawrocka-Świętkowiak holds a Ph.D. in Law, a Master’s degree in Law, and a Bachelor’s degree in Biology. She graduated from Adam Mickiewicz University. She is an Assistant Professor and Disciplinary Officer at Merito University in Poznań, as well as an attorney. Her research focuses on the quality of forensic expert opinions in criminal cases. She led research grants from the National Science Centre and collaborated with John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. As a practitioner, she focuses on defending her clients in criminal trials. She is proficient in Polish, English, and Russian.
Eva van der Zee
Eva van der Zee is a Junior professor (tenure track) in international law with a focus on behavioural law and economics at the Institute of Law and Economics at Hamburg University. Her research focuses on the role and interrelation of (in)formal regulatory systems in promoting sustainable development.
Bahadir Kus
I am currently a doctoral student at the Social Sciences University of Ankara. I serve as a research assistant at Atatürk University. My academic focus primarily lies within the realm of civil procedure and enforcement law. During my master's studies, I conducted research on access to the assets of debtors within enforcement law. A part of this research delved into accessing electronic data. I have also authored a book section on the subject of electronic data in civil actions.
Albana Hana
Albana Hana is a juris doctor of the University of Hamburg. Her research revolves around the principle of legal certainty and her professional objective is to make law more certain, in view of enhancing protection and enjoyment of Human Rights. She is an expert in Project Cycle Management and EU funds, speaks several languages and is very passionate about cultures, travel and literature.
Karan Choudhary
Karan Choudhary is presently Postdoctoral researcher. Before this, he was judge in India. He is PhD in Law from National Law University, Delhi and Université Paris Nanterre, France. He specialises in Public Law, Music Law, AI & Law and the interface between Culture, Law and Policy. He has received the prestigious Erasmus Scholarship from the European Union. Qualified 'All India Examination for Assistant Professor in Law' i.e. UGC -NET. E-mail: kch.mac007@gmail.com, Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6621-0962, Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karan-Choudhary-6.
May Pascaud
I am a PhD student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, researching prison education, reentry, desistance, and the prison nonprofit sector. My interests also include income inequality, mass incarceration, and alternatives to imprisonment. I have worked in the fields of technology, education, edtech and journalism, holding positions in customer success, marketing, producing and project management. I enjoy leveraging my design, communications and technology skills in my research.
Marta Bakun
Marta Bakun is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science and Administration at the Doctoral School of the University of Wroclaw, Poland. Her interests include the protection of rights, including those of foreigners (with a special focus on migrants), and comparative studies of Polish and German law. Marta holds MA in law at University of Wrocław. Student Ombudsman of the University of Wrocław. Assistant legal advisor at the Marshal's Office of the Lower Silesian Voivodship.
Mateusz Grabarczyk
Mateusz Grabarczyk is a doctoral student at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences of the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. He concentrates his research on transitional justice, legal accountability, constitutionalism and legal values. He was a visiting fellow at the University of Amsterdam (2023) and a visiting PhD student at the European University Institute (2024).
Kamil Szostak
Kamil Szostak is a recent Computer Science graduate and a 5th year Law student at Adam Mickiewicz University. His fluency in programming includes Python, Java, R, and SQL while his academic interests are focused on Constitutional Law and potential ways of AI application in the legal practice.
Mateusz Mroziński
Mateusz Mroziński is a recent graduate at Adam Mickiewicz University. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. He has intermediate programming skills in Python and web technologies, his interests include data science and artificial intelligence.
Martyna Osztynowicz
Martyna Osztynowicz is a first year Computer Science student at Poznań Univeristy of Technology. She is interested in cybersecurity and plans to continue her studies in this field. She is proficient in Python and C programming.
Joanna Walczak
Joanna Walczak is an IT student at Poznań University of Technology. In her free time, she primarily explores programming through game development, alongside engaging in computer graphics projects like object modeling. She knows the basics of Python and C++ languages.
Krzysztof Jeromin
Krzysztof Jeromin is a fifth-year student of European law at Adam Mickiewicz University. He is currently conducting research on access to encrypted data in information exchange services and its impact on the right to privacy. He presented his research at the LAITech 2024 conference in Estonia. His research interests focus on the impact of new technologies on fundamental rights.
Weronika Łomako
Weronika Łomako is a 5th year student of European Law at Adam Mickiewicz University. Her academic interests are focused on consumer protection on online platforms, especially in context of recommendation systems.Accra
All Participants
Emmanuel Olamijuwon
Emmanuel Olamijuwon is a Lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, UK. His research interest lies at the intersection of technology, sexuality, & population health in low-and-middle-income countries. His recent projects combine data from traditional data sources (such as the DHS), with digital traces (Facebook and Twitter) and Online surveys to illuminate the complexity of a number of social and health issues such as knowledge inequality, suicide ideation, as well as sexual and reproductive health.
Fidelia Dake
Fidelia Dake is a Senior Lecturer at the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS), University of Ghana. Her research focuses broadly on population health and international development. Her research interests include nutrition and physical activity, obesity and non-communicable diseases, socio-environmental determinants of health, urban health, health statistics, health-financing and population ageing. She is also interested in using methods in computational social science to study health and lifestyle behaviours including dietary practices, physical activity and travel behaviours.
Yaw Atiglo
Yaw Atiglo is a Research Fellow at the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS), University of Ghana. His research interests border on population health, population-environment nexus, and population-sustainable development interrrelations, particularly from a gendered perspective. He also seeks to employ complex data systems to explore society-environment interactions and other social issues relevant for sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa.
Mac-Donald Abopaam
Mac-Donald Abopaam is a dedicated researcher with a strong academic background in Geography and Population Studies. His research interests are climate change, urban planning, and population health. He is eager to expand his skill set through the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science, aiming to enhance his technical capabilities and contribute to innovative solutions in policy reforms and sustainable development, especially in the context of climate change adaptation and urban planning.
Patrick Addo
Patrick Addo is a qualitative researcher of CHORUS project II at the University of Ghana School of Public Health. CHORUS (Community-led Responsive and Effective Urban Health Systems), a research programme consortium, seeks to help address urban health challenges in poor urban communities through a demand-driven approach that brings together stakeholders from the community to higher-level policymakers to identify and find solutions to health challenges for the urban poor. Patrick is driven by his passion to address pressing societal health issues through rigorous scientific methods and hopes to improve and contribute to the building of resilient, healthy and smart urban centres. With the world inundated with a plethora of data (both numbers and text), Patrick seeks to find innovative approaches to analyse and draw insights to inform policies specifically to the contribution of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 3 and 11, which emphasises good health and building a healthy and resilient city respectively. Before CHORUS, Patrick has worked as a freelance researcher participating in national informing health policy projects like the Community-based Health and Planning Services (CHPS) plus and Developing Acute Care and Emergency Systems (ACERS). He is the manager of Penuel-Charis Research Consultancy, a start-up research firm which is currently a grant holder from the Ministry of Environmental Science and Technology of Ghana, exploring the feasibility of using a web-based application to scale up mass drug administration for schistosomiasis following Covid-19 pandemic in the Volta and Oti regions of Ghana.
Patience Serwaa Bonsu
Patience Serwaa Bonsu is a master's student at the Regional Institute for Population Studies, University of Ghana. Her current research focuses on parental education and early childhood development in Ghana. She is self-motivated, adaptable, and passionate about becoming an agent of change and a problem solver in the community and society.
Dzeble Jonas Horlali
Dzeble Jonas Horlali is a student at the Regional Institute for Population Studies, University of Ghana, with a strong interest in Computational Social Science, particularly in migration studies and population geography. Currently, he works as a research assistant on the Immobility in a Changing Climate Project, where he contributes to the conceptualization of immobility. Jonas is eager to apply computational methods to understand complex social phenomena and is excited to collaborate with fellow researchers at the Summer Institute.
Edward Owusu Manu
Edward Owusu Manu is a dedicated student at the University of Ghana's Regional Institute for Population Studies. His research interests are focused on living standards, multidimensional poverty, income inequality, and population dynamics. Edward is particularly skilled in population analysis and indirect estimation techniques, which he employs to derive valuable insights from population data.
Peter Annor Mensah
Peter Annor Mensah is a development researcher at Participatory Development Associates. His research interests are in child nutritional outcomes, climatic variability and nutritional vulnerability, and the commercial determinants of health. Specifically, Peter aims to research the fossil fuels industry in Sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of commercial determinants of health.
Prince Mensah
Prince Mensah is a CAPI developer and data manager with a keen interest in social science. He holds a Master of Arts in Population Studies from the University of Ghana's Regional Institute for Population Studies. His research has explored the complex relationship between Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), decision-making dynamics, and contraceptive use among women of reproductive age in Kenya. With a strong track record of delivering research outputs from survey data, Prince is now expanding his expertise into computational social science. He is particularly interested in exploring non-traditional data sources, such as text data from online platforms, and applying computational techniques to process and analyze these rich data sets.
Stephanie Tetteh
Stephanie Tetteh is a Research Assistant at the Regional Institute of Population Studies, where she contributes to an ongoing research “Immobility in a Changing Climate” project. Her background is in Actuarial Science, and she is completing her M.A. in Population Studies. Her current research focuses on social vulnerability to flooding, which reflects her commitment to understanding and mitigating the impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations. She is driven by her favorite quote: *'Try everything and keep smiling'*, which encapsulates my positive and proactive approach to life and work.
Amsterdam
All Participants
Diliara Valeeva
Diliara is an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at the Political science department of the University of Amsterdam. She received her PhD at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research in 2021. Before joining the UvA, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Geography department of the KU Leuven. Diliara's current research is on business and finance, corporate elites and power, and social networks. Diliara also works as a Lecturer at the BSc program in Computational Social Science at the UvA, and serves as a coordinator at the Social & Behavioral Data Science Center of the UvA, where she consults social scientists in utilizing data science methods, oversees community development, and coordinates funding.
Daniel Mayerhoffer
Daniel is Assistant Professor in the Bachelor Program Computational Social Science, a member of the Institutions, Inequalities, and Life courses research group in Sociology, and affiliated with the Data Science Centre. He uses Agent Based Simulation, among and in combination with other methods, to explain and predict complex socio-technical systems to enhance their governance. He applies Computational Models mainly to questions in Political Epistemology, Collective Behaviour and Economics. Furthermore, he evaluates these models from an analytical and Philosophy of Science perspective. Daniel's transdisciplinary background facilitates work on various topics and collaboration in diverse teams.
Johannes Aengenheyster
Johannes Aengenheyster is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Sociology programme group at the Sociology Department at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from University College Maastricht and a Master of Science from the University of Amsterdam. His research investigates the development of the population of private museums in terms of openings and closings, as well as their influence in the canonization of artists. His other interests include the structure and development of classification systems and computational methods.
Marie Labussière
Marie Labussière is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam since September 2021. She studies social stratification and mobility using a variety of quantitative methods, including text mining and machine learning. Her current work in the CAREER ERC project focuses on the employment trajectories of workers in the context of changing labor markets, based on a combination of job advertisement data and panel data. Marie is also interested in improving the use and teaching of quantitative methods in the social sciences and is a strong advocate of open science. She holds an engineering degree from the French National School of Statistics and Economic Analysis (ENSAE) and a master's degree in interdisciplinary social sciences.
Gijs Schumacher
Gijs is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently co-director of the Hot Politics Lab and the Challenges to Democratic Representation Program Group. In his research he uses psychological perspectives to analyze contemporary politics. He uses a range of different methods from neuroscience, computer science and social science. His work has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Nature Human Behaviour, Scientific Reports, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, European Journal of Political Research, Emotion and Political Psychology.
Reshmi G. Pillai
Reshmi is a PostDoc Researcher at the Department of Communication Science in the Vrije University Amsterdam. She focuses on the adoption and implementation of artificial intelligence techniques, specifically natural language processing, in the context of local journalism. Her current research explores the construction of structured knowledge bases in the context of regional news media organizations in the Netherlands. Previously, she was a Lecturer at the Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, in the Master's program in Information Studies (Data Science track). She holds a PhD from the University of Wolverhampton for her thesis on the expressions of psychological stress in tweets.
Rens Wilderom
Rens Wilderom works as a Core Lecturer in Computational Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. His current research focuses on (i) the impact of stylistic trends in the film art world and (ii) how large language models can be leveraged in the sociology of culture. In the past, he worked on the development of dance music in the US, UK, and the Netherlands, and alternative markets for food production and consumption.
Rafiazka Hilman
Rafiazka Hilman is affiliated with Computational Science Lab (CSL) at the Informatics Institute (IvI) and Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), University of Amsterdam (UvA). She holds a PhD in Network and Data Science from Central European University (CEU). Specialized in Spatial Data Science and Computational Social Science, she focuses on urban dynamics and urban complex system. Currently, she is working on structure and dynamics of multidimensional segregation.
Elisa Omodei
Elisa Omodei is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Network and Data Science at the Central European University. She holds a BSc and a MSc in Physics from the University of Padua and Bologna, respectively, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics for the Social Sciences from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) of Paris. She carried out her postdoctoral training at the Rovira and Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain. She then spent over four years at the United Nations, first at UNICEF's Office of Innovation in New York and then at the UN World Food Programme in Rome. In her research, she explores how complexity and data science can help us address the needs of the most vulnerable populations and monitor the UN Sustainable Development Goals. She also served as Vice-President Secretary of the Complex Systems Society from 2018 to 2021.
Petter Törnberg
Petter Törnberg is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Language, Logic and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, Associate Professor in Complex Systems at Chalmers University of Technology, NWO VENI laurate, and senior researcher at the University of Neuchâtel. His research focuses on the intersection of AI, social media, and politics, using digital data and computational methods to critically examine the consequences of datafication and platformization.
Juhi Kulshrestha
Juhi Kulshrestha is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aalto University. Her research focuses on studying online news and information consumption, online political communication, online social media and the role of online algorithmic intermediaries in shaping people's online information diets. She has developed frameworks for measuring the bias and diversity in the news and information that users are consuming via algorithmic recommendation and search systems on web and social media platforms.
Malte Lüken
Malte Lüken is a Research Software Engineer at the Netherlands eScience Center. His Work focuses on natural language processing and machine learning in the digital humanities and social sciences. He graduated from the Research Master’s Psychology at the University of Amsterdam with a focus on methodology and statistics and has been contributing to the open science software JASP. His interests are applied (Bayesian) statistics, machine learning, and programming in research.
Samvardhan Vishnoi
I am pursuing a Physics Ph.D. at Northwestern in complex systems. My transdisciplinary work combines Bayesian statistical methods with city scaling models to model US crime and arrest trends, with the goal of not only explaining the trajectories but also tackling unreported/missing data to improve the FBI's data quality. Additionally, I work in equity within academia itself, revealing the difference in scientist career trajectories and survival by gender.
Mariia Tepliakova
Mariia Tepliakova is a PhD candidate at the Salzburg Centre of European Union Studies at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria. In her research and teaching, she deals with the contestations of gender equality policies in Europe using a mix of survey research, expert interview and quantitative text analysis.
Anna Sokolova
Anna Sokolova is a PhD student at the Chair in Sociological Methodology at the University of Mannheim. She is interested in the emergence of inequalities in networks and how the cumulative advantage of social capital can contribute to said inequalities. In her research, Anna uses agent-based modelling, behavioral experiments, and social network analyses of longitudinal classroom network data.
Sasha Moriniere
Sasha is currently a Researcher at the Open Data Institute working on the future of open data, research-digital platforms data sharing partnerships, power imbalances within data ecosystems, and responsible data stewardship. Previously, she conducted research, advocacy and policy work on online harms and regulation, led projects on electoral disinformation in France, and promoted data literacy in Mali and Indonesia. Sasha recently coordinated research and policy work delivered to French President Emmanuel Macron regarding online disinformation and its impact on our democracies. Holding a Master's degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics, she's fluent in French, English, and Spanish, and is learning Arabic.
Dominika Betakova
Dominika Betakova is a PhD candidate at the Department of Communication of the University of Vienna. Her research interests include political communication, news (non-)consumption and avoidance, automated text analysis and experimental research methods. Her dissertation titled “I Do Not (Want to) Know! Political News Use in Fragmented Media Environments ” focuses on the highly socially relevant phenomenon of news avoidance.
How Hwee Ong
How Hwee Ong is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen. He received his PhD in social psychology from Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He is broadly interested in the psychological underpinnings of misbeliefs and interventions to improve decision-making.
Simone Skeen
Simone J. Skeen is pursuing her doctorate at Tulane University. Her work covers political and structural/systemic drivers of suicidality; linguistic signatures of subtle discrimination in mental healthcare; racialized income inequality, law enforcement violence, psychotraumatology, and immune function among people living with HIV; and identity formation and digital health autonomy movements.
Dhruv Mittal
Dhruv, a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam's Computational Science Lab, studies collective decision-making and cultural evolution in changing environments. With a background in physics, he draws from domains like Complex Systems, Network Science, Evolutionary Game Theory, and Social Psychology to work towards informing policy interventions in social systems.
Laura Eberlein
Laura is a PhD student in Sociology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research interests include school-to-work transitions, social stratification and inequalities in the labour market. In her dissertation, she analyses early career paths and investigates which factors influence differences in the quality of employment in the first years of working life. She holds a BA in Philosophy and Economics from University of Bayreuth and a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School.
Veronika Ebner
Veronika Ebner is a master’s student in the Erasmus Mundus Journalism Program at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests are climate change communication, solutions journalism, emotions, and social media. After graduation, she will join the Computational Communication Science Lab at the University of Vienna to pursue her PhD.
Leevi Saari
Leevi Saari is a PhD Candidate at the University of Amsterdam researching the way contemporary AI governance initiatives approach AI shape and limit the potential politics of technology. Before his PhD, he served as an accredited policy advisor in the European Parliament with key responsibilities in regulation initiatives on artificial intelligence, data and platform economy. He also serves as the EU Policy Fellow at AI Now Institute.
Ruiwen Zhou
Ruiwen Zhou (she/her) is an incoming MPhil student in Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Currently, she is a research assistant in the Digital Narratives Studio and is involved in a research project exploring digital authorship in the age of Gen-AI. Her experiences in observing, feeling, and witnessing the permeation of technologies triggered her interest in digging deeper into human-technology intricacy.
Anastasia Mertens
Anastasia Mertens is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Political Science at Kiel University, Germany. Her research focuses on state behavior in cyberspace. Her dissertation, "Disinformation in Social Media: A Cross-National Comparative Study", aims to identify factors correlating with the prevalence, issues, and agenda-setting power of online disinformation.
Hannah E. Murdock
Hannah E. Murdock is a PhD candidate and President’s Scholar in the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, Seminar Leader in the Imperial Energy Futures Lab, and Research Partner at REN21. She has previously held various roles working within NGOs, international organisations, academia, and consulting in the US and Europe. Her research interests lie at the intersection of sustainability, psychology, and public policy, with her thesis focusing on decarbonising transport while maximising co-benefits – analysing the role of policies, biases, and behaviour – using various computational methods as well as traditional social science methods.Atlanta
All Participants
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Dr. Albrecht’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study fear, violence, and data distortions. She is particularly interested in the nexus of fear and risk-taking behaviors, digital trace data, and the impact of law on decision-making. She frequently serves as a computational science expert for the defense on active legal cases about life without the opportunity of parole, felony murder, gang enhancements, and the Racial Justice Act. She is presently a Fellow at Georgetown University Law School where she is doing data infrastructure work on court data systems in Tennessee.
Elycia S. Daniel
Criminal justice professional skilled in Educational Technology, Training, Adult Education, Public Speaking, and Grant Writing, she has over 20 years of experience teaching in higher education. Her research interests include specific areas of policing such as civilian review boards, female police chiefs, and body-worn cameras. In addition, she is a Program Evaluator for the AUC Data Science Institute.
Talitha Washington
Dr. Talitha Washington is the inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Data Science Initiative, a Professor of Mathematics at Clark Atlanta University and an affiliate faculty at Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Spelman College. She is the Director and lead principal investigator of the NSF-funded National Data Science Alliance (NDSA) and the President of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She works across Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to increase the number of Blacks with expertise in data science and expand data science research that advocates for social justice.
Desha Elliott
PhD Candidate in the Whitney M. Young Jr. School of Social Work at Clark Atlanta University. Former Research Assistant for In Her Hands Guaranteed Income Project. Federal Grant Evaluator. Entrepreneurship & Economic Development Enthusiast.
Charlotte Alexander
Charlotte S. Alexander holds the Connie D. and Ken McDaniel WomenLead Chair as an Associate Professor of Law and Analytics at the Robinson College of Business and the College of Law at Georgia State University. She founded and directs the university’s Legal Analytics Lab, which brings together faculty from law, business, and data science to take on legal problems and questions using computational methods. Professor Alexander’s own scholarship focuses on civil litigation, and particularly employment litigation, using text mining, natural language processing, and machine learning to uncover patterns in case filing, progress, and resolution in both courts and private dispute resolution fora. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Heather Offutt
Heather Offutt is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University Cognitive Sciences program, and an associate member of the Neuroscience Institute. Her research focus is memory and decision-making in the legal context. She consults with trial attorneys in eyewitness identification cases and serves as an expert witness.
Talitha Washington
Dr. Talitha Washington is the inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Data Science Initiative, a Professor of Mathematics at Clark Atlanta University and an affiliate faculty at Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Spelman College. She is the Director and lead principal investigator of the NSF-funded National Data Science Alliance (NDSA) and the President of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She works across Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to increase the number of Blacks with expertise in data science and expand data science research that advocates for social justice.
Edmond Anderson
Edmond Anderson is a soon-to-be graduate of the Masters of Data Science program at Michigan State University where he studies applications of topic modeling and knowledge graphs on very large scale datasets. Specifically, Edmond studies the ways in which Artificial Intelligence can understand and influence human emotions, as well as the ethics behind varying applications of machine learning. His current work also focuses ways in which recommender systems and generative models can alter and affect human behavior and beliefs.
Mi Aniefuna
Mi is a public health and education researcher, and doctoral candidate in Health Education & Promotion at Teachers College, Columbia University. His interdisciplinary research focuses on population health and implementation strategies to achieve Black health equity. His topics of interest are child development and adolescent mental health, racism & health, social determinants of health, and equity in education. Mi is the Head of Research at EdSurge, an education nonprofit newsroom and research center where he uses data storytelling via critical qualitative and quantitative methods in his translational and community-based participatory research.
Yilin (Alen) Chen
Yilin “Alen” Chen is a Ph.D. student at Georgia State University’s Communication Department, focusing on strategic communication and political communication on social media platforms. He utilizes Python and Jupyter Notebook for his research. Alen holds a Master of Accounting and a Bachelor of Science in Management from Tulane University, achieving both degrees in three years. His professional roles include Communication Course Instructor and Political Communication Research Assistant at Georgia State University, Integrated Marketing Strategy Consultant for Fonus Inc., and Partner at Paperclip Education Consulting. He has successfully guided over 100 students to top universities like Yale and Stanford. Alen has presented his work at international conferences and published an equity research report on Globalstar, Inc. He is also the founder of several student advocacy and community organizations. His skills include IT, public speaking, and multilingual communication, with interests in poetry, jazz, and roadtrips.
Rafael Geurgas
Rafael Geurgas is a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University. He has a major in theoretical physics, with a master's in astrophysics. His passion for social science started with his PhD in applied machine learning where he analyzed the impact of COVID-19 fake news on Twitter using machine learning and graph theory. He currently works in the sociology department studying behavioral genetics. His research interest is to develop a statistical tool/machine learning approach to understand how genes influence social behavior, especially educational attainment and depression. Contributing to advance in the Nature x Nurture debate.
Gayane Grigoryan
Gayane Grigoryan is in the process of completing her Ph.D. in the Engineering Management and Systems Engineering department at Old Dominion University (ODU). She received a Master's degree in Economics from ODU in 2017 as a Fulbright scholarship recipient and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Armenia State University of Economics. Gayane was a research assistant with the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center (VMASC), where she studied the association between cyber risk and cyberloafing behavior. Gayane was an instructor with Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), teaching machine learning and data analytics courses. Her current research focuses on developing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods using cooperative game theory and an evaluation metric to measure the effectiveness of these methods. She has a strong interest in integrating XAI and language models with research in healthcare and education to understand the human decision-making process.
Hanzi He
Hanzi He is a first-year PhD student in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. Her work sits at health communication, where she uses computational techniques to study health messages on social media. She is particularly interested in how health messages affect people’s viewpoints on health issues and diseases and also thus impact their subsequent behaviors.
Soobin Kim
Soobin Kim is an incoming Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Georgia School of Social Work. Her research interests span economic and social inequality, health disparities, family well-being, and social policy. Her motivation lies in comprehensively understanding the challenges faced by economically and socially marginalized individuals, considering their multifaceted contexts such as family, school, workplace, community, and neighborhood, alongside the influence of social policy and social forces. Ultimately, her aim is to inform policy development that enhances the well-being of marginalized populations.
Chin-Ling Lee
Chin-Ling Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication at University of Georgia (UGA). She is also a faculty member of UGA’s Institute for Integrative Precision Agriculture. Her research focuses on innovation adoption in the context of agricultural science and extension, including integrative precision agriculture, climate-smart technologies, and innovative decision-making processes.
Fei Li
Fei Li is an Assistant Professor at the Urban Studies Institute of Georgia State University. Her work investigates how cities and urban policy can influence individual behavior and lifestyle choices and promote health, equity, and sustainability. Her latest research focuses on how (im)mobility affects health and wellbeing for low-income individuals, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how cities can enable and promote alternative mobility, including active transportation (such as biking and walking) and micromobility (such as bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters), to enhance mobility justice, accessibility, and environmental sustainability.
Amari McGee
Amari 'Mari' McGee is an LGBTQ+ professional speaker, educator, activist, and research consultant. During his professional career, Mari has been featured in Canva, USA Today, PinkNews, and other media outlets for his work within the Transgender community. He delivers educational and inspirational presentations on allyship, workplace inclusivity, LGBTQ+ psychology, LGBTQ+ history, and community acceptance. As an inspirational speaker, educator, and consultant; Mari also brings over 8 years of experience as an activist for the transgender community to his work.
Nana Kwame Osei Fordjour
Dr. Nana Kwame Osei Fordjour is an Assistant Professor of Public Relations at the Department of Communication, University of Maryland, College Park. His research revolves around the intersection of public relations, political communication, and media. Specifically, Dr. Osei Fordjour investigates how politicians construct their public image in governance, crises, and elections. He also studies user political discourses online.
Jiaqin (Ada) Pan
Jiaqin Pan is a Ph.D. student in Communication at Georgia State University, with a research focus on health communication. Specifically, her work addresses vaccine hesitancy, social media, misinformation, and media framing. She holds a Master of Science in Digital Social Media from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from the University of Connecticut. Jiaqin has experience as a social media manager, instructor, and has worked as a senior media analyst at Meltwater, a media data analytics company.
Vithika Salomi
Vithika (she/her) is pursuing her Ph.D. in Communication at Georgia State University. Her current research interest includes misinformation on new media platforms and their impact on politics and society. She is also generally interested in social media use and its effects. She is currently a Presidential Fellow in Transcultural Conflict and Violence (TCV) Initiative at GSU and has also served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of Communication besides teaching undergrad students.
Jiajing (Scarlette) Shi
Jiajing (Scarlette) Shi is a Ph.D. student in the joint doctoral program in Public Policy at Georgia State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. She holds a Master's in Public Administration with a specialization in policy analysis and program evaluation, and a Bachelor's in Social Work. These educational experiences have shaped her interest in analyzing systemic issues in healthcare. Scarlett's primary research focuses on health policy and health disparities among vulnerable populations. As a member of the Health Economics & Analytics Lab (HEAL) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, she collaborates with faculty on projects addressing issues related to school-based health centers and domestic violence using causal inference methods. She also leads several research initiatives using quantitative and qualitative methods to study preventative care and opioid prescribing behavior in the sickle cell disease population under the Georgia Sickle Cell Data Collection program, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As she continues her research in healthcare and health policy, Scarlette is particularly interested in integrating computational modeling with health policy and health services research to optimize health outcomes for individuals.
Chenchen Shi
Chenchen Shi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Pedagogy at The Central Academy of Drama (in Beijing). Her research focuses on evidence-based education, program evaluation, and meta-analysis. Currently, she is a collaborator of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at the Johns Hopkins University.
Carry Smith
Carry (CJ) Smith is a PHD in Political science at Clark Atlanta University. Smith is an accomplished researcher, Policy Analyst, Political Scientist, Scholar, and Voting Rights Advocate in Georgia. Smith has consulted and led many political and issued based campaigns in Georgia. In 2008, Smith was featured in the book, “The Tiger’s Roar,” by Dr. Emmett Brooks for her leadership role in the successful campaign in southeast Georgia to register 120,000 voters in Chatham County; also registering 2,500 of 3,500 SSU students to vote and bussed another 1,500 to the polls. Smith has served on panels presenting at the National Association of Black Political Scientist Annual Meeting, Symposium on Southern Politics at the Citadel, and Southern Political Science Association Annual Meeting. Smith has served as an instructor at Savannah State University, Georgia Southern University and Georgia Highlands College. She is currently the Coastal Georgia Coordinator for the Georgia Coalition of the People’s Agenda. Her areas in public administration, urban politics, comparative politics, campaigning, and American politics. Her dissertation research focuses on Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act.
Jessica Udry
Jessica Udry recently completed her PhD at Georgia State University and will be starting a position as an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M Commerce in Fall 2024. Her research focuses on the relationship between memory and belief. She does this primarily by investigating the cognitive mechanisms of the illusory truth effect, which is the finding that repetition increases belief. She is also interested in interventions used to prevent belief in online misinformation. Her dissertation project focused on investigating how psychological inoculation can be used to prevent belief in online misinformation in younger and older adults.
Meng Ye
Meng Ye is a PhD student in public policy majoring in public management and nonprofit studies. Her research interests lie in nonprofit commercialization, cross-sector collaboration, and social enterprises. She has published several journal articles and book chapters on topics including social enterprise policy, commercialism in nonprofit management, charitable fundraising, and charitable financial management. She won the Best Conference Paper Award from the AOM PNP section, the APPAM Equity and Inclusion Fellowship, ARNOVA Graduate Diversity Scholarship, and PMRC and ASPA Conference Scholarships. She also serves as the Editorial Manager at the International Journal of Public Administration and a Development Committee member of ARNOVA. Meng formerly worked as a nonprofit policy researcher at China Philanthropy Research Institute. She consulted the Asian Development Bank, and national and local policymakers in designing policies on nonprofit management.Barcelona
All Participants
Andreu Casas
Andreu Casas is an Assistant Professor in Political Communication at Royal Holloway University of London in the Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, and a Faculty Associate in the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University. He is a computational political scientist working on political communication, public policy, legislative politics, and computational methods. The substantive goal of his research is to build a better understanding of the policymaking process, broadly speaking, in the current digital society. His research in political communication and public policy looks at how social media has shaped collective action dynamics; how social movements, interest groups, political parties, as well as the public, use public communications to influence the political agenda; the role of (social) media in increasing/ameliorating polarization; and the regulation of political speech by social media companies. His research on legislative politics looks at the conditions under which individual legislators and legislative groups influence policy through less prominent (e.g. amendments) and more informal (e.g. bundling legislation) mechanisms. He develops and/or applies novel computation methods (text-as-data and images-as-data) that allows to unlock important (classic and new) research questions that cannot be addressed otherwise.Chico Camargo
Chico Camargo is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter. His research interests cover the intersection of computational social science, complex systems, political communication, data science, cultural evolution, cultural sociology, and information theory. He studies how ideas spread and evolve, mixing data science with theories about human behaviour, culture, and society. He is also a science communicator, having written for Science, HuffPost Brazil, The Conversation, and produced over 50 videos for YouTube.Laia Castro
Laia Castro is an assistant professor in the department of Political Science at University of Barcelona and research associate at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Her research involves empirical work on political communication, comparative media research & public opinion, with a particular focus on cross-cutting exposure and communication across political lines. She was assistant professor at the Faculty of Communication at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya - Barcelona and a senior researcher at the Department of Communication & Media Research at University of Zurich. Laia holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of Fribourg, and studied Political Science at University Pompeu Fabra (BA) and Political Communication and Marketing at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (MA). For more than seven years, she has also worked as a political advisor and assistant at several Catalan institutions.Xavier Fernández i Marín
Xavier Fernández i Marín is a 'Ramón y Cajal' fellow at the Universitat de Barcelona. He develops and tailors solutions for social science research methods, including current developments in Bayesian inference, data visualization, probabilistic programming, experimental designs and machine learning. He has substantial contributions in comparative politics, public administration, public policy, international relations and psychology. Xavier has worked in the fields of global governance and IGOs, the diffusion of policies and institutions and the processes of development of regulatory agencies. He has a also worked on Internet and e-Government diffusion and other related aspects of the public management of the Information Society, which lately include the adoption of Artificial Intelligence in public administration.Camilo cristancho
Camilo Cristancho is a Ramon y Cajal research fellow at the Political Science Department, Universitat de Barcelona. His research focuses on protest, interest groups, and elite behaviour with a comparative approach in Europe and Latin America. He works with computational linguistics, social network analysis and experimental methods. His most recent projects study public attitudes and elite responsiveness to protest, affective polarization, and public emotions in contentious times. He was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for European Studies at Sciences Po, Paris, and has collaborated with different government institutions on policy implementation and evaluation projects. His work in political communication, political sociology, and political science has been published in Europe, the US and Latin America.Andreu Rodilla
Andreu Rodilla is a PhD candidate at University of Barcelona (UB) and at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). His research focuses at the intersection of judicial politics and legislative studies. In particular, he studies how courts influence the legislative process from an empirical perspective. In this sense, he analyses legislative and legal text from a quantitative point of view.Luis Remiro
Luis Remiro is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Barcelona. His research primarily explores political behaviour, political culture, and quantitative research methods, with a special focus on affective polarisation and voters' attitudes towards institutions. He examines the factors driving affective polarisation in Latin America, including elite behaviour, the role of leaders in shaping political identities, and how democratic backsliding can drive affective polarisation. Additionally, he regularly contributes to various media outlets (online, radio, and television) and forums to discuss Venezuelan politics and electoral behaviour.Beijing
All Participants
Fang Luo
Professor Fang Luo serves as the Deputy Dean and Professor at The Faculty of Psychology at Beijing Normal University, and she also holds positions as the Vice Chairman of the Educational Statistics and Measurement Branch of the China Educational Technology Association and Secretary-General of the Psychological and Educational Statistics and Measurement Branch of the Chinese Society of Education. She has long been engaged in interdisciplinary research between artificial intelligence and psychology. Her current research interests include the development of human-computer interaction tests combining artificial intelligence and psychometrics, process data mining, and the development and application of educational tests based on large models. She has published nearly 100 papers and received more than twenty grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Social Science Fund, among others.
Matthew J. Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He is also affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers including the Office of Population Research and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.
Xing Xie
Dr. Xing Xie is a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and a part-time doctoral supervisor at the University of Science and Technology of China. He leads a research team dedicated to data mining, social computing, and responsible artificial intelligence. His academic achievements include receiving the ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award and the China Computer Federation (CCF) Young Scientist Award in 2019, the ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Honorable Mention in 2020, the ACM SIGKDD China Test-of-Time Paper Award in 2021, the ACM SIGKDD Test-of-Time Paper Award in 2022, the IEEE MDM Test-of-Time Paper Award and the CCF Natural Science First Prize in 2023, and he was named a DeepTech Pioneer in China's Intelligent Computing Technology Innovation. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and the China Computer Federation (CCF).
Yankai Lin
Yankai Lin is an appointed Assistant Professor at Renmin University of China, he obtained his Bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees from Tsinghua University in 2014 and 2019, respectively. After completing his doctorate, he served as a Senior Researcher at Tencent WeChat before joining Renmin University of China as an Assistant Professor in 2022. His primary research interests include pre-trained models and natural language processing. He has published over 40 papers at top international conferences in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, IJCAI, and NeurIPS, with more than 9,000 citations according to Google Scholar and an H-index of 27. Three of his representative works on structured knowledge of natural language processing were summarized in "Methods for Structured Knowledge Representation Learning" and received the First-Class Natural Science Award from the Ministry of Education. Additionally, his contributions to the field are evidenced by the open-source toolkits OpenKE and OpenNRE, which have garnered over 6,400 stars on Github, becoming mainstream tools in knowledge-driven natural language processing internationally. He has also served as an area chair for conferences like EMNLP and ACL ARR.
Xiting Wang
Xiting Wang is an appointed assistant professor at Renmin University of China, graduated with a Bachelor's and Ph.D. from Tsinghua University, and formerly the lead researcher of the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). Her research interests lie in explainable and responsible artificial intelligence, with related research achievements implemented in Bing, the world's second-largest search engine. Two of her papers were selected as cover articles by the CCF-A category journal TVCG. She has been invited to serve as an area chair for IJCAI and AAAI, joined the IEEE VIS organizing committee as the archive chair, and serves on the editorial board of Visual Informatics. She was recognized as an Outstanding Senior Program Committee member at AAAI 2021. She has twice been invited to deliver keynote speeches at the SIGIR Workshop on Explainable Recommendation, and she is a senior member of both CCF and IEEE.
Lei Cao
Dr Lei Cao received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University. He is a lecture at The Faculty of Psychology at Beijing Normal University. His research interests are in artificial intelligence and mental health, such as a method for detecting users' extreme mental states based on deep learning and real-time assessment of students' learning status in the classroom.
An Zeng
An Zeng is a Full Professor in the School of Systems Science at Beijing Normal University. His research combines statistical physics and computer science to exploit the opportunities and promises offered by Big Data. The tools of network science are employed to better understand and predict social interactions, human mobility, and research behavior. So far, Professor Zeng have published about 50 papers and received over 2000 citations.
Kondwani Kajera Mughogho
Kondwani Kajera Mughogho joined the Psychometrics Centre in May 2023 as a Psychometrician. He holds a PhD in Educational Measurement from the University of Oslo. Prior to joining the Psychometrics Centre, Kondwani worked as a Psychometrician at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). He was a member of the team responsible for conducting psychometric analysis on the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation’s (Ofqual’s) National Reference Test (NRT). Additionally, Kondwani contributed to psychometric analysis for NFER's new e-Assessments, evaluated various questionnaires and research instruments, and reviewed and updated technical reports.
Luning Sun
Dr Luning Sun is Research Director of The Psychometrics Centre and Research Associate in the Organisational Behaviour subject group at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He received his PhD in psychometrics from the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge in 2014. Dr Sun is a highly experienced psychometrician and researcher, having led many international research collaborations to advance the field of psychological and behavioural measurement. His research focuses on the new forms of assessment that are enabled by the advancements in psychometric theories and techniques. He is also interested in the evaluation of AI systems such as Large Language Models.
Diyi Yang
Diyi Yang is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, her research interests include natural language processing, machine learning, and computational sociolinguistics, with a focus on computational social science and natural language processing. She is dedicated to combining NLP, machine learning, and social sciences to study how humans use language in social contexts and to develop advanced language technologies to facilitate better human-computer interaction. Her work includes the novel integration of artificial intelligence technologies and social science theories. She has been recognized in Forbes' "30 Under 30 in Science" in 2020, IEEE's "Top 10 AI Rising Stars" in 2020, MIT Technology Review's "Innovators Under 35" in China in 2021, and as an outstanding student in the "Top-notch Student Training Program in Basic Disciplines 2.0" by the Ministry of Education in 2021.
David Stillwell
Prof David Stillwell is Academic Director of The Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge. He is also Professor of Computational Social Science and Deputy Director of the MBA programme at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He earned his PhD in Decision Making from the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham in December 2012. His research interests include psychometrics, psychology, decision-making, and social networks. Prof Stillwell uses big data to understand psychology, and also does consultancy on the topics of psychometrics, and people analytics. His research has been cited by many governments’ national data protection regulators worldwide.
José Hernández-Orallo
José Hernández-Orallo is Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain and Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, UK. His academic and research activities have spanned several areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science and intelligence measurement, with a focus on a more insightful analysis of the capabilities, generality, progress, impact and risks of artificial intelligence. He has published five books and more than two hundred journal articles and conference papers on these topics. He is a member of AAAI, CLAIRE and ELLIS, and a EurAI Fellow.
Yong Li
Yong Li is an associate professor and Ph.D. supervisor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University. He has long been engaged in research in data science and intelligence, serving as the principal investigator for key projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation and national key R&D programs. His research has resulted in over 150 academic papers published in international conferences and journals such as KDD, NeurIPS, WWW, and UbiComp, with more than 16,000 citations, and has won Best Paper/Nomination awards at international conferences six times. He has been recognized as a Ministry of Education Chang Jiang Scholars Program, a global "Highly Cited Researcher", and a national "Ten Thousand Talent Program" young top-notch talent. He has received the IEEE ComSoc Asia-Pacific Outstanding Young Researcher Award, the Ministry of Education's First Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress, the Second Prize of the Natural Science Award from the Chinese Institute of Electronics, and the Wu Wenjun AI Excellence Award for Young Scientists.
Zhang Chen
Zhang Chen is pursuing a Ph.D. in Internet Information at the Communication University of China. Zhang's research interests span disaster communication, online communities, social media, and computational social science.
Mingqiu Zheng
Mingqiu Zheng is a doctoral student in political science at School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. His work lies at the intersection of political geography and online cultural production, including the discursive construction of spatial representation, spatial hierarchies, and group allegiance. His dissertation looks into the regionalised nationalism in digital China that connects the sub-national regionmaking to the political project of national Identity. Methodologically, he employs the large language model to dealt with the data corpus of online political expressions for topic modelling and generating semantic networks.
Yichen Wang
Yichen is a PhD student at Cornell University. She studies in the field of Psychological Sciences & Human Development. Her research interests lie in interpersonal relaitonships, positive experience, stress and resilience, Developmental Psychology, Human Computer Interaction.
Sam Deng
Sam Deng is a third-year PhD candidate in the Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology Program at Fordham University in the States. She received her bachelor's degree at George Washington University, where she double majored in statistics and psychology. Her research interests are in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and quantitative psychology theories, such as structural equation modeling and item responses theory. Specifically, she’s interested in Game-based assessments (GBAs), where game components are adapted into traditional assessments. She believes that GBAs can help test takers reveal their true abilities, which improves test reliabilities.
Yun Chen
Yun Chen is a PhD candidate in Personality and Social Psychology at Beijing Normal University. Her current research focuses on promoting pro-environmental behavior and climate action at both individual and group levels. Before her PhD, she received her master's degree in School Psychology from Capital Normal University, where her research investigated the effects of reward prediction error on episodic memory.
Wenjia Tan
Wenjia Tan is an upcoming computer science master's student at the University of Macau. She is curious about the nature of intelligence. Her current research compares AI and human evaluations of children's learning to develop more effective and human-centered AI tools. She has worked at Tsinghua University for five years as a Lab Manager and Assistant Engineer. Involved in several research projects funded by the NSFC, companies, and NGOs, she collaborated with labs and produced papers, products, and white papers. Additionally, she established an online research platform to promote a win-win relationship between the public and scientists.
Yuelin Wang
Yuelin Wang doing her PhD study of Political Communication in Technical University Munich. She was graduated from Victoria University of Wellington and Cardiff University. She's research interest includes Climate Change, social media communication and crisis communication.
Xuanyu Shi
Xuanyu Shi is a PhD student at the Institute of Transdisciplinary Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. Currently, his research interests lie in the AI value alignment, computational social science, and complex network in social science. His scholarly contributions have been recognized in top-tier conferences such as ICA, AEJMC, and IAMCR.
Jiahui Liu
Jiahui Liu is a graduate student in Communication at the Communication University of China. Her research focuses on the dark sides of AI-mediated communication, such as AI-driven misinformation, synthetic media and deception, and unhealthy human-AI interactions. She aims to mitigate the threats arising from the misuse of AI. Her research has been published in journals and conferences such as Global Media and China, ICA, and IAMCR. Currently, she is conducting research on the role of social bots in feminist discussions.
Wei Wang
Wei Wang has been engaged in computer work for many years, from early desktop Win32 application development to Web application development, and then to ecological based digital applications. Currently, he is working on various text-based applications and has a certain understanding of text and natural language processing. Currently, he is conducting practical work on large language models.
Siyi Gong
Siyi Gong is a second-year PhD student in the Communication Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research is situated at the intersection of communication, cognitive science, and computational modeling, with a particular focus on collective intelligence based on visual common ground. Her recent work primarily explores how people collaboratively address challenges in communication when it becomes difficult and overloaded. Additionally, Siyi is interested in integrating artificial intelligence into her studies to examine the dynamic interplay between machine and human intelligence.
Yuqing Shi
Yuqing Shi is a Ph.D. student in Psychology at the National University of Singapore. She holds an M.S. in Cognitive Neuroscience and a B.S. in Psychology from Beijing Normal University. Her research interests focus on social cognition, particularly on how conceptual knowledge influences trait inferences and the organization of trait space during the dynamic process of impression formation.
Rui Cao
Rui Cao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and a graduate affiliate of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. She is broadly interested in gender, family, and education. Her research focuses on (1) the role of family dynamics and school processes in exacerbating or alleviating existing disparities in cognitive and non-cognitive abilities across racial and social class groups, (2) the gendered consequences of family structures during adolescence and adulthood, and (3) the implications of motherhood on midlife women's health.
Muhua Huang
Muhua Huang is a master's student in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago, holding a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Her research interests lie in advancing computational methods for behavioral science and leveraging social science theories to understand AI agents' behaviors. She employs machine learning, natural language processing, and structural equation modeling in her work. Currently, she focuses on two main areas: (1) designing AI agents with distinct personalities using a psychometric approach and (2) examining the value systems of large language models through multi-agent interactions.
Xi Cheng
Xi Cheng is a doctoral student at Beijing Normal University, specializing in the cognitive structure of social knowledge. She recently developed a qualitative tool to measure social relationships. Utilizing text analysis and large language models, she explores the historical evolution of social cognition. Additionally, she is interested in the science of science, with a particular focus on individual differences in researcher cooperation.
Zhaonan Wang
Zhaonan Wang is an incoming Assistant Professor to NYU Shanghai. His research interests lie in the interdisciplinary area of AI-urban science; he has published over 20 papers on top-tier AI data mining conferences and journals. Zhaonan has just finished postdoc at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he led the Geospatial AI team at CyberGIS Center. Zhaonan obtained his PhD in 2022 at Center for Spatial Information Science, the University of Tokyo, where he was awarded the Japanese Government (MEXT) scholarship. Zhaonan was also one of 37 nominees who were admitted to Peking University with College Entrance Exam exempted in Beijing 2010.
Cai Yang
Cai Yang is an incoming PhD student at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interest is politically oriented computational social science for improving online information ecosystems. Previously, he was a research intern at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems on the Saarland Informatics Campus, where he worked on analyzing TikTok addiction through data donation. He obtained his Bachelor's degree from the Australian National University.
Deliang Wang
Deliang Wang is a Year 2 PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at The University of Hong Kong. His research directions lie on AI and explainable AI in education, such as using AI and explainable AI to model and interpret educational dialogue and learner models. His publications appear in prestigious journals and conferences, such as IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, British Journal of Educational Technology, Educational Technology & Society, Education and Information Technologies, AIED, and AAAI conferences.
Youhan Ding
Youhan Ding is a research and international affairs programme specialist of Beijing Film Academy. Graduated from Scripps College in 2017 with a BA in Politics and Economics and New York University in 2020 with a MA in International Relations. Beyond her work in international communication and exchange, she has developed an interest towards the discussion and research on technology (especially generative AI), cultural studies and film as her work of the UNESCO Chair on Cinematic Arts and Cultural Diversity deepens and as she takes part in more international discourses about AI and education, and arts, etc.
Yingru Ji
Yingru Ji (PhD) is a ZJU100 Young Professor and doctoral supervisor in the College of Media and International Cultures at Zhejiang University. Her research focuses on human-machine communication and strategic communication. Recently, she has concentrated on the communication strategies, agency, and relationships of generative AI-based conversational chatbots with humans. She is the author of the forthcoming book, "Attribution Bias: The Public Opinion Psychology in the Social Media Era." Her work has been published in top-tier communication journals such as New Media & Society and has won top paper awards at prestigious international communication conferences such as ICA and AEJMC.
Desheng Hu
Desheng Hu is a PhD candidate in computer science at University of Zurich, co-advised by Prof. Aniko Hannak and Prof. Christo Wilson, with research interests in social computing, applied machine learning, algorithm auditing, and with applications in search engine and social media. Serving as leading authors, he published and presented several papers on top conferences such as WWW, ACM WebSci, AAAI ICWSM; and delivered invited talks about his work at top Internet companies such as Twitter Inc. and talked at academic events like Stanford's Trust & Safety Research Conference. He enjoys that the measurements conducted in his projects can offer real-world guidance for system designers or policy-makers to help make intelligent systems fairer, more transparent, and accountable.
Yun Wu
Yun Wu is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on youth development and how technologies have been shaping individuals' emotional wellbeing. She is interested in using big data and computational techniques to understand young people's purpose development and wellbeing.
Jingwei Yi
Jingwei Yi is a fourth-year joint Ph.D. candidate between Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Her research interests lie within responsible AI research problems, especially the societal, safety and security problems related to large language models.
Jiaying Liu
Jiaying Liu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at Beijing Normal University, where she is deeply engaged in the study of group dynamics and intergroup processes. Her current research delves into the ways in which men can be effectively engaged in the gender equality movement, as well as the impact of patriarchal structures on individuals' cognition and perceptions of interpersonal relationships. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from South China Normal University.
Yuanming Tao
Yuanming (Alex) Tao is a PhD student in applied mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of Sydney. His research focuses on understanding the meso-scale organization of complex networks beyond assortative communities by virtue of methods in network science and natural language processing.
Ruomeng Liu
Ruomeng is currently an undergraduate student at University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and an incoming MPhil student at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong. He is interested in political communication, media cognition and computational methods. His current research focuses on the people's decision-making in the context of high-choice media environment, and its political and societal implications.
Ziye Wang
Ziye Wang is a PhD candidate in Communication at Beijing Normal University. As an interdisciplinary researcher in Communication and Psychology, she is interested in integrating the quantitative methods and technologies from computational social science and psychology with Communication research questions, aiming to gain insights from macro-meso-micro perspectives. Her research interests span intelligent communication, computational communication, the usage of intelligent media, and measurement of communication effects.
Mingyuan Li
Mingyuan Li is currently pursuing her PhD in Comparative Politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, with a focus on consequences of context on civic behaviour and research methods. She earned her master's degree in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and Politics in 2023, following her bachelor's degree in Statistics and Political Studies from Queen's University.
Shiyao Wei
Shiyao Wei is a doctoral student in Instructional Design and Learning Technology at Florida State University. Her research focuses on collaboration in informal learning environments. She's interested in how people engage in informal learning, such as seeking and sharing information online, participating in crowdsourcing competitions, and undergoing peer review processes. She also explores how technology aids or obstructs these processes.
Junjie Liu
Junjie Liu is currently a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin and investigating conflict forecasting and he holds an MPhil degree in Probability and Mathematical Statistics from Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include conflict research, statistical inference, spatio-temporal model, natural language processing, and computer vision.
Yiran Hu
Yiran Hu is a research fellow in the University of Hong Kong. Before joining in HKU, she graduated from Tsinghua University as an outstanding graduate student. Her research interest lies in computational law, particularly in the field of Knowledge-centric NLP and Technology Policy. Her work has won "CIKM2023 Best Resource Paper Honorable Mention". She is deeply invested in exploring the policy implications of AI safety, taking into account the potential risks and ethical dilemmas posed by the use of Large Language Models within the realm of social sciences. She aspires to push the boundaries of legal AI and contribute to the creation of safe, reliable AI systems that integrate seamlessly into daily life.
WANG Shuang
WANG Shuang is a second-year PhD student at the Education University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include cultural psychology and moral psychology. Her recent research is about how culture affects moral judgment, especially blame judgment.
Dan Gilles
Dan Gilles is an MA candidate at the University of Chicago in Computational Sociology. His previous focus was philosophy, with a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Eastern Classics from St. John's College. His research attempts to integrate ancient disciplines with modern computational methods in order to explore sociological topics such as the evolution of happiness in America. He is also interested in international relations, and lived in Beijing for nearly 10 years before Chicago.
Yanyu Chen
Yanyu Chen is a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Psychology at Beijing Normal University, where she is deeply engaged in the study of social psychology. Her current research interests focus on time poverty, time use strategy, decision making, and adolescent mental health. Additionally, she is also interested in the analysis of longitudinal data.
Yufeng Zheng
Yufeng Zheng is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, specializing in Operations Management and Statistics. His research focuses on innovative decision-making methods within complex systems, emphasizing operations management, machine learning, and their intersections with computational sociology and deep learning. His work includes projects on adaptive methodologies, online learning, and revenue management.
Yuxin Hou
Yuxin Hou is an incoming PhD student at Peking University. She obtained her bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering and her master's degree in Education from Tsinghua University. Her research interests include the application of natural language processing in social science research, including social media analysis, political science, and human behavior.
Sabrina Yue ZHENG
Sabrina Yue ZHENG is a research analyst at Beijing Normal University. Her work lies at the intersection of child welfare and machine learning. She is interested in how research can inform frontline social workers' decision with the lens of social justice. Sabrina received her MSW from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with the concentration of program evaluation and applied research.
Peter Romero
Peter Romero leads the Centre's research projects and educational programmes in the field of people analytics, and is currently a researcher at Keio University in Tokyo. Being educated in Hamburg, Tokyo, and Cambridge, he has extensive teaching experience at undergraduate and graduate level as well as in senior executive programmes. Peter has 20 years of experience in the talent business, of which he spent six years in R&D, and fourteen in consultancy. He has overseen several global People Analytics projects in cooperation with People Analytics functions from top organisations. He is a founding member of Advanced Cognition Labs, an interdisciplinary institute focusing on research in the area of Artificial Intelligence.Berlin
All Participants
Lena Hipp
Head of the Work & Care research group at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and professor of Social Inequality & Social Policy at the University of Potsdam. Researchess social inequalities related to paid and unpaid care work and relies on a broad spectrum of methods and data, including survey, experimental, and digital data.
Stefan Munnes
Sociologist and research fellow in the Work & Care research group at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Interested in all kinds of social inequalities, currently researching gender inequalities and antisemitism. Furthermore, mainly engaged in computational methods, such as (automated) text analysis and graphical illustrations. Likes to share this knowledge and ask new questions and work through challenges in a team. Last year, he participated in SICSS Lisbon.
Armin Sauermann
Armin Sauermann is a researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He recently completed his Sociology Masters at the University of Potsdam and will pursue his PhD. Armin analyzes large-scale observational data and is learning to collect and analyze internet-based data to study group processes and political extremism. Last year, he participated in SICSS Helsinki.
Clara Bersh
Clara is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the Max Planck School of Cognition and specializes in Artificial Intelligence at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development at the Center for Humans and Machines in Berlin. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf and a Master of Science in Psychology from the University of Cologne, with studies abroad in the United States and the United Kingdom. Before joining the Max Planck School, she studied Computer Science at the FernUniversität Hagen. Clara's research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development focuses on collaborative ontology and knowledge engineering with an emphasis on knowledge graphs, real-time information extraction, and application design for intuitive human-machine interaction and effective facilitation of human reasoning and decision-making. 09/07 The world in knowledge graphs
Christian Rauh
Christian Rauh is a senior researcher in the Global Governance unit of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and a Professor for the 'Politics of Multilevel Governance' at the University of Potsdam. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of EU studies, international relations and comparative politics. His is particularly interested in decision-making of the European Commission and the public political debates about European and international institutions. Christian's work aims to combine solid theory with innovative empirical analysis - often involving web scraping, quantitative text analysis, and advanced data visualization. 11/07 How web scraping and large-N text analyses can shed light on (European Union) politics
Miriam Schirmer
15/07 Trauma and Violence Detection with Natural Language Processing
Sophia Hunger
Sophia Hunger is professor of Computational Social Sciences at the University of Bremen and research fellow at the Center for Civil Society Research. Until April 2023 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center and involved in a research project on protest and political radicalization in Germany, after receiving her doctorate from the European University Institute in 2020. Her research focuses on protest movements, political engagement, party competition, political communication, and applied quantitative methods, particularly quantitative text analysis and automated event extraction. Currently, her largest methodological undertaking is the automatization of Protest Event Analysis with cutting-edge methods in order to facilitate research on how protest shapes and affects modern societies. She is furthermore interested in developing new methods to measure positions, polarization, and resonance in political communication and public debate. 16/07 Automatic protest event analysis
Melissa Panlasigui
Melissa Panlasigui ist seit Februar 2024 wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin der Forschungsprofessur „Arbeit, Familie und soziale Ungleichheit“. Im Rahmen ihrer Promotionsarbeit beschäftigt sie sich mit dem Thema der Gleichstellung von Frauen und Männern in Orchestern. Sie ist auch als Dirigentin tätig und war Bundeskanzlerstipendiatin der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.
David Meiering
David Meiering is a PhD candidate at the chair for German Politics and the Chair of Integration Research and Social Policy at Humboldt University Berlin. His dissertation project focuses on how political narratives contribute to the construction of anti-pluralist alliances between seemingly disparate groups. He is also interested in understanding radicalization processes, mobilization of groups and movements, and especially the normalization of the far right. Therefore, he combines in-depth qualitative methods with quantitative text analysis.Jing Zhou
Jing Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate at Wuhan University and is now a visiting student in archival studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include multimodal archives, digital humanities, natural language processing, etc. She is working on her dissertation on scientists’ archives and digital storytelling.
Ilaria Vitulano
Ilaria Vitulano is a Doctoral Researcher in the group “Platform Algorithms and Digital Propaganda” at Weizenbaum Institute. Her current research interests include how state-controlled narratives enter the media and reach the public through social media algorithmic curation mechanisms.
Jannis Hertel
Jannis Hertel is a Research Fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center WZB. In the project “Access to Justice in Berlin” he is currently using quantitative data analysis to investigate the influence of social inequality factors on civil court proceedings at Berlin courts.
Kaylee Matheny
Kaylee Matheny is an incoming Assistant Professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. She uses mixed methods to examine socioeconomic inequality in education through three strands of work: evaluating equitable policies and practices, understanding people’s educational experiences as classed, and analyzing how socioeconomic status intersections with other social identities. She holds a BA from Emory University as well as an MA and a PhD from Stanford University, and she was most recently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins' Poverty and Inequality Research Lab. She loves all things books, board games, and puzzles.
Paula Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik
Paula Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik is a postdoctoral researcher at the Universty of Cologne. She obtained her PhD from the University of Geneva in 2023, and has held visiting positions at the European University Institute and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Her research interests include migration policies and politics in Europe, the links between trade and migration policy and the politics of the European Union.Boris Nurdinov
Boris Nurdinov is MA student in the University of Siegen. His research and professional interests are democratisation, digital media, and citizens' attitudes and behaviour. Before starting his MA degree in Siegen, he worked in non-profit and research projects on civic education, foreign media influence and youth engagement.
Xiaojuan Grace Yang
PhD candidate in international relations, doing research on global cyber governance.Bologna
All Participants
Francesco Niccolò Moro
Francesco Niccolò Moro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna and Adjunct Professor of International Relations at the Johns Hopkins University-SAIS Europe. His research focuses on collective violence, with particular reference to the strategies and organizational features of armed groups (and organized crime), on the relationship between violence and governance, and on national security policies. Francesco is Head of Department and a member of Academic Senate and of the UNIBO Learning and Teaching Center.
Giampiero Giacomello
Giampiero Giacomello is Associate Professor of Political Science. His research interests include strategic theory (mostly Clausewitz), cybersecurity and wargaming and simulation. He has extensively published on all of these topics.
Marco Albertini
Marco Albertini is Full Professor at the University of Bologna. His research interests focus on intergenerational relations; the consequences of separation and divorce; the comparative study of income inequality and social stratification; the consequences of childlessness; long-term care policies and ageing.
Chiara Binelli
Chiara Binelli received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University College London. She is Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna and Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Research and Social Progress (cersp.org). Her early research focused on returns to schooling, quality of education, informal labor markets, social inequality, employment and earnings’ expectations. More recently, she has been working on using data science to address policy-relevant questions such as climate change. She has published in several international journals such as the Review of Economic Dynamics, Social Indicators Research, Economics of Education Review, and World Development.
Matthew Loveless
Matthew Loveless is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He investigates how individuals make sense of politics in Europe, focusing on public opinion, media use, and perceptions.
Paride Carrara
PhD student enrolled in the 36th cycle of the course in Political and Social Science. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of ideological ambiguity. Among his interests, there are intra-party politics and text analysis.
Simon Luck
Simon is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Bologna. His research interests are political representation, democratic institutions, and media effects. He specialized in Computational Social Science, with a particular focus on NLP.
Aidar Zinnatullin
Aidar Zinnatullin is a PhD student in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He studies how political discussions evolve in the context of authoritarian politics. In the research project, Aidar uses quantitative text analysis techniques and causal inference identification strategies.
Franziska Pradel-Sınacı
Franziska Pradel-Sınacı works as a post-doctoral researcher at the Chair of Digital Governance at the HfP/TU Munich. Prior to this position, she worked as a doctoral researcher at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics at the University of Cologne (2018-2021). She wrote her thesis in political science on Biased political information in search engines and their effects. Her research interests include online political communication, especially investigating biases on online platforms and their effects on political attitudes, computational social science, and experiments.
Laura Sartori
Laura Sartori is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento (2002) and, ever since, has worked on several topics related to the social and political implications of technology, from ICTs to AI. Current projects are about 1. Bias, inequalities and the social implications of AI, 2. Public perception of Artificial Intelligence, 2. the medical practice and the introduction of Automated Decision-making systems (ADMs), 3. Digital and sustainable lifestyle and novel forms of urban economy.
Fabio Giglietto
Fabio Giglietto is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences, Humanities, and International Studies at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo. His research focuses on the interplay between digital media and societal transformations, particularly on how digital platforms influence public opinion and democratic processes. He is a prominent figure in the field of Internet Studies, known for his innovative use of advanced methodologies to study political communication on social media platforms.
Étienne Ollion
Étienne is Research Director at CNRS. He is also Professor of Sociology at l’École Polytechnique. His research focuses on contemporary politics (parliament, state, media). He integrates classic data sources and methods with digital approaches. Method-wise, his current work focuses on what can social sciences do with, and also for, Artificial Intelligence.
Rubing Shen
Rubing Shen is a PhD Candidate in Sociology jointly at Sciences Po (Médialab) and at l’Institut polytechnique de Paris. His research focuses on the transformations of political journalism in France and in particular on the changes in the narrative framing of political news, leveraging both quantitative and computational methods
Alessandra Casarico
Alessandra is an Associate Professor of Public Economics at Bocconi University and a member of the Dondena Research Center on Social Dynamics and Public Policy, where she coordinates the newly established Social Inclusion Lab (SILab). Her research relies on a mix of applied theory and empirical methods to explore policy-relevant issues. She uses administrative data to document the extent and explore drivers of gender inequality along the distribution, with a particular focus on the top and on the role of firms. Moreover, she studies the under-representation of women in elite occupations, focusing on politics and academia. To study the sources of inequality in the economics profession, she uses text as data and natural language processing tools to uncover sources of bias.
Milena Tsvetkova
Milena Tsvetkova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University in 2015. Prior to joining LSE in 2017, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Milena’s research interests lie in the fields of computational and experimental social science. She employs online experiments, network analysis, and agent-based models to study fundamental social phenomena such as cooperation, contagion, and inequality. Her current work investigates the structural conditions under which inequality emerges and worsens when individuals interact in large social groups. In collaboration with computer scientists, physicists, organizational scientists, and game developers, she is working on incorporating gamification to develop new methods for large-scale social interaction experiments online.
Oltion Preka
Oltion Preka is a researcher and an adjunct professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. Through his course ‘Big Data for the Social Sciences’ he has involved many students of political sciences in learning how to leverage Python programming skills in their studies. He also has a long experience as a data scientist covering a broad range of areas (from data wrangling to machine learning, to natural language processing). His main interests concern the application of Deep Learning techniques, especially NLP, to make sense of text data in the social sciences.
Tommaso Venturini
Tommaso is researcher at the CNRS Centre for Internet and Society, associate professor at the Medi@lab of the University of Geneva, and founder of the Public Data Lab. In 2017 and 2018, Tommaso has been researcher at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon and recipient of the “Advanced Research” fellowship of the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation. In 2016, he has been “digital methods lecturer” at the Department of Digital Humanities of King's College London. From 2009 to 2015, he has coordinated the research activities of the médialab of Sciences Po Paris.
Marlene Hecht
Marlene is a PhD student in Psychology at the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Her research interests mainly lie at the intersection of social decision-making, information search, and digital media. Currently, she investigates the cognitive processes by which people form social judgments.
Francesco Mattioli
Francesco is a PhD student in Social and Political Science at Bocconi University in Milan, where he previously obtained an MSc in Economic and Social Sciences. His research interests lie at the intersection of political economy and cultural economics. His doctoral research focuses on measuring novel dimensions of political selection through computational methods, and identifying their economic and political consequences in the context of macro-demographic changes using causal inference methods.
Anna George
Anna George is a Social Data Science PhD student at the University of Oxford who uses computational approaches to study online harms. Her research focuses on the message transmission of harmful online communities. Before joining the doctoral program at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), Anna graduated with distinction from the OII’s MSc in Social Data Science. Anna holds an M.S. in Industrial/Organizational-Social Psychology and a B.S. in Psychology, Second Major in Sociology, and minor in Statistics.
Márton Végh
Márton Végh is a PhD student at Bocconi University's Department of Social and Political Sciences, interested in the nexus of political economy and political behavior. His research examines the political drivers and effects of global economic flows. Before starting his PhD, he worked at the European Central Bank and earned an MA from the Central European University.
Rebecca Langella
Rebecca is PhD is a Medical Research Council-funded PhD candidate based at the Great Ormond Street Institute for Child Health, currently working on large administrative datasets to explore inequalities in healthcare and social care provision in the UK. Her interest lies in disenfranchised and under-reported population, with a particular focus on unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASCs).
Paul Drecker
Paul Drecker is a research assistant and doctoral student at the University of Münster. In his research, he uses methods of computational social science (network analyses, NLP) to study the polarisation of the climate policy debate
Elisabeth Höldrich
Elisabeth Höldrich is a doctoral student at the University of Graz. With a background in theoretical and computational physics, her current research in computational social science examines the spread of conspiracy theories in online environments. Through the application of Natural Language Processing and topic modeling Elisabeth hopes to measure different characteristics of conspiracy narratives and identify which of these characteristics contribute to the popularity of a narrative.
Maria Zuffova
Mária Žuffová is a Research Fellow at the European University Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her research interests include media freedom, politics of transparency, and gender representation and stereotypes. Her work has been published in journals such as the EPSR and IJPP.
Gaetano Scaduto
I am a PhD Student at the University of Milan-Bicocca, currently in visiting with the Media Movement and Politics group at the University of Antwerp. I do research in the fields of political communication, political psychology, and related. In my research I use both experimental and computational methods.
Lorenzo Mattioli
Lorenzo Mattioli has a background in Economics, and is now a Master student in Politics and Social Policy at the University of Bologna.
Stefano Sangiovanni
Stefano Sangiovanni is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Studies at the University of Milan. His research interests include political crises and scandals, intra-party politics, leadership, computational methods, and quantitative text analysis. He holds a BA in Sociology and an MA in Administration and Public Policy.
Giuseppe Corbelli
Giuseppe Corbelli is a postdoctoral researcher at Sapienza University of Rome, and he is collaborating with Uninettuno University on several research projects. His research focuses on quantitative methods applied to the understanding of moral self-regulation and behavior. He is interested in the interplay between personality, cognitive dimensions, and manipulated information on social media.
Faye-Marie Vassel
Faye-Marie Vassel is a STEM Equity and Inclusion Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University. Her research focuses on racial-ethnic and gender inequities in undergraduate STEM pathways, using mixed-methods to explore how marginalized students navigate STEM culture. She examines how students perceive the norms of Computational Sciences (CS) and how these perceptions influence their CS identity development and decision-making. Her work aims to enhance understanding of the social and political factors shaping equitable educational experiences for underrepresented students in CS.
Lovisa Mundschenk
Lovisa is a PhD student at the University of Zurich at the Chair of Comparative Politics and Democratic Representation. In her research she focuses on political behaviour, climate change and democratic attitudes using quantitative methods. She holds degrees in political science and sustainability sciences from University of Mannheim and Leuphana University.
Pietro Michael Lepidi
Pietro Michael Lepidi is a PhD Candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He has broad interests in computational methods and studies of political representation in post-industrial democracies. His dissertation concerns electoral competition in Europe and its relationship with 'risk', both economic and environmental. Pietro earned a BA from LUISS University and an MPhil in European Politics and Society from the University of Oxford.Calabar
All Participants
Inyang, Juliet John
Inyang, Juliet is a co-founder of Academic Hive and an academic staff at the Department of Marketing, University of Calabar. Her research interest is in the areas of consumer culture, service innovation, process improvement, higher education, digital transformations and sustainable development. Specifically, she is interested in combining computational, quantitative and qualitative methods to unravel key insights about human behaviour in society. Juliet participated in the 2022 SICSS-Paris location.
Grace Ihejiamaizu Paul-Anietie
Grace Ihejiamaizu is a co-founder of Academic Hive and an academic staff (Lecturer II) at UNICAL. She is currently undertaking her PhD in North America. Her research interest is in improving the lives of women social entrepreneurs in Nigeria through employability, entrepreneurship and digital skills.
Inyang, John Okiri
John is a postgraduate student and early-career researcher with a keen interest in health economics, development economics, public sector economics and sustainable development research.
Otobi, Augustine Ogbaji
Augustine is an avid researcher who loves to use computational tools to investigate the WHY, WHEN, WHERE and HOW of events, patterns and systems represented by numbers and other data structures. He is a PhD student in the department of Computer Science, and he specialize in Data Science/Artificial Intelligence. His research interests encompass a broad spectrum, including climate-related issues, fraud and risk prediction, expert systems, and distributed databases. Augustine actively contributes to advancing these fields, aiming to enhance understanding and application through rigorous exploration and education as a university lecturer. Augustine participated in the 2022 SICSS-Covenant location, further enriching his expertise and collaborative network in computational social science.
Professor Bassey Igri Okon
Bassey Igri Okon is a Professor of Animal Science (specialization- Animal Production) and currently the Director of Research and Development at the University of Calabar. Bassey takes pleasure in guiding and facilitating trainings and group activities of young academics and researchers at the University of Calabar.
Professor Enang Udah
Enang Udah is a Professor of Economics with expertise in Econometrics, Macro Economics and Development Economics. He is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and has served as a consultant to various local and international organizations including Cross River State government, EU-SRIP, NEWMAP, Tuning Africa project sponsored by the European Union in collaboration with the African Union.
 Grace Etuk.jpg)
Professor (Mrs.) Grace Etuk
Grace Etuk is a Professor of Sociology and social works with an interest in women productivity and technological empowerment. She is currently the Head of the Department of Social Works and has served as a resource person to several professional and governmental bodies including the Nigerian Naval War College and the Niger Delta Development Commission.
Elijah Appiah
Elijah Appiah is an Economist and Data Scientist who loves using data to solve economic problems. With expertise in econometric modeling and data science, he has trained numerous students worldwide in the field of data science. Elijah is proficient in various data science tools, including but not limited to Python, R, SQL, Tableau, and TensorFlow, enabling him to employ advanced data analytics and machine learning techniques. He is currently a Ph.D. Economics student at the National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA) in Bangkok, Thailand. Elijah has authored books, namely, “Data Analysis with R Programming” and “Simplified Mathematical Economics”.
Joseph David
Joseph David is Research and Teaching Assistant at Lagos Business School, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos. He is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR), Nigeria. Joseph’s research interest revolves around development economics, public finance, corruption, energy economics, and the economics of crime (with a bias in money laundering). His current research focuses on determining the quantum, flows, and laundering of illicit funds associated with criminal and illegal activities such as grant corrupt practices, kidnapping, terrorism, and tax evasion, amongst others, in Nigeria, Africa, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Joseph participated in the 2022 SICSS-Covenant.
Dr. Isaac Bassey
Dr Isaac Bassey is a lecturer at the Cross River State College of Health Technology, Calabar. He holds a PhD in Computer Science (Software Engineering) with a bias in AI. Dr Isaac has over a decade of experience in the training of midlevel health professionals in computer programming and the use of computer applications such as SPSS, database management systems, etc. His research interests include Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Neural Networks and Software Development. He is a recipient of several scholarship awards including National Mathematics Center Scholarship, Chevron/NNPC Joint Venture Scholarship and Australia Awards Scholarship.
John Adoga Oghlewu
John Adoga is an academic staff in the Department of Statistics at the University of Calabar. His research interests span through the areas of computational statistics, epidemiological modeling, and machine learning. Leveraging his expertise in mathematical, computational, and machine learning techniques, John is committed to generating data-driven insights and solutions to address complex epidemiological issues and public health challenges.
Liwhuliwhe, James Unimke (In-person Participant)
Unimke is an early-career researcher and an academic staff of the Department of Economics, University of Calabar. He is passionate about tech and its various applications to human life, especially academic research. Hence, he is very much data driven. Professionally, he is keen on both primary research and secondary research tools as means of inferring valuable relationships within data in environmental and health economics, public sector economics, and development economics. He is a member of the Nigerian Economic Society (NES) and also a Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) scholar.
Ireti Taiwo Olupo (In-person Participant)
Ireti Taiwo Olupo is an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Statistics, Yaba College of Technology. She is also a research (Ph.D.) student at the University of Lagos. Her research interest is in the area of statistical methods, data analysis and data science.
Oba preye Inimiesi (In-person Participant)
Oba Preye Inimiesi is an academic staff member in the Department of Public Administration at the University of Africa, Toru-Orua, and equally a PhD student in Federal University Otuoke, all in Bayesa State. My research focuses on Criminal Sociology, using computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods to explore and uncover key insights into human criminal behavior in society.
Dr. Esiobu Nnaemeka Success (In-person Participant)
Dr. Nnaemeka is a seasoned expert in agricultural and climate change economics with over 7 years of field experience focusing on sustainable agriculture, climate change modeling, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission measurement, mitigation, and reduction in agrifood systems. He holds a PhD degree (distinction) in Agricultural Economics from Imo State University, Owerri, and he is a Post-Doc Scholar with IRRI.
Olufemi Adebola Popoola (In-person Participant)
Olufemi Adebola Popoola is a Development expert with specialization in agricultural and applied economics. He is focused on analyzing policies and institutions affecting innovation, productivity growth, and transformation of agrifood systems. He has participated in several large-scale household and firm-level surveys.
Ibe Anthony Ekene (In-person Participant)
Anthony is a lecturer at the Department of Physics, British Canadian University, Obudu, Cross River State. He loves the use of computer and also delights in learning new tools that aid research. He is also a Ph.D. student at the University of Calabar, studying Groundwater Geophysics in the Department of Physics.
Dr. Adeyemo Oyindamola Olajumoke (In-person Participant)
Dr. Oyindamola Adeyemo is an economist and faculty lecturer at Hensard University, Bayelsa State. She holds a Doctorate in International Economics and has experience as an academic researcher and reviewer. She is dedicated to mentoring future economists, combining her academic rigour with practical industry expertise.
Onche, Emmanuel Philip (In-person Participant)
ONCHE, EMMANUEL PHILIP is the CEO of Chief Lantis Ltd. A medical laboratory scientist and a data analyst who enjoys using data to draw conclusions and arrive at data driven decisions. He is a researcher and has a master's degree in medical laboratory science. He is a senior medical laboratory scientist at federal neuro psychiatric hospital and has a strong passion for computational biology and bioinformatics.
Dr. Gloria Bassey Igri Okon (In-person Participant)
Gloria Bassey Igri Okon is an Associate Professor of Culture and Civilization. She is a seasoned researcher and has facilitated trainings for academics and non-academics. Her current area of research is in the teaching of French for specific purposes (employability). She speaks English, French and Efik.
Margaret Onwanyi Onoyom (In-person Participant)
Margaret Onwanyi Onoyom is an Assistant Lecturer and a PHD student in the Department of Economics, University of Calabar, Nigeria. Her research interest includes Demography and Population studies, Health Economics, Microeconomics and Development Economics.
Inyali Moses Inyokwe (In-person Participant)
Inyali Moses is a Senior System Analyst with the University of Calabar where he currently utilizes basic and advanced analysis and design techniques to solve real-life problems using information technology. Moses is proficient in Data Analysis, Infodemics Management, Surveillance Systems, Project Management, Artificial Intelligence Essentials and Human Resources. He holds a passionate interest in Data Science, Computational Social Science, System Security and Artificial intelligence.
Engr. Oliver Ibor Inah, PhD (In-person Participant)
Engr. Oliver Ibor Inah, PhD is a full-time academic at the University of Cross River State, Department of Mechanical Engineering. Where I teach a verity of Mechanical Engineering courses at both Undergraduate and Prostgraduate, and provide research supervision in the areas of manufacturing systems design improvement, industrial emissions pattern and improvement potential. Dr. Inah is a diligent researcher, with both qualitative, quantitative and anlytics skills, with over 11 publications in reputable internationalpeer reviewed journals. His research interest focuses on the development of accurate, dynamic models for energy consumption and emissions peak projections, which aligns with SDG goal 13.
Eworo, Raymond E. (In-person Participant)
Raymond Eworo is an academic staff in the Department of Chemical Pathology, University of Calabar with over 14 years of experience in Research. Raymond is interested in the application of data science tools such as R, Bioconductor, machine learning, python, Tiny ML in the analysis, manipulation of high throughput genomic data and to complement multi-omics approaches in understanding pathological molecular maps in cancer and other human diseases.
Etim-James, Grace Victor (In-person Participant)
Grace Etim-James is a Master's degree holder in Media Studies from University of Calabar with a strong desire and plans to pursue a PhD in the nearest future. She is a novelist and a researcher with several published research papers on Institutional journals. She has a keen interest in gender equality, journalism and social media. Currently, she works as a secondary school teacher.
Priscilla Chidinma Ogbonna (In-person Participant)
Rev. Sister Chidinma is a Catholic Nun, a Public Health Professional, a teen mentor/girl-child advocate, and a PhD student in Environmental Health and Safety, Federal University of Technology, Owerri Imo State. She is a lecturer at the University of Africa Toru-Orua, Bayelsa State, and equally serves at the counseling unit of the student affairs division of the University. She has since distinguished herself in teaching, research, and mentorship. She has researched different aspects of Public/Environmental Health but has special interest in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH), and Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs).
Participant 2024 (Virtual Participant)
Profile...
Uduakobong Otu
Uduakobong Otu is a post graduate student in the university of Calabar studying marketing and his area of specialization is logistics and supply chain management. His research interests include research methodology, green packaging, inbound and outbound logistics among others. Uduakobong Otu is a quantitative data consultant for academic hive. As a free lance researcher and data analyst Uduakobong Otu has so much wealth of experience in research and quantitative data analysis.
Odo George Obase
George is an enthusiastic and detail-oriented computer science undergraduate at the University of Calabar, with a strong passion for programming and data-driven solutions. His technical skills span a variety of programming languages and frameworks, including Python, R, JavaScript, Node.js, React, HTML, and CSS, which he has honed through several academic and personal projects. Gearge has been able to gather a lot of wealth of experience as an intern at Zoe-Sprout Technologies International, one of his notable projects includes development of a dynamic and user-friendly website for a consultancy firm in the United Kingdom and the development of a classical machine learning model. These projects and many others have improved his coding skills and system design principles in creating interactive platforms that meet both client and user needs. He is particularly drawn to the power of data science, and he enjoys exploring how data can be leveraged to drive innovation and solve complex problems. As he continues to grow in the field of computer science, he is eager to apply his skills in real-world projects, where he can share his knowledge with others while continuing to learn and improve. He believes in the importance of collaboration and he is always ready to contribute to a team effort.
Chicago
All Participants
Binglu Wang
Binglu Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in Management & Organizations (MORS) at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, with affiliations at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). Her scholarly inquiry centers on Innovation & Science, Cross-Cultural Evaluation, and Social Networks. Employing computational methodologies alongside field experiments, her current research endeavors aim to understand how social learning mechanisms—such as observation, feedback, cooperation, and cultural transmission—facilitate or obstruct the processes of innovation incubation and evaluation within the realms of Science, Culture, and Entrepreneurship, drawing on large-scale archival and experimental data. She received her bachelor's degree in Information Management and Information Systems from Peking University in 2019. Binglu is also a 2021 SICSS alum.
Ji Hae Choi
Ji Hae Choi is a Ph.D. student in Management & Organizations (MORS) at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, with affiliations at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO).
Yingdan Lu
Yingdan Lu (PhD, Stanford University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on digital technology, political communication, and information manipulation in authoritarian and democratic contexts. Her research employs both computational and qualitative methods to understand how authoritarian governments use digital media and artificial intelligence to maintain their rule, and how individuals experience visual media in different media environments. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Political Communication, New Media & Society, Human-Computer Interaction, Computational Communication Research, and among other peer-reviewed journals. For more information, see her website: https://yingdanlu.com/.
Hancheng Cao
Hancheng Cao is an incoming assistant professor at Emory University Goizueta Business School Information Systems & Operations Management Department. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft's Office of Applied Research. Hancheng works in the field of computational social science and human computer interaction, where he mines large-scale data, develops algorithms and builds systems to study the implications of technology on the future of work. His work has been recognized by three Best Paper (CHI 2023) or Honorable Mention (CSCW 2020, CHI 2021) awards at top venues. His work has been featured in the popular press including The New York Times, Wired, Forbes, New Scientist, TED. Hancheng obtained his Ph.D. in computer science (with a PhD minor in management science and engineering) from Stanford University, and his bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University.
Damon Centola
Damon Centola is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Engineering and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. His research centers on social networks and behavior change. Damon’s work has received numerous awards including the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Sociological Methodology in 2011; the James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society in 2017; and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book in 2019. He was a developer of the NetLogo agent based modeling environment, and was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a member of the Sci Foo community and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Facebook, the National Institutes of Health, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American and CNN, among other outlets. His speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cigna, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Heart Association, General Motors, the National Academies, the U.S. Army and the NBA. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press, and the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (Princeton, 2018), and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (Little Brown, 2021).
Solène Delecourt
Solène Delecourt is an assistant professor in the Management of Organizations Group at the Haas School of Business. She earned her PhD at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She also holds a master’s degree in Economics and Public Policy from Sciences Po Paris and École Polytechnique. Delecourt studies inequality in business performance using large-scale field experiments and novel survey data. Her research agenda focuses on what drives variation in profits across firms and how we could reduce inequality in business performance among entrepreneurs in different market settings, including India, Uganda, and the US.
Matt Groh
Matt Groh is a Donald P. Jacobs Scholar and Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations. His research examines the dynamics of human-AI collaboration in deepfake detection, medical diagnosis, and empathic communication. Professor Groh's research has been published in Proceedings on National Academy of Science (PNAS), Nature Medicine, Science, Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), Affective Computing and Intelligence Interactions (ACII), and Communications of the ACM among other journals and conferences. His work has been featured in the popular press including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Science, Scientific American, NPR, Le Monde, Aeon, and Fast Company. Professor Groh received his BA from Middlebury College with a major in economics and minors in mathematics and Arabic and received his MA and PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.
Manling Li
Manling Li is an assistant professor at the Computer Science department of Northwestern University and a postdoc at Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At the core of her research in Knowledge Foundation Models, she aims to equip machines with factual knowledge extraction and reasoning from multimodal data (Language + X, where X can be images, videos, robotics, audio, etc). The ultimate goal of her research is to promote factuality and truthfulness in information access, through a structured knowledge view that is easily explainable, highly compositional, and capable of long-horizon reasoning. Her work on multimodal knowledge extraction won the ACL'20 Best Demo Paper Award, and the work on scientific information extraction from COVID literature won NAACL'21 Best Demo Paper Award. She was a recipient of Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship in 2021. She was selected as a DARPA Riser in 2022 (nominated by DARPA), and an EE CS Rising Star in 2022. She was awarded C.L. Dave and Jane W.S. Liu Award, and has been selected as a Mavis Future Faculty Fellow.
Sameer Srivastava
Sameer B. Srivastava is the Ewald T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and is also affiliated with UC Berkeley Sociology. His research uses computational methods to: (1) unpack the complex interrelationships between group culture, individual cognition, and interpersonal networks; and (2) examine how they jointly relate to individual attainment and organizational performance. He is Organizations Department Editor at Management Science and was previously a Senior Editor at Organization Science. Sameer co-directs the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation and the Berkeley-Stanford Computational Culture Lab. Sameer was previously a partner at a global management consultancy (Monitor Group; now Monitor Deloitte). He holds AB, AM, MBA, and PhD degrees from Harvard University.
William Thompson
Will Thompson received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Northwestern University in 2009, and has worked in both academia and industry as a data scientist specializing in computational linguistics. During 12 years at Motorola Labs, he developed software and algorithms for conversational dialog systems. He subsequently joined the Feinberg School of Medicine as a principle investigator and key contributor on several NIH grants for extracting information from clinical notes contained in large scale electronic medical record systems. He currently serves as Lead Computational Research Consultant for the Kellogg School of Management, guiding a team of computational specialists in support of faculty and graduate student research. Dr. Thompson has followed recent developments in large language models with great interest and has experience using them for multiple research projects at Kellogg.
Brian Uzzi
Brian Uzzi is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He also co-directs the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), and holds professorships in Sociology and the McCormick School of Engineering. He has been on or visited the faculties of INSEAD, Chicago, Harvard, and Berkeley. His work has received 17 teaching prizes and 15 scientific research prizes worldwide in the social, physical, and computer sciences. His research uses social network science and computational methods to explain outstanding human achievement.
Rob Voigt
Rob Voigt is an assistant professor of linguistics and computer science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University, where he directs the Linguistic Mechanisms Lab. He is interested in natural language processing, social meaning, sociophonetics and interactional variation, Chinese and Japanese linguistics, gesture and embodiment, and applications of linguistic research to social good. He is particularly interested in using computational methods to understand the linguistic mechanisms of social problems. Professor Voigt received his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford in 2019, where he was a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science in 2020.
Dashun Wang
Dashun Wang is a Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. At Kellogg, he is the Founding Co-Director of the Ryan Institute on Complexity and the Founding Director of the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI). He is also a core faculty at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). His current research focus is on Science of Science, a quest to turn the scientific methods and curiosities upon ourselves, hoping to use and develop tools from complexity sciences and artificial intelligence to broadly explore the opportunities for innovation and promises of prosperity offered by the recent data explosion in science. Dashun is a recipient of multiple awards for his research and teaching, including the AFOSR Young Investigator award, Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors, Complex Systems Society’s Junior Scientific Award, the Erdos-Renyi Prize, Thinkers50 Radar, and more.
Nandini Banerjee
Nandini Banerjee is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Notre Dame. With a keen interest in the intersection of technology and human behavior, Nandini's research focuses on studying disruption in citation networks to understand how scientific knowledge evolves and how innovation is fostered within academic communities. Her work aims to unravel the complexities of scientific collaboration, particularly by understanding the characteristics and dynamics of scientific teams. Beyond her academic pursuits, Nandini likes to dabble in art in different mediums.
Mitali Banerjee
Mitali Banerjee is an Assistant Professor in the Strategy & Organizations department at the McGill Desautels Faculty of Management. Her research uses tools from computer vision, natural language processing and social network analysis in unique empirical contexts such as modern and jazz to examine the valuation of creative production. Her work has been published in the Academy of Management Journal and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She completed her Ph.D. in Management from Columbia University. She graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in Mathematics (BS) and Economics (BA) from the University of Rochester.
Pietro Bonaccorsi
Pietro Bonaccorsi is a PhD candidate in Strategic Management at the University of Toronto - Rotman School of Management. His research interests revolve around the social underpinnings of creativity and innovation – with a particular attention to the generation and evaluation of novelty in creative industries, and the intersection of networks and culture. Pietro holds undergraduate and Masters' degrees in Economics from the University of Pisa and the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies.
Christian Caballero
Christian Caballero is a Political Science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on American politics and political behavior. In particular, he studies the ways in which social networks influence processes of political persuasion and how political ideologies develop within subcultures. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology from New York University.
Liang Cai
Liang Cai is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago (expected to graduate spring 2025). His research interest centers on how human behaviors are shaped by social and physical contexts and how causally relevant contexts should be defined. His recent work has explored activity space exposures, income segregation around the clock, and spatio-temporal patterns of crime. His ongoing projects examine 1. the spatial decision-making process and its social context in activity space, 2. how mobility patterns factor into individuals' rural/urban living experiences, and 3. how social scientists can leverage computer vision AI to decipher local social ecology from street view images. My work integrates perspectives from urban sociology, decision science, geography, criminology, data science, and more.
Likun Cao
Hi! I am Likun, a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of Chicago. I am a member of Knowledge Lab, advised by Professor James Evans. My current work focuses on science & technology innovation and its social impacts. I am curious about the social and organizational conditions by which new things emerge and evolve, and how innovations influence business competition and social structures.
Lautaro Cella
Lautaro Cella is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago, specializing in comparative politics and quantitative methods. His research interests include comparative political behavior, redistributive politics, and democratic erosion, with a regional focus on Latin America. His dissertation examines the determinants of anti-establishment attitudes and protest behavior among voters. His research employs survey experiments, semi-structured interviews, and text-as-data methods.
Rochana Chaturvedi
I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Natural Language Processing Lab, University of Illinois Chicago. My research focuses on understanding the latent patterns in evolving textual narratives with applications such as modeling individual health trajectories using clinical notes from multiple patient visits. I combine these notes with structured data and medical knowledge graphs for precise modeling. I also examine temporal trends in polarization based on the content people post online and how to reduce it to foster healthier communities.
Jinkyong Choi
Jin Choi is a Ph.D candidate at Columbia Business School. She is interested in innovation and entrepreneurship.
Ross Dahlke
Ross Dahlke is a fourth-year PhD Candidate at Stanford University in the Department of Communication where he is also a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and Data Science Scholar. He will be an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication in January 2025.
Hongbo Fang
Hongbo Fang obtains his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and will soon join the University of Chicago as a postdoctoral scholar. During his PhD, he studies networks of open-source software developers and explores innovation and sustained participation in open-source context. He is also broadly interested in the general topics of computational social science, science of science and innovation.
Brandon Freiberg
I'm a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. My work lies at the intersection of behavioral strategy, entrepreneurship and innovation. For example, my research has investigated the relationships between founder personality traits and startup success, social movements and venture investor behavior, political polarization and startup hiring, and natural disasters and support for green technologies. I often use a combination of computational and econometric approaches in my research, but have also conducted experiments and am open to whatever methodology best suits the research question or phenomenon. I'm also excited by complexity and collective information processing.
David Gamba
Hi, I'm David Gamba, a second-year Ph.D. student in Information Science at the University of Michigan, working with Daniel Romero and Grant Schoenebeck. My research explores the interplay between individual choices and collective phenomena, focusing on political polarization, social preferences, and ideological bubbles. I aim to understand how personal actions influence and are influenced by group behaviors and community decision-making. Using network science perspectives and mechanism design, I analyze these complex dynamics. Additionally, I am interested in examining the limits of addressing issues such as polarization at both the individual and collective levels.
Fatima Gaw
Fatima Gaw is a Media, Technology and Society PhD student at Northwestern University University, working with Dr. Erik C. Nisbet and in the Center for Communication and Public Policy. She investigates how digital media logics, platforms, and ecosystems shape contemporary politics, with a focus on the Global South. Her research focuses on the cross-platform analyses of propaganda, disinformation, and elections on social media using computational methods and qualitative field methods. Fatima has a Master’s degree in Digital Communication and Culture from the University of Sydney, and a Bachelor’s degree in Broadcast Communication from the University of the Philippines.
Mengdi Huang
Mengdi is a third-year PhD candidate in Social Psychology at Northwestern University. Her interests lie at the intersection of self, social network, and psychological well-being. Specifically, she is curious about how group experiences can shape and be shaped by our identities and self-concepts.
Bekhzod Khoshimov
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery at UW-Madison. Incoming assistant professor at New York University Abu Dhabi. In my research, I study determinants of early-stage entrepreneurial success and factors that affect the supply of entrepreneurs in society. Before my Ph.D., I did a master’s in Economics at the University of Wisconsin and a bachelor’s in Applied Mathematics at Nanyang Technological University.
Yuhan Li
Yuhan Li is a Ph.D. student in Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on science communication and computational social science. She uses computational (including analysis of texts, visuals, and audio data) and experimental methods to study public understanding of science (e.g., climate change, scientists) and technologies (e.g., AI, social media affordances) and how people's understandings of science drive their perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors toward risks.
Zihang Lin
Zihang Lin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, with affiliations at Kellogg Center for Science of Science & Innovation (CSSI) and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). His research interests encompass computational social science, science of science, and innovation. Recently, his endeavors have been concentrated on extensive data analyses with advanced deep learning techniques, in a quest to achieve a deeper understanding of science and innovation, especially in accelerating the translational impact and bridging the gap from previous scientific knowledge to tomorrow's technological breakthroughs.
Nyx Ng
Nyx L. Ng is a Social-Personality Psychology PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary lines of research seek to uncover the mechanisms underlying (a) moral judgments and perceptions and (b) susceptibility to misinformation. Her recent works examine moral misperceptions and partisan biases in truth judgments as potential sources of political polarization in the United States. Her research primarily employs computational modeling approaches and involves conducting lab and online studies using observational and experimental methods. Nyx earned her MSc from University College London and BBM from Singapore Management University, and she is a recipient of the University of Texas at Austin’s University Graduate Continuing Fellowship.
Charlotte O'Herron
Charlotte O’Herron is a Doctoral Student in Sociology & Social Policy at Harvard University. Her research interests include labor market inequality, gender, race, and culture. Before starting her Ph.D., Charlotte received a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Katherine O'Toole
In my research, I investigate how technological affordances can facilitate creativity for both individuals and groups. My work aims to develop computational models of the processes involved in collective creativity and cultural evolution, and to examine Human-Computer Interaction in order to identify ways in which technology can be leveraged to support creativity both in individual and collaborative settings. In my work, I utilize data science, machine learning, statistical modeling, and social network analysis to explore the multifaceted dimensions of human-computer interactions and to identify ways to design technical tools and platforms that can support creative expression and collaboration, with a particular focus on music. I am particularly interested in examining the dynamics of co-creative behaviors within socio-technical systems, and my work leverages digital trace data to investigate how distributed creativity emerges as individuals extend and build on existing knowledge within a domain.
Haohan Shi
Haohan Shi is a Ph.D. student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University. At Northwestern, he collaborates in the Lab on Innovation, Networks, and Knowledge under the guidance of Dr. Agnes Horvat. He is broadly interested in the science of science, retraction, online democracy, misinformation, computational social science, and AI for social good. His work focuses on advancing online scholarly communication and promoting the democratization of science through digital science dissemination. He holds an M.A. in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in Mathematics/Computer Science and Psychology/Linguistics from Emory University.
Hui Sun
I am an assistant professor at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. My research focuses on cognitive and communicative mechanisms in strategy-making, organization design, and social network mobilization.
Jung Hyo Sun
Jung-Hyo is a doctoral student in management at INSEAD. His research focuses on the adoption and uses of technological innovations through the lenses of organization theory. He is particularly interested in understanding when and how firms use social media to achieve multiple functional goals, applying computational methods and using Twitter as an empirical context. Before pursuing his PhD, he worked in the R&D center of an automobile company, where he gained industry experiences. In addition to his academic interests, he enjoys playing European football and riding bikes.
Shinan Wang
Shinan Wang is a doctoral student in Management and Organization and Sociology at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. She is currently exploring how broad societal factors—such as social structure, networks, and culture—shape micro-level labor market practices, including organizational job design and individual careers. She is also interested in understanding how these factors contribute to workplace inequality. Currently, she is working on projects examining the influence of social trust, kinship, and nationalism on cross-country differences in labor market practices. Before graduate school, she was a research associate at Harvard Business School, studying organizational inequality. She earned an M.P.P from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Brandeis University.
Xi Wang
Xi Wang is a fourth-year Ph.D student in Sociology at Northwestern University and is currently training at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. She is broadly interested in the culture and institution of mental health, especially in a transnational context. Focusing on the post-licensure context of psychotherapy in China, she examines how social actors re-professionalize the field through various forms of expertise. Her dissertation explores the professional jurisdiction of psychoanalysis and its connection to social modernity, examining why psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy are intellectually prominent but clinically marginalized in contemporary China through psychoanalytic training programs co-taught by indigenous practitioners and Western therapists.
Tingting Zhang
Dr. Tingting Zhang is an assistant professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research within industrial relations focuses on the role of information communication technology (ICT), such as social media, in labor movements and union renewal.
Jessica Zier
Jessica (Jessi) is a PhD student in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the psychology of persuasion, (mis)information processing, and human communication behaviors in the context of digital and algorithmic systems. She holds a BSc in Cognitive Neuroscience (Minerva University) and MA in Digital Communication (Vrije Universiteit Brussel/University of Salzburg).
Yanling Zhao
Yanling Zhao is a doctoral student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at School of Communication, Northwestern University and a member of the Center for Communication & Public Policy research lab. Her research centers on political communication, public opinion, and political behavior with an emphasis on new technology and digital media. Yanling employs a range of methodological approaches in her scholarship, including computational, survey, and experimental methods. Yanling is also a 2023 SICSS alum.
Jiahui Xue
Jiahui Xue is currently a pre-doctoral fellow and a research assistant at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, with affiliation at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI). He is interested in computational social science and his research focuses on the unintended inequality of different ethnicities resulting from gender diversity promotion in cross-cultural contexts. He is expected to receive bachelor's degree in management information system from Peking University in July 2025
Yi Ming Ng
Yi Ming is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and Management & Organizations at Northwestern University. His research investigates the institutional change processes around hybrid organizations, corporations that combine profit and purpose, through cultural, valuational, and interactional perspectives. This work has received awards, including the 2024 SSSP Best Paper Award in Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation, while earlier work is published in Nature Climate Change and Parliamentary Affairs. Yi Ming is a 2021 SICSS-Helsinki alumnus.Chile
All Participants
Andrés Abeliuk
Andrés Abeliuk is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile and a researcher at the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA). His research studies the relationship between algorithms and humans in social computing systems, applying machine learning models, optimization, game theory, and online experiments to drive collective behavior toward more efficient social outcomes. In 2016, he received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Melbourne, Australia. His thesis was on the optimality and predictability of socially influenced online markets.
Pablo Beytía
Pablo Beytía is a lecturer of digital methods for social research at the Institute of Sociology of the Catholic University of Chile and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social Sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is also a research fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society (Germany) and director of the social analytics platform Monitor Social (www.monitorsocial.cl). His doctoral research focuses on how Wikipedia frames information about humans by creating biographies that establish content inequalities favoring specific social groups. Pablo’s research interests include digital discourse, open knowledge, platform power, digital social memory, and artificial intelligence for social data reporting.
Cristian Candia
Cristian Candia is a researcher in computational social science. He is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Computational Social Science Research Lab (CRISS-LAB) at the Universidad del Desarrollo in Chile, and an External Faculty member at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Cristian holds a PhD in Social Complexity Science, having conducted his doctoral research thesis at the MIT Media Lab, with additional research roles at the Center for Complex Networks Research (CCNR) at Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School, as well as at Central European University (CEU). His research integrates data science with human behavior theories to address issues like collective intelligence, school coexistence, and digital democracy. He has secured funding for key projects through ANID-FONDECYT Initiation and FONDEF grants, linking academia, public policy, and industry to promote social innovation. Cristian has also developed digital tools such as Lixandra, discolab, and Capybara, applying AI and network science to real-world challenges. His work has been published in top journals like Nature Human Behaviour.
Hernán Sarmiento
Hernán Sarmiento is a Senior Data Scientist at Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD). He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile. His interests include social network analysis using data mining, machine learning and NLP approaches applied to several topics, such as crisis informatics, polarization, and disinformation.FGV/ECMI Brazil
All Participants
Danielle Sanches
Danielle Sanches is a professor at FGV ECMI and a PhD in History of Science at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in cooperation with the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/FioCruz. She currently works on Digital Methods, focusing on the influence of the algorithm culture on social practices.
Denisson Silva
Denisson holds a PhD in Political Science (UFMG), a Master's degree in Sociology and is a Social Scientist (UFAL). He has experience in Political Science, working mainly on the following themes: political parties, party migration, electoral results, and campaign financing. Researcher at the Center for Legislative Studies (CEL/UFMG), the Citizenship and Public Policy Group (UFAL), and research fellow at EMCI-FGV.
Maria Sirleidy Cordeiro
Maria Sirleidy Cordeiro is a PhD and Master in Linguistics at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). She completed part of her PhD program in Portugal at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP). She is a professor at FGV ECMI and a member of the research group on Communication, Society and Digital Media (FGV). She works in the areas of cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis and public policy analysis, investigating processes of meaning, ideologies and power relations imbricated in text and discourse.
Paulo Fonseca
Dr. Fonseca, with a Ph.D. in Sociology focusing on the Social Impacts of Science and Technology, began his academic career with a Bachelor's in Physics, laying the groundwork for his interdisciplinary approach. He is an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), within the Institute of Science, Technology, and Innovation (ICTI), and a member of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Culture and Society. His experience includes a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program at Harvard University and a current role as a Visiting Professor at the School of Communication, Media, and Information of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (ECMI/FGV). His work intersects critical analysis of technological innovation with interdisciplinary research methodologies.
Polyana Barbosa
Polyana Barboza is a professor working with data extraction and analysis on social networks at FGV ECMI. She has a major in Applied Mathematics at the School of Applied Mathematics of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV EMAp) and is a Master in Computer Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Her main lines of research are Social Network Analysis in Digital Media and Multi-agent Systems in Software Engineering.
Elias Bitencourt
Elias Bitencourt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design at Universidade do Estado da Bahia (UNEB). He holds a Ph.D. in Communication from FACOM/UFBA and a Master's in Culture and Society from IHAC/UFBA. He was a visiting researcher at the Milieux Center (Concordia University, Canada, 2019) and currently leads the Datalab/Design at UNEB: a center for research and development in data visualization and digital methodologies. His research focuses on data visualization, algorithmic mediation in daily social life, platform studies, digital practices, and imagination. He also collaborates with the Inova Media Lab (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and the international Public Data Lab research network.
Eurico Mattos
Eurico Matos is a PhD and Master in Contemporary Communication and Culture at the Bahia Federal University. He coordinates the Digital Communication undergraduate course at FGV ECMI and is a researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology in Digital Democracy (INCT.DD). He carries out research on topics such as digital government, political communication, online hate speech and mobile app studies.
Jess Reia
Jess Reia is an Assistant Professor of Data Science at the University of Virginia, a 2024 Visiting Scholar at Fudan University and a 2024-2025 Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C. Before joining UVA, they were appointed Mellon Postdoctoral Researcher at McGill University and BMO Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal in Canada. Reia held a two-year mandate as a member of MTL 24/24's first Night Council in Montreal, providing guidance on data collection and open data practices for the night-time economy ecosystem. From 2011 to 2019, Reia worked at the Center for Technology & Society at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, leading projects on access to knowledge, privacy and smart cities in Latin America and BRICS. They work primarily on data justice, urban governance, and technology policy transnationally.
Leandro Becker
Leandro Becker is a journalist with 20 years of experience in reporting, editing, and managing teams and projects in print journalism, radio, TV, communication consultancy, and digital journalism. He has worked in major national newsrooms, including Zero Hora, NSC TV (a Globo Network affiliate), and Globo Rural, covering areas such as politics, economy, agribusiness, international affairs, and sports. Currently, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Journalism at Lupa.
Leonardo Nascimento
Leonardo F. Nascimento is a professor at the Federal University of Bahia. As the Digital Humanities Laboratory (LABHDUFBA) coordinator, he has contributed to research in digital sociology, digital humanities, and computational social science. He is the author of the book “Sociologia Digital: uma breve introdução - EDUFBA – 2020”. In his current research, he is collaborating with InternetLab, UFSC, and AI for Society on a project investigating the intersection of instant messengers and political violence and utilizing a combination of natural language processing (NLP) techniques and mixed qualitative approaches, including discourse analysis and online ethnography.
Lucas Roberto
Lucas Roberto da Silva is a professor and researcher at the School of Communication, Media and Information at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV ECMI), where he works on data extraction and analysis of social networks. He has a major in Mathematics at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) and is a Master in Computer Science at the Department of Informatics in PUC-Rio. His main lines of research are Analysis of Social Networks and Natural Language Processing.
Mateus Pestana
Matheus Pestana is a professor at the School of Communication, Media, and Information at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV ECMI), a researcher at the Institute for Religious Studies (ISER), and a member of the New Illegalisms research group (GENI/UFF). He is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), where he also earned his Master's degree in the same field. His current research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and politics/public opinion. He has interests in computer vision, large language models (LLMs), speech recognition, and image detection/segmentation.
Alcindor Antonio Diniz de Oliveira
Toni Oliveira is a professor of 'Electronics for the Arts' at CECULT, affiliated with UFRB. He is an experienced musician and a research artist focused on new open-source digital technologies and computer programming contextualized in artistic environments. He holds an Interdisciplinary Bachelor's degree in Humanities with a Concentration Area in Art and Contemporary Technologies from IHAC/UFBA. He obtained his Master's degree from the Multidisciplinary Graduate Program in Culture and Society with the thesis: 'The source code in symbolic context in computational art: an overview of the relationship between software and culture.' He is currently a doctoral candidate in the same program, with the research topic: 'Written culture in machine code.'
Bianca Melo
Master's student in Information Science and bachelor in Journalism from the Federal University of Alagoas (Ufal). She works as an assistant researcher at the Laboratory of Internet and Social Network Studies (NetLab) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), focusing on studies about socio-environmental disinformation.
Branco Di Fátima
Branco Di Fátima holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE). Currently, he is a contracted junior researcher at LabCom – University of Beira Interior (UBI) in Portugal. He has published more than 90 scientific works and has been part of the teams for 11 research projects funded by national and international organizations.
Bruna Távora
Bruna Távora is a Communication Activist and Social Science Researcher specializing in Political Communication and Environmental Social Movements. Using action research methods, she collaborates with various social movements to drive social change. Her current research project is related to political communication and environmental conflicts involving far-right politicians and disinformation, addressing how social movements and civil society are developing narrative tools to combat it.
Claudia Monteiro Fernandes
Economist, licensed in Sociology, with a Master's and a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). She is a researcher at the Observatory of Metropolises (INCT), the 'The Color of Bahia' Program – a Research and Training Program on Racial Relations, Culture, and Black Identity in Bahia (UFBA), and the Periféricas Group (UFBA). She conducts research in the field of socioeconomic inequalities, focusing primarily on education, work, income, and regional inequalities, with an emphasis on an intersectional approach. Mother of Clarice.
Daniel Oliveira Zacarias
Ph.D. candidate in Social Psychology at PPG-PSTO (UnB). Member of the National Institute of Science and Technology in Social and Affective Neuroscience (INCT SANI). My main interests include programming and understanding behaviors, beliefs, and social attitudes related to the field of politics (corruption, political behavior, voting intention, prejudices, and discrimination).
Felipe Marques Esteves Lamarca
Felipe Lamarca is an undergraduate student in Social Sciences at the Superior School of Social Sciences (FGV CPDOC) and in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the School of Applied Mathematics (FGV EMAp). He is interested in Quantitative Methods applied to Social Sciences, especially (Bayesian) Statistical Modeling, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning.
Gabriellen da Silva Xavier do Carmo
PhD student in Political Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia (USA), holds a Master's degree in Law from the University of Lisbon (Portugal), and is a lawyer in Brazil. Her research interests lie at the intersection of technology, law, and politics, focusing on the regulation and social impact of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. She also studies the development of virtual social phenomena like fake news, hate speech, and cancel culture, examining their influences on voting behavior and broader political decisions. Her work aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how these modern developments shape public opinion and policy-making in the contemporary political landscape.
Glauciene dos Santos Carrijo
Glauciene Carrijo holds a Master's degree in Project and City. She conducts research with a theoretical and conceptual foundation aimed at understanding the relationship between architecture, design, and environmental perception, and how these relationships connect and influence the well-being of users in residential spaces. Her work is situated in the field of applied social sciences, art history, and architectural and design criticism.
Isabel Feix
Isabel Feix is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Universidade Católica Portuguesa. She has a master's and a Ph.D. in Social Science - Communication, and her research explores intersections between social behavior and economic narratives.
Kleyse Costa Vaz Santana Prado
Ph.D. candidate in Communication at the Graduate Program in Communication, Culture, and Amazonia at the Federal University of Pará (PPGCOM/UFPA). Member of the Research Group on Advertising and Publicity (GRUPPU). Currently pursuing a specialization in Data Journalism, Artificial Intelligence, and Netnographic Research, also at UFPA. Her research focuses on the social impacts of using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in communication mediations. She employs computational methods to map the advancements in the use of GAI in advertising agencies in the State of Pará, Brazil.
Larissa Milhorance dos Santos
Computer Scientist, Director of TechMov, Coordinator of the International Research Center for Youth, and Software Artisan. Striving to think about technology in a human way for and with human beings.
Lauriano Atílio Benazzi
Lauriano Benazzi is a journalist, photographer, graphic designer and teacher. PhD student at the Postgraduate Program in Journalism at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (PPGJOR-UFSC), he researches the connections between photojournalism and human rights, starting from the sociology of Law and with input from phenomenology. It also investigates how current photojournalism records themes related to the SDGs in the mainstream press. He has a master's degree in Visual Communication and a specialist in Photography, Praxis and Photographic Discourse, from the State University of Londrina (UEL), with works that propose a new taxonomic classification for press photography. He has experience in the daily press in layout, photo reporting, web journalism, press relations and journalistic writing and editing. He worked with Information Technology in the early days of Personal Computing in Brazil, following the entire trajectory of the internet and online journalism.
Lucas Marques Feitosa
Master's in Political Science and International Relations and Bachelor's in International Relations from UFPB. Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at UFPE. I research Brazilian Foreign Policy and Energy Diplomacy. I am currently completing an MBA in Data Science and Analytics from USP. I have experience in data analysis and data science with software such as R and Python, using supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques.
Marcelle Amaral
PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). Visiting researcher at Cornell Law School (USA) in the first semester of 2023. I hold a Master’s degree in Political Science from UFPE and an LL.M. in Law and Economics (EMLE) from the Faculty of Law of Hamburg (Germany) and Haifa (Israel). I am a lawyer (UFPE) and the Legal Coordinator at SecMulher/PE. My main research interests are Political and Judicial Behavior, Experiments, and Latin America.
Martin Egon Maitino
Martin Egon Maitino is a PhD candidate in Political Science at USP, with a bachelor's degree in International Relations (2016) and a master's in Political Science from the same university (2019). He has research experience in foreign policy analysis and decision-making processes, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. Currently, he develops studies on participation in Brazilian environmental foreign policy, using network analysis to map relations between governmental bodies and civil society.
Matheus Vieira de Souza
Matheus Vieira de Souza, Bachelor in Business Administration (Centro Universitário de Bauru), Master in Business Administration (University of São Paulo), and Ph.D. candidate in Production Engineering (São Paulo State University 'Júlio de Mesquita Filho'). He is interested in Consumer Behavior, specifically in topics related to Sustainable Consumption and the Behavior of Indebted Consumers.
Paula Cristina Santos Menezes
Ph.D. in Sociology (UFRJ) and currently a Post-Doc researcher in Sociology of Education (UNICAMP), she has experience as a teacher and researcher in both Basic and Higher Education. She also holds a postdoctoral degree in mobility, urbanism, and labor (ENTPE, France). She is a specialist in the field of educational technologies and the platformization of work and the city. Member of the Labtec (UFRJ) and Elico (France) laboratories.
Paulo Henrique Dantas
Paulo Henrique Dantas is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Graduate Program at UNICAMP (PPGS-UNICAMP) and holds a Master's degree in Social Sciences from PPGCS-UFBA. He is currently affiliated with the research group 'Social Movements, Power Relations, and Public Policies in the Countryside' (CPDA - UFRRJ) and the Laboratory of Sociology of Association Processes (LaSPA) at UNICAMP. He has experience and interest in Rural Social Movements, CAQDAS, Media Studies, and Media Framing.
Rogério Almeida Meneghin
Rogério Almeida Meneghin. Post-Doctorate in Health Innovation for Neglected Populations by the Innovation Office (EI), Technological Innovation Center (NIT) of the Center for Technological Development in Health (CDTS), of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ), 2019-2023. PhD in Intellectual Property Science from the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS), 2015-2018. Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), 1998-1999. Bachelor's degree in Electrical Industrial Engineering from the Federal University of São João del-Rei (UFSJ), 1992-1997. Head of the Intellectual Property Department of the Minas Gerais State Research Support Foundation (FAPEMIG), 2004-2009. Specialist member of the Intellectual Property Rights Commission of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB-MG), 2006-2007. Award for best work of the session at III ENAPID in 2010 (nanotechnology). Author of 8 books on intellectual property, 7 by Editora Lumen Juris in 2013 (stem cells, wind energy, biodiesel, hearing impairment, solar energy, border technologies, historical heritage), and 1 by Editora Appris in 2019 (tuberculosis). Author of 1 book chapter on patents published by the Academic Association of Intellectual Property in 2017 (malaria); and 1 book chapter on patents and artificial intelligence by CONPEDI in 2023 (tuberculosis in the population deprived of liberty). Participation in the 3rd Edition of the Conexão Inova Award 2022. Conexão Inovação Pública Network. Result: the innovation project “Elements for developing public policies on patents dedicated to tuberculosis” received the “4-star Conexão Inova Seal” (maximum score is 5 stars). Honorable Mention Award for participation in the 2023 International Student Tribunal (TRIe) – 8th edition. Theme: “Artificial intelligence and war - is the use of weapons controlled by artificial intelligence in international armed conflicts legal under Humanitarian Law?” Title: North Macedonia Against the use of weapons controlled by Artificial Intelligence in international armed conflicts. Currently, he works as a Researcher at EI, CDTS, FIOCRUZ.
Ruan Arthur Lima Santos
Undergraduate student in Social Sciences at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) with research interests in areas such as Epistemology, Gender and Identity Studies, Sociology of Religion, Sociology of Crime, and Far-right movements. Currently, a research fellow at the Laboratory of Digital Humanities of the Federal University of Bahia (LABHD-UFBA).
Talita Ribeiro da Silva
Talita Ribeiro holds a bachelor's degree in International Relations from UERJ and is a master's candidate in History, Politics, and Cultural Heritage at FGV/CPDOC. Her research interests include police institutions, public security, violence, and gender issues.
Thiago do Nascimento Fonseca
Thiago Fonseca is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Politics and Economics of the Public Sector (CEPESP-FGV) and a tutor professor at the São Paulo School of Economics (EESP/FGV), both at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation. He holds an postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC, 2021), as well as a Ph.D. (2021) and an M.A. (2015) in Political Science, and a B.A. (2011) in Social Sciences, all from the University of São Paulo. He specializes in corruption and anti-corruption, elections, and the judiciary. His research agenda mainly focuses on the impact of anti-corruption policies and institutions on political competition and public policies. His methodological expertise includes quasi-experimental methods, computational methods, statistical text analysis, and machine learning.
Renata Zampronio
Renata Zampronio is a master student in the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP) Social Science department. Her current research examines resistance practices of young latin migrant women at workplace. She holds a Bsc in Production engineering at University of São Paulo (USP) and she is a member of Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) research group on Children and Youth.Florida
All Participants
Jieun Shin
Jieun Shin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Production, Management, and Technology in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. Dr. Shin's research covers social media dynamics with a focus on the spread of news and misinformation.
Kevin Lanning
Kevin Lanning is a Professor of Psychology and Data Science at the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Lanning's research uses simple tools in natural language analysis and network analysis to understand complex social and psychological phenomena. In his spare time, he is training for his first marathon.
Kathryn Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Dr. Albrecht’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study fear, violence, and data distortions. She is particularly interested in the nexus of fear and risk-taking behaviors, digital trace data, and the impact of law on decision-making.
AJ Alvero
AJ Alvero is a computational social scientist at the University of Florida Department of Sociology, Criminology & Law. His primary interests are in language, race/ethnicity, culture, and education. His current research uses computational techniques to analyze college admissions essays and model the social patterns within them. AJ’s future research plans include investigations into machine translation and multilingualism, social media and counter hate speech, and California parole hearing transcripts.
Nathan Carpenter
Nathan Carpenter is the Director of the ATLAS lab, a digital listening and analytics lab, at the University of Florida. Dr. Carpenter's expertise is in analyzing trends and conducting research using data from social media platforms.
Soojong Kim
Soojong Kim is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at UC Davis. As a former computer scientist and engineer, he is interested in combining insights from the social sciences with innovative research methods, including large-scale data analysis, natural language processing, web-based experiments, network analysis, and computational modeling. Before joining UC Davis, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University, jointly affiliated with the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL).
Marshall A. Taylor
Marshall A. Taylor is an Assistant professor of sociology at New Mexico State University, where he is also the lead of the Data Science and Application Center, PI of the C3 Lab, and the interim co-associate dean of research for the College of Health, Education, and Social Transformation. He is the author of ‘Mapping Texts: Computational Text Analysis for the Social Sciences (co-authored with Dustin S. Stoltz). He investigates how social contexts and cognitive structures interface to influence the stability and change of cultural knowledge and how to best measure cultural knowledge in natural language and survey data using computational methods.
George G. Vega Yon
George G. Vega Yon is a Lead Data Scientist (Associate) at Booz Allen Hamilton and an Assistant Professor of Research at the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Utah. He works on studying Complex Systems using Statistical Computing. He has over ten years of experience developing scientific software focusing on high-performance computing, data visualization, and social network analysis. His training is in Public Policy (M.A. UAI), Economics (M.Sc. Caltech), and Biostatistics (Ph.D. USC).
Marley Kalt
Marley Kalt is Senior Data Project Manager at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. ICPSR is the world’s largest social science data archive and keeps research data accessible while training generations of researchers. It maintains a data archive of more than 350,000 research files in the social and behavioral sciences and hosts 23 specialized data collections in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.Coming soon!
Gwiwon Jason Nam
Jason is a doctoral student at the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. His research interests and academic pursuits are situated at the intersection of strategic communication, computational social science, and emerging technologies.Iceland
All Participants
Matti Nelimarkka
Matti Nelimarkka teaches social data science at the University of Helsinki. His book [Computational Thinking and Social Science: Combining Programming, Methodologies and Fundamental Concepts](https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/computational-thinking-and-social-science/book268542) was published by SAGE Publishing in 2023. Beyond teaching computational methods for social scientists, he leads the Helsinki Social Computing Group, an interdisciplinary group examining both computers and society. They explore digital democracy and politics in the digital era as well as computational techniques in social sciences, especially workflows and connections between social science theories and code. He is affiliated with the Faculty of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Aalto University.
Thamar Heijstra
Thamar Heijstra is a professor of Sociology at the University of Iceland and the Director of Academic Development at the School of Social Sciences. Her research interests center around academic teaching, organisational culture, work conditions, well-being, and gender relations, and she is currently involved in research projects on AI use in the labour market, remote work and well-being, and the social aspect of restoration projects.
Stefán Hrafn Jónsson
Stefán Hrafn Jónsson is a Professor of Sociology and the Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Iceland. He received his PhD in Sociology and Demography from Pennsylvania State University. Stefán has contributed to numerous national and international research projects, focusing on public health, youth behavior, and social inequality. He has worked with the Directorate of Health and the Public Health Institute of Iceland. He led the Icelandic team in the European Social Survey and investigated smoking and drinking in films across six European nations (Smoking in Movies project). He participated in the ESPAD and HBSC projects and was the Principal Investigator in the first two waves of the national survey on Health and Well-being in Iceland in 2007 and 2009.David Reimer
David Reimer is professor of sociology of education at the University of Iceland (since January 2023). He also holds a part-time position at Aarhus University. His research focuses on questions related to inequalities in educational attainment. He is particularly interested in educational transitions - such as the transition from upper secondary education to higher education or the transition from compulsory school to the subsequent schooling alternatives. He is currently principal investigator for a major research project: [EDUCHANGE, Changing Inequality at Educational Transitions (ERC consolidator grant)](https://www.educhange.hi.is). In his work he often combine different sources of data – such as survey data from experimental interventions with administrative registry data. He haas also been working with digital trace data from a reading app for compulsory school students in Denmark and connected this data to registry and survey data
Jon Edmund Bollom
I am a PhD student in Global Studies. My research foci include higher education and the social determinants of young people's aspirations. I hold a BA in Geography from the University of Exeter (thesis focus upon UK university tuition fee rises and impacts upon prospective students), a Post-Graduate Certificate of Education from the University of Exeter, and an MA in Development Studies from the University of Iceland (thesis focus upon the social determinants of alcohol and other drug use and criminality within school attending adolescents in Guinea-Bissau).
Helgi Eiríkur Eyjólfsson
Ph.D. student in socioloy in the School of Social Work in University of Iceland. Research project is on intergenerational social mobility and educational inequality in Iceland. I do my Ph.D. research part-time alongside a position as quantitative analyst in the Ministry of Education and Children. My background in in sociology and methodlogy/statistics.Olga Latapí
assets/images/Olga Latapí.jpg
Brent Pitchford
I am a postdoctoral research in the Icelandic Vision lab situated in the University of Iceland. My research interests are in visual cognition, attention, perception, as well as individual differeneces in these abilities. I received my PhD from Brock University in Canada.
Pitsiree Praphanwittaya (May)
Postdoctoral Researcher in Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Iceland. My project aims to develop pharmaceutical products for commercial purposes
Rafnar Lárusson
Ph.D. student in the School of Business in University of Iceland. Research project is on Financial institutions and technological changes, and its affect on legitimacy. I do my Ph.D. research part-time alongside a position as the CFO of the National power company of Iceland, Landsvirkjun. My background in in business and finance.
Sóllilja Bjarnadóttir
PhD researcher and instructor in environmental sociology. Fulbright Fellow in sociology at Harvard University 2022-23. Teacher at the University of Iceland.
Adeline Clarke
Adeline is a Project Planner at the University of Helsinki Centre for Social Data Science where she creates tools for analysis surveys containing open-ended questions in Finnish.Korea
All Participants
Jeon June
June Jeon is an assistant professor of sociology at KAIST. He is a qualitative ethnographer and theorist, specialized in sociology science, technology, and environment. His recent research interests include computational large-scale qualitative analysis on varieties of inequalities in scientific knowledge production. June received Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has published in Social Studies of Science, New Media & Society, Agriculture & Human Values, among other journals.
Byungkoo Kim
Byungkoo Kim is an assistant professor in Data Science at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in Statistics from the University of Michigan. His research expertise lies at the confluence of international political economy and quantitative methods. He is particularly interested in studying how global supply chains shape new dynamics in global trade and investment governance; economic policies and political institutions; and economic security. His research also focuses on developing statistical models for networks and text data. In this line of research, he has ongoing projects that analyze citation networks and opinion texts of U.S. Appeals Courts and Supreme Courts.
Lanu Kim
Lanu Kim is an assistant professor in the school of humanities and social sciences and a joint professor in the school of computing at KAIST. After finishing her sociology PhD at the University of Washington, she was a postdoctoral fellow and data science scholar at Stanford University. Her research broadly contributes to the theoretical understanding of academic knowledge creation by mainly examining the impact of academic search engines, gender inequality in higher education, and the social structure of knowledge construction. To investigate, she utilizes new big data sources, innovative analytical strategies, natural language processing, and advanced statistical methods and works with interdisciplinary research teams.
Jinhyuk Yun
Jinhyuk Yun is an assistant professor in the School of AI Convergence, at Soongsil University. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from KAIST. During his Ph.D., he developed a strong interest in the structure and dynamics of complex systems such as society, culture, media, and collective knowledge, along with the big data and statistical physics models, which led him to join Naver as a Data Scientist. He then worked as a Senior Research Scientist at KISTI, where he researched big data analysis and AI technology development. Since 2020, he has been a Professor at the School of AI Convergence at Soongsil University, where he is currently working on complex systems theory, big data, and AI to understand in-depth human behavior.
Won-tak Joo
Won-tak Joo is an assistant professor in Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida. His research interests are in the areas of social demography, social networks, and computational sociology. Specifically, he investigates how social and family relationships change across the life course, and how these patterns contribute to social and health inequalities, using a range of quantitative approaches including social network methods, applied econometrics, and demographic techniques.
Bas Hofstra
Bas Hofstra is a tenured Assistant Professor at Radboud University's Department of Sociology. He got his PhD from Utrecht University s Department of Sociology and was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University. His work orbits the study of diversity, stratification, and innovation. It captures longitudinal systems of social and cultural exchange: from the gestation and birth of networks, careers, ideas, or innovations, to their use, up until their eventual cessation. As such, he strives for three interrelated goals: (i) answering substantive questions on causes and effects of social networks, while (ii) contributing to social theory, and (iii) using computational methods and big data. His research appeared (among others) in PNAS, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Networks, and Nature Human Behaviour, and was honored with several grants and awards.
Hwaran Lee
Hwaran Lee is a lead research scientist at NAVER AI Lab, working on natural language processing and machine learning. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2018 and her B.S. in Mathematical Science at KAIST in 2012. Before joining NAVER AI Lab, she worked at SK T-Brain as a research scientist from 2018 to 2021. Her current primary research interests are ethics, safety, and trustworthiness of language models. Also, she is interested in controllable language generation, dialog systems, and machine learning for language models.
Jonghee Park
Jonghee Park is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Seoul National University. He is also the Director of Global Data Center at Institute of International Studies, Seoul National University. He received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. Jonghee Park studies political methodology and international political economy. He also maintains R packages MCMCpack and Bayesian taskview in CRAN. He is recently working on dynamic network analysis, text analysis of North Korean document, and changepoint analysis of Bayesian shrinkage models.
Hyunwoo Park
Hyunwoo Park is Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Data Science at Seoul National University. Before joining SNU, he was an Assistant Professor in Management Sciences at the Fisher College of Business and a Core Faculty for the Translational Data Analytics Institute (TDAI) at The Ohio State University. Before OSU, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Tech. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech, a Master of Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Seoul National University. His research interests include business and data analytics with an emphasis on visualization, supply chain management from the network perspective, and technology and innovation management in the presence of digital platforms. His research has been published in leading journals, and he has won several awards and nominations from major conferences, including INFORMS and the Academy of Management.
Jihee Kim
Jihee Kim is an associate professor at the School of Business and Technology Management, KAIST College of Business, and also holds a joint appointment with the School of Computing at KAIST. She is an economist, yet her academic and research endeavors have embraced interdisciplinary scholarship. Jihee earned a B.S. in Computer Science at KAIST, then pursued her master’s degree in Economics at Stanford University, followed by her PhD in Management Science and Engineering, also at Stanford University. Her academic journey reflects a commitment to interdisciplinary exploration, as evidenced by her collaborative efforts across various disciplines, such as computer science and energy policy, while maintaining a strong foundation in economics.
Yeowoon Bae
BAE Yeowoon, formerly a reporter in the Investigative Journalism Division at SBS, currently leads the Data Journalism Team, which produces Mabu News, in the broadcaster’s Digital News Production Division. He was awarded the Data Journalist to Watch Award at the 2019 Korea Data Journalism Awards. In 2020, he won the Korea Journalists Award for his analysis of provincial lawmakers’ operational expenses and assets. Last year, he won Grand Prize at the Korean Broadcasting Journalist Association Awards for his work on elections and data.
Annie Hui-Ping Lin
Annie Hui-Ping Lin is an incoming PhD student in Political Science at UC San Diego. Her research interests lie in global governance and international cooperation, with a particular focus on environmental concerns and marine affairs. She is especially intrigued by institutional overlap and the impact of international law-making on domestic institutions, including the dynamics of (de)judicialization and the harmonization between domestic and international institutions. Originally from Taiwan, she obtained her Bachelor of Social Science in East Asian Studies from National Taiwan Normal University in 2021 and her M.A. in Political Science from National Taiwan University in 2024.
Sinjae Kang
Sinjae Kang is a postdoctoral fellow at Center for Digital Social Science in Yonsei University. He received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at Yonsei University. And he also received Best Dissertation from Korean Political Science Association. He is interested in computational social science, particularly in using computational methods to analyze the behavior of legislators in Korean National Assembly. He published many studies on the legislative process and political behavior in Korean journals.
Vira Vyshnevska
Vira Vyshnevska holds a master degree in international economics and is currently pursuing her master in public policy in KDI School of Public Policy. She has a solid background in the banking field. Currently, her research interest focuses on applying data science techniques to analyze the banks’ financial fundamentals and develop financial forecast.
Bryan Nathanael Wijaya
Bryan is a first-year M.S. candidate in the School of Computing at KAIST. He is passionate about applied artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI for protein engineering, data science, multimodal AI, and large language models (LLMs). Recently, he has gained interest in computational social science, particularly in analyzing the impact of the recent surge of machine learning developments–especially LLMs–on society and their tendencies and how to leverage these techniques to tackle social issues by revealing patterns and anomalies in society through a data-driven approach. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering with a minor in chemical and biomolecular engineering and an AI special designated major from KAIST.
Gleb Papyshev
Gleb Papyshev is a Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include AI policy and regulation, AI ethics, and human-AI interaction. The results of his work have been published in Policy Design and Practice, AI & Society, AI & Ethics, Data & Policy, and Elgar Companion to Regulating AI and Big Data in Emergent Economies.
Yoonseok Lee
Yoonseok Lee is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. He received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. in Political Science from Yonsei University. Lee’s research focuses on the determinants of migration-related preferences and attitudes, with a special focus on the international political economy (IPE) and quantitative methodology. His current research examines how different socio-political backgrounds shape natives’ reactions to refugee shocks and whether or how low birth rates affect natives’ immigration attitudes. He also has an interest in Japanese politics and East Asian politics in general.
Yongjai Yu
Yongjai Yu is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. His research focuses on the presidential power in the U.S., and in particular the use of text analysis and large language models for understanding and estimating the implications of the president’s unilateral directives, such as ‘the extent to which presidential unilateral directives change the policy status quo.’ His methodological interests are large language models, Bayesian statistics, machine learning, and experimental design. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from Korea University and a Master of Public Policy from Seoul National University.
Eunmi Cho
Eunmi Cho is a Master’s student in Political Science at Yonsei University. She has an interest in voter behavior, public opinion, and legislative politics, especially how the characteristics of parliamentary speeches relate to political outcomes or the personal attributes of the legislators. Currently, she is working on her master’s thesis, which involves sentiment analysis of speeches by members of the National Assembly. Through this analysis, she aims to identify factors that influence the emotional expressions of legislators. Furthermore, she plans to explore the potential of using machine learning and deep learning-based text and sentiment analysis to conduct diverse research on these topics of interest.
Mei-Yu (Mei) Kuo
Mei-Yu (Mei) Kuo is a first-year PhD student in Sociology at The Ohio State University, holding an MA in Sociology from National Taiwan University. Her research explores how family and work experiences are stratified by gender and class, focusing on the role of family dynamics, occupational characteristics, and labor market conditions. She is also interested in applying innovative computational methodologies to analyze online discourse, investigating the qualitative distinctions of political and gender ideologies across cultural contexts. Outside academia, she is a movie buff and a coffee aficionado.
Jesslene Lee
Jesslene Lee is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include international political economy and international organizations, with a focus on how deepening regime complexity and institutional competition affect international cooperation. She is currently working on a project on how alternative sources of finance affect environmental safeguards in development finance. She also has ongoing projects on institutional design and change in international financial institutions, as well as the diffusion of rules in preferential trade agreements. In her research, she utilizes network analysis, natural language processing, large language models and a range of other methods.
Patrick Xi
Dr. Patrick Xi is an assistant professor of communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interests lie in political communication and computational social sciences. His current research focuses on multimodal textual analysis and nation branding.
Ju Hee JEUNG
Ju Hee Jeung is in her fifth year of the Ph.D. program in public policy and management at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management. Her research interests include water economics and policy, energy policy, development economics, and North Korea. Her ongoing dissertation project examines the effects of a water-saving monetary incentive program, initially introduced in Korea in 2015. She also serves as a program manager at the UNESCO i-WSSM (the UNESCO International Centre for Water Security and Sustainable Management), and she is dispatched from K-water (Korea Water Resource Corporation). Prior to arriving at the KDI School, Ju Hee completed her MBA in corporate finance, sponsored by K-water. She is still pursuing her career in the water sector, and since 2014, she has been giving lectures on water policies and water prices in Korea to water experts in developing countries.
Kyungmin Lee
Kyungmin Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware. She focuses on applying computational methods to data-driven policymaking concerning energy, climate change, urban development, and sustainability. Her doctoral research delves into energy user behavior and the development of privacy-preserving models using techniques such as time-dependent proximal remote image processing, machine learning, and computer vision. Her past research investigates benefit-sharing mechanisms of renewable energy and drivers of international carbon neutrality trends and policies.
Inkoo Kang
Inkoo Kang is an incoming PhD student in Urban Systems at New York University, with a mixed background in urban planning, public administration, and design studies. Her academic interests center on regenerative city transformations that can 1) correspond to social changes and solve urban issues while 2) understanding and preserving regional characteristics and charms. She has also explored how to bridge the gaps between quantitative and qualitative research methodologies.
David Ugarte Chacon
David is a PhD student of public policy at the Korean Development Institute. His research focuses on the impact on inequality by implemented social prediction systems. Namely, ongoing research currently delves on two topics - reproduction of systematic financial discrimination by credit scoring models, and the idiosyncratic load in transformer-based language models.
Kyu Sik Yang
Kyu Sik Yang is a Ph.D. student in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University. He studies executive politics, bureaucratic politics, and interbranch politics, with a particular interest in causal inference and text-as-data. His research uses quantitative methods to study strategic interaction in the bureaucratic decision-making process. He is also interested in computational social science (broadly defined) and understudied topics in political science. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in political science from Yonsei University.
Yumi Park
Yumi Park is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy at KDI School. Her main research interest is the role of new payment methods in society, such as mobile money and cryptocurrency. She is currently investigating the spillover effect between crypto assets and financial assets, and plans to analyze the competitiveness of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and mobile money through laboratory experiment or machine learning approach.
Yunjung Yang
YunJung Yang is a second-year PhD student at KDI School. Her work focuses on group dynamics in regulation policy, utilizing computational methods such as text analysis, natural language processing, and quantitative analysis. YunJung received her M.A. in Public Administration in International Development from Harvard Kennedy School and B.A. in Public Administration and Economics from Yonsei University.
Suhyoung Choi
Suhyoung Choi is a Master’s student in Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences at KAIST. Her research interests center on bias, inequality and discrimination represented on technology with computational methods. She is currently studying Data Science, and the application of those methods solving various social problems.
Myokyung Han
Myokyung Han is a Master’s student in Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences (DHCSS) at KAIST. With a solid foundation in computational social sciences, her research focuses on how digital technologies affect the production and consumption of knowledge across various domains. To explore these impacts, she aims to integrate theoretical frameworks and analytical methodologies with new big data sources.Location TBD (Coming Soon!)
All Participants
Nairobi/Mathematica
All Participants
Prof. Alfred Agwanda
Professor Alfred Agwanda Otieno is an Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Population Studies and Research Institute, within the Department of Geography, Population and Environmental Studies, at the University of Nairobi. His areas of expertise include technical demography and policy analysis studies. His research focus has covered reproductive health, monitoring and evaluation of population and health programs. He has undertaken several researches involving primary as well as large scale secondary data, and these have been published. Professor Agwanda Otieno has co-authored several papers in peer reviewed international journals such as Social Science and Medicine, Journal of Biosocial Sciences, Demography India, and African Population Studies.
Dr. John Otieno Oredo
Dr. John Otieno Oredo Lectures in the Departments of Information Science and Management Science & Project Planning at the University of Nairobi (UoN) and previously served as a Research Associate at the Kenya Education Network (KENET) and Research Fellow at the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (Strathmore University). He holds a PhD degree in Business Administration specializing in Strategic Information Systems (University of Nairobi), MSc. IT (Strathmore University); and B.Ed. (Moi University). Dr. Oredo is trained in scientific communication and publishing; E-Learning Course Design (ETSU, PASGR) and Faculty Support in Online Course Development (EDUCAUSE). He is a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified in Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT), Big Data Engineer (IBM Certified) and Artificial Intelligence Analyst (IBM Certified). He also undertook a training in Supply Chain Resilience Management (Kuhne Logistics University-Germany). Dr. Oredo has published in refereed journals and is a reviewer of several ranked Information Systems journals and currently serves as a Senior Editor for the Information Technology & People Journal. Dr. Oredo and collaborators has attracted research grants from the British Council, Kuhne Foundation, DAAD, European Union, British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) and SSHRC (Canada). Dr. Oredo is currently organizing a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS). He is an active member of several local and international professional bodies: ISACA, KIM, CSK, PMI, and AIS (President AIS Eastern Africa Chapter)
Prof. Samuel Musili
Professor Samuel M. Mwalili is a distinguished academic and expert in Statistics and Mathematical Modeling, currently serving as a Professor of Statistics at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT). He is also an adjunct Professor and Director of the Center for Health Analysis and Modeling at Strathmore University. With a career spanning decades, Professor Mwalili has made significant contributions to public health research and statistical analysis, particularly in infectious disease modeling and HIV/AIDS epidemiology. He has played a pivotal role in national health initiatives, including serving as the lead Modeling Expert for Kenya's second and third Modes of HIV Transmission studies in 2019 and 2023. His work with the National AIDS Control Council (NACC) since 2011 includes producing the biennial National HIV Estimates for Kenya. In 2020, he joined the National COVID-19 Modeling Technical Committee, showcasing his expertise in addressing emerging public health challenges.
.jpg)
Dr. Kathleen A. Anangwe
Dr. Kathleen Anangwe is a Seniour lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Social Work and African Women Studies, and an adjunct at the Centre for Human Rights and Peace - University of Nairobi, Kenya. She is a Development Sociologist specializing in the area of social inequalities especially those experienced by women and vulnerable groups. Her areas of interest include Research Methodology, Economic Sociology, Migration and the rights of vulnerable groups. Her research showcases various qualitative and quantitative techniques of studying the Social Condition while interfacing and critiquing the response of social systems and processes within social structures to emerging social forces. She is published and a member of the International Sociological Association (ISA) and Bioethics Society of Kenya.
Dr. Mary Muyonga
Mary Muyonga is a demographer holding an MA and PhD in in Population Studies, from the Population Studies and Research Institute of the University of Nairobi, Kenya.She is an alumnus of the SICSS- Covenant program held in July 2022 in Nigeria (https://sicss.io/2022/covenant- university/people). She recently completed her doctoral studies researching on migration and inequality linkages in Kenya, and received a grant under the ARUA-Andrew Mellon foundation fellowship, to investigate emerging social issues in urban Africa. Her research interests include migration, mobility, urbanization, and policy linkages. Mary has authored several articles and co-authored book chapters. She is a member of the Union of African Population Studies (UAPS) and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP).
Dr. Amos Langat
Amos holds a PhD in Mathematics Statistics option of Pan African University Institute for Basic Sciences Technology and Innovation, a Masters of Science in Applied Statistics from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Mathematics from Kabarak University. He has made significant contributions to academia through his teaching roles at Maasai Mara University and Kabarak University. His research interests focus on statistical modeling in infectious diseases, calculus applications, and Bayesian perspectives on HIV risk factors. Amos has published numerous articles in reputable journals, highlighting his expertise in statistical analysis and modeling. Recognized for his excellence, he has received multiple scholarships and awards. Amos is also an alumnus of the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS-ACCRA 2023), where he expanded his knowledge and network. Additionally, he actively participates in various professional societies and has attended numerous international workshops and conferences, furthering his knowledge and impact in the field.
Selina Atwani Ochukut
Selina is a computer science graduate from Masinde Muliro University of Science and technology in Kenya. She holds a master’s degree in information technology management from the University of Nairobi. She is currently pursuing a PhD in information systems at the University of Nairobi. Her research interests are in the areas of technology enhanced learning, learning analytics, machine learning application in health and education. Selina is currently working as a tutorial fellow at the University of Nairobi where she is involved in teaching undergraduate computer science students and carrying research in the various areas of computing. Selina has thought several data science short courses.
Zadok Maingi, SEKU
Mr. Zadok Maingi holds a Master of Science in Public Health Nutrition and BSc. Human Nutrition and Dietetics both from Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology, Kenya. He currently works for South Eastern Kenya University in the department of Food Science, Nutrition and Technology. Mr. Maingi has a great passion for research and community service. His research interests include maternal and young child nutrition, food security, agri-nutrition, food systems and climate change. Mr. Maingi is a certified Publons Peer Reviewer academy graduate, has served as a senior journal reviewer for African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development (AJFAND) and also serves as a reviewer for the African Journal of Bioethics. He is skilled in data analysis using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and has basics in R programming language. He looks forward to learning more skills in computational social sciences and applicability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in research from the Summer Institute in Computational Social Sciences (SICCS)
WALTER OKONGO, Pan African University Institute for Basic Sciences, Technology and Innovation
I am a PhD student in Mathematics with focus on biomathematics and analysis of infectious diseases. I have strong interest in studying and understanding how mathematics play a role in different societal aspects of human life and how mathematics can used to improve human livelihoods.
LESTER KILUMA,University of Nairobi
My name is Lester Kiluma, a holder of bachelor of science in meteorology from the University of Nairobi and currently pursuing a masters of science in meteorology at the same institution. At the moment, I am finalizing on my dissertation that incorporates climate modeling under NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 global circulation models and knits it to extremes in weather for regional context with agricultural sector at the core. My interests have been to apply the scientific knowledge in solving local and regional key issues while leveraging on informed evidence based scientific research. What matters of them all is how then Am I able to communicate this scientific information to the policy makers so as to aid in dissemination and ameliorating the impacts associated with it. In dealing with large climate datasets, it calls for great computational skills so as to be able to effectively manipulate the datasets and deduce findings from them in a fast and efficient manner. This is where data analysis in python is a competent skillset to aide in my research as I advance in the early career scientist field. All and sundry; dynamical modeling, climate change and air quality sets the pace as my areas of interest in research.
EDWIN MUTENDWA, University of Nairobi
Edwin Mutendwa is a skilled data scientist and health economist with expertise in health financing, data analytics, and policy development. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Finance, is a Certified Public Accountant (CPAK), and has advanced training in data science. Currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Health Economics and Policy at the University of Nairobi, Edwin is deeply committed to using data-driven insights to enhance healthcare systems and achieve sustainable solutions.
Dr. Cynthia Atamba, Ph.D, University of Science and Technology of China
Cynthia Atamba is a highly dedicated and experienced researcher and academic professional with a passion for creating a safe and decent work environment. She holds a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Science and Technology of China. With a focus on employee well-being, Atamba’s research interests span a range of topics, including emotions, mistreatment, and coping strategies. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed academic journals. Atamba is also actively engaged in community development initiatives and has served as a consultant for various international organizations. She is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion in academia and works tirelessly to mentor and support underrepresented students in her field.
 - Lameck Agasa.jpg)
LAMECK ONDIEKI AGASA, Kisii University
Lameck Ondieki Agasa is a dedicated academician and researcher with extensive expertise in statistical analysis and research methodologies. Lameck holds an MSc in Applied Statistics from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, as well as a BSc in Applied Statistics with Computing from Maasai Mara University. His research interests encompass Bayesian modeling, multivariate analysis, computational methods, and stochastic processes, with significant contributions in biomedical research, health education program evaluation, and the socio-economic factors influencing health outcomes. Lameck has actively engaged in teaching, research supervision, and community outreach initiatives at Kisii University, where he serves as a Tutorial Fellow.
MARTIN MANG'ENI NANJE, University of Nairobi
I am a passionate Environmental and Bio-Systems Engineer with expertise in agricultural engineering, environmental conservation, and sustainable technology development. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Environmental and Bio-Systems Engineering at the University of Nairobi, focusing on optimizing mechanized potato harvesting technology for small and medium-scale farms in Kenya. I also hold an MSc in Agricultural Engineering from Don State Technical University, Russia, and a BSc in Environmental and Bio-Systems Engineering from the University of Nairobi. As the Founder and CEO of Sisili Agritech, I drive innovative agricultural solutions tailored to the needs of farmers across Kenya. I serve as a Knowledge Transfer Specialist and Part-Time Lecturer at the University of Nairobi, mentoring future engineers and contributing to cutting-edge research. His professional expertise spans agricultural mechanization, water resources and irrigation engineering, project management, agro-ecosystem development, and environmental impact assessment. I have led transformative projects, including the development of a hybrid energy-powered Smart Irrigation System under the African Agriculture Knowledge Transfer Partnership, aimed at promoting cost-effective and sustainable irrigation practices. A certified NEMA Lead Expert and active member of the Kenya Conservation Tillage Initiative, Martin is committed to advancing sustainable agriculture and environmental stewardship. He has authored multiple publications and frequently shares his work at national and international forums.
 - eve musioka.jpg)
Evalyne Musyoka, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology
Evalyne Musyoka, a Statistician holds an MSc in Applied Statistics from JKUAT and a BSc in Actuarial Sciences from the University of Eldoret. With experience as an Assistant Lecturer and Data Analyst, geo-spatial analysis, Bayesian modeling, and teaching statistical concepts. She is currently a Research assistant in a research center in ZETECH University.
EMMANUEL ODEMBA, University of Nairobi
Currently pursuing a PHD degree in Information Sciences at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Completed course work, at research stage. Working in the ICT sector in East Africa.
FA NDIRANGU NGUNJIRI, University of Nairobi
FA Ndirangu Ngunjiri (MKIM, IoD) is a partner and a senior Investment Analyst with Watermark Consultants. He is a Doctoral (Finance & Accounting) fellow at the University of Nairobi with a research interest in; inequality & poverty, cyber security, innovations, and climate change. He is a published researcher and has presented at local and international conferences. He is currently working on a study that analyzes data from mobile loan platforms and their impact on market performance, showcasing how digital data can be leveraged to understand economic trends and challenges in real time. This aligns with the digital focus on utilizing data and technology for financial analysis. He enjoys rock climb, and mountain climbing in 2023, he climbed Mt Kilimanjaro for the second time and is a Rotarian, Rotary Club of Nairobi Madaraka. You can reach him on: ndi@watermarkconsultants.com, Twitter: @ndi70, https://www.linkedin.com/in/fa-ndirangu-ngunjiri-iia-mkim-iodk-44a86731/
LEAH JEROTICH MURKOMEN, University of Nairobi
I am an Early-Career Researcher and a professional social scientist. I am a PhD student at the University of Nairobi, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and my thesis title is Sociology-Economic Effects of Climate Variability on the Marginalized group in Turkana County and Policy Options to Enhance Resilience. I am deeply committed and focused to advancing research in areas of climate resilience that will address challenges that are currently being faced by youth in the horn of Africa and Africa at large.
CHRISTOPHER NDILI, University of Nairobi
Christopher Ndili has a deep-rooted love for microbiology, while he sits atop an intersection of biology and computational science to unlock the secrets of microbial life in combat against the global threat of AMR. Chris is now an MSc Bioinformatics student with a keen interest in computational social science, microbiology, and great dedication to fighting antimicrobial resistance. He has a passion for the understanding of complex systems using computational tools to not only understand microbial genomics but also broader implications of human behaviour and society trends, most especially towards health and public policy. Besides academic and activist work, Chris has a deep love for poetry. This hobby serves as an outlet for creative expression and is also used as a source of personal reflection and inspiration. Nature, science, and human resilience are some of the themes that often find a place in Chris's poetic works, hence offering a creative perspective on a world of data and science.
PHYLLYS WAFULA, University of Nairobi
My name is Phyllys Wafula, a teacher by profession, working with the Teachers' Service Commission (TSC) of Kenya. I have worked with the TSC since 2013 as secondary school teacher in Bungoma County at a school called St.Teresa's Kabula Boy's High School.
MAKAMBI ABUGA DENNIS, Kisii University
My name is Makambi Abuga Dennis, from Kisii County-Kenya. I have a masters Degree of Mathematical Statistics majoring Population Genetics with a background of Applied Statistics. i currently work as an adjunct Lecturer at Kisii University. Academically i have published a journal entitled; Imputation method on Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium with missing genome-wide expression data. I have gained much experience in data mining, entry, analysis using softwares such as python,R-program and SPSS.
 - MWAURA LUCY WACUKA.jpg)
LUCY MWAURA, University of Nairobi
I am Lucy Mwaura, an academic with a solid foundation in Computer Science and Information Technology. My educational journey began with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Chuka University, where I developed a passion for technology and innovation. I furthered my studies by earning a Master’s degree in Information Technology Management from the University of Nairobi, equipping me with advanced skills in IT leadership and systems management. Currently, I am pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, focusing on artificial intelligence, gamification, and big data analytics. Professionally, I have over seven years of experience in higher education, teaching and mentoring students. I currently serve as a Tutorial Fellow at Africa Nazarene University, a position I have held since September 2022. Additionally, I have worked as an adjunct lecturer at several institutions, including Machakos University, Kiriri Women’s University of Science and Technology, Multimedia University, KCA University, and Umma University. These roles have allowed me to refine my teaching methods and positively impact my students’ academic and personal growth. My educational background and job experience reflect my dedication to lifelong learning and my commitment to empowering the next generation of innovators.
ISABELLA MULAMA, MASINDE MULIRO UNIVERSITY
An undergraduate degree in Education Arts, English/Literature, A masters degree in comparative literature and a doctorate degree in Literature.
DR. BULINDA MAJOR VINCENT, Kisii University
Dr. Bulinda is an accomplished applied mathematician specializing in health informatics, recognized for his significant contributions across multiple domains, including computational fluid dynamics, computer science, and health systems. He employs mathematical modelling and computational techniques to uncover innovative solutions to complex challenges. Dr. Bulinda earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from JKUAT, along with an MSc. in Applied Mathematics from the same institution and a BSc. in Mathematics and Physics from UEAB. Additionally, he completed a post-master fellowship focused on Healthcare Capacity Building for Sustainable Development, with an emphasis on Health Informatics at the University of Nairobi. Throughout his academic career, he has established a robust foundation in various mathematical disciplines, such as calculus, dynamical systems, and differential equations, along with their practical applications. Furthermore, he has developed expertise in programming languages including MATLAB, R, and FLUENT, which serve as essential tools for numerical simulations and analyses.
NOEL LIKALAMU, University of Nairobi
I am a dedicated social scientist with a solid foundation in sociology and medical sociology, specializing in public health research. My work focuses on examining healthcare disparities and understanding the social determinants of health that influence access, quality, and outcomes of care. With a passion for addressing systemic inequities, I am committed to advancing health equity through evidence-based research, policy advocacy, and innovative solutions that promote inclusive and equitable healthcare systems.
BENJAMIN CHUKWU,University of Nairobi
Benjamin Chukwu is a PASET RSIF PhD Scholar at the University of Nairobi, specialising in renewable energy. He is passionate about leveraging computational methods to deepen his understanding of complex scientific phenomena. With a strong commitment to using computational expertise and data-driven approaches, Benjamin aims to address energy challenges and develop sustainable energy solutions.
ANITA NYABOKE, University of Nairobi
Dr. Anita is a registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN) with interests in chronic disease prevention and management. She is currently a research fellow and Centre manager at the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) - Centre of Excellence for Non-Communicable Diseases at the University of Nairobi. Anita has experience in nutrition management and education in various contexts such as; clinical experience working at Mbagathi District Hospital, Nairobi, working in Community projects - managing food relief projects and vocational training in Mogadishu, Somalia, Consultancy at UNICEF in development of recommendations for policy development and revision and in Academia - guiding students at Kyoto University, Japan and providing online classes -The National Taiwan University, Wellness lounge, Pakistan and Buuruj Training Institute in Kenya. Anita undertook a fellowship of the Kyoto University Inter-Graduate School program for sustainable and survivable societies (2016-2021) and is a board-certified Lifestyle Medicine professional (2020).Besides professional endeavours, Anita enjoys making presentations and cookery demonstrations to individuals and community groups through PRIMIA Health Co., travelling experiences, making friends and learning new things. 'The doctor of the future will no longer treat the human frame with drugs, but rather will cure and prevent disease with nutrition”-Thomas Edison (1903).'
 - maxwell sifuna.jpg)
SIFUNA MAXWELL, Kenyatta University
I am currently a Volkswagen Ph.D. fellow in the Field of Urban and Regional Planning at Kenyatta University, Geography Department, Kenya working on a project titled “Land Acquisitions and Rising Inequalities in East Africa”. I am also a holder of a Master of Arts (M.A) in Geography from Kenyatta University, Kenya, specializing in Urban and Regional Planning as well as a holder of a Bachelor of Education Arts (Bed) from the University of Nairobi, Kenya majoring in Geography and Business Studies as my teaching subjects. Professionally, I am a certified and qualified teacher, registered by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) of Kenya with 10 years of cumulative experience in public and private Kenya secondary schools. My work experience spans Education practice and academia. I have previously worked as a Teacher of Geography at St Hannahs High School, Friends Secondary School Bwake in Kitale, Dadaab Secondary School in Garissa and Cardinal Otunga Girls High School in Bungoma. Additionally, I have also worked as a part-time lecturer at Kibabii University as well as a Tutor at Bungoma National Polytechnic.
JAMES KARANJA, University of Nairobi
I am a dedicated professional with expertise in medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, and synthetic chemistry, with a focus on developing new molecules for pharmaceutical applications, particularly in treating fungal infections. My work involves a blend of theoretical and hands-on research, leveraging computational tools to predict molecular interactions and validate them through synthesis and laboratory testing. I am passionate about contributing to drug discovery by identifying novel compounds that address pressing health challenges. My background in analytical chemistry, organic and inorganic chemistry, and industrial analysis provides a solid foundation for this work. I have also implemented Health and Safety strategies at various workplaces by conducting risk assessments, developing Health and Safety policies, suggesting possible control measures to be implemented to reduce the risks, and regularly monitoring and reviewing the health and safety performance of the organization. I have ensured the continuous improvement of health and safety strategies by staying up-to-date with the latest regulations, industry best practices, and technological advancements.
GEORGE ESHO, University of Nairobi
George Esho is a budding professional in the field of Information Science, currently pursuing his Bachelor’s degree at the University of Nairobi .With a strong foundation in ICT, George has gained hands-on experience in hardware maintenance, network management, software configuration, and IT support during his industrial attachment at the Postal Corporation of Kenya. He is particularly passionate about programming, with a keen interest in Python, and aspires to specialize in data science. George is driven by the potential of data-driven solutions to transform industries and is eager to explore innovative applications of technology in solving real-world problems. Committed to continuous learning and professional growth, George aims to make significant contributions to the ICT sector by leveraging his technical expertise and programming skills to advance the field of data science.
ALEX MWANZIA MUTUKU, University of Nairobi
My name is Alex Mwanzia Mutuku, a fourth-year student at the University of Nairobi pursuing a Bachelor of Information Science. I have a strong passion for technology and data management, with expertise in data science and Python programming. Through my studies, I have developed skills in data analysis, visualization, and machine learning, enabling me to solve real-world problems and contribute to data-driven decision-making. My academic journey has equipped me with knowledge in information systems and resource management, preparing me for the dynamic challenges in this field. I am dedicated to leveraging technology to create innovative and efficient solutions. As I approach the end of my studies, I look forward to applying my skills and knowledge to drive positive impact in the information science and data management sectors.
TASSY MWAURA, Pan African University Institute for Basic Sciences, Technology and Innovation
I am a dedicated 4th-year student at the University of Nairobi, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Information Science. With a strong passion for knowledge and innovation.As a team player who is both kind and humble, I bring collaboration and intentionality to every project I undertake. My commitment to excellence and a deep curiosity drive me to give my best in every task, ensuring quality outcomes and continuous personal growth. My ability to combine diligence, adaptability, and a strong sense of purpose makes me a valuable contributor in any environment I engage with.
NICOLE MWAURA, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology
My name is Nicole Mwaura, a passionate individual dedicated to creating sustainable, data-driven solutions that drive positive change. With a background in actuarial science, I thrive on analyzing complex systems and developing innovative strategies. Currently my focus is on leveraging data to identify emerging trends and create strategies that promote financial security and resilience. Whether it’s designing new products, refining models, or addressing emerging risks, I am committed to delivering impactful and practical solutions. My analytical mindset also extends to research, where I enjoy uncovering insights that inform strategic decisions and foster innovation. Beyond my professional endeavors, I’m deeply motivated by the principles of effective altruism, which guide my efforts to make a meaningful, evidence-based impact on the world. I believe in using reason and data to drive decisions that create the greatest possible good. In my free time, I enjoy reading, learning, and staying active through lawn tennis and chess—two hobbies that fuel my competitive spirit and strategic thinking. I’m always eager to connect with like-minded individuals to collaborate, share ideas, and contribute to building a better, more resilient world.
ODISSEI
All Participants
Tom Emery
Dr. Tom Emery is the Deputy Director of ODISSEI, where he is responsible for the strategic development of the infrastructure and international collaborations. Emery is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Sociology of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Before that, he was the Deputy Director of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague. Emery gained a PhD in Social Policy from the University of Edinburgh in 2014 and his thesis examined the interaction between financial support between elderly parents and their adult children in a number of European countries. His research also covers questions of comparative survey methodology and policy measurements in multilevel contexts.
Paulina Pankowska
Dr. Paulina Pankowska is an assistant professor at the Sociology department of Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the topics of data and methods quality. She is currently working on a project investigating the quality of non-traditional data sources and on a project related to climate change sociology. She is also the task leader of the ODISSEI benchmarking task, which aims to organize an algorithm benchmark for the social sciences. The overarching goal of this project is to guide social science research towards a culture wherein different methods and techniques that are used to solve a specific problem are compared and evaluated objectively.
Javier Garcia-Bernardo
Dr. Javier Garcia-Bernardo is an assistant professor at Utrecht University in the Social Data Science (SoDa) team. Before that, he was a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam and at Charles University (CORPTAX), and a data scientist at the Tax Justice Network. In his research he applies computational models to understand social and economical systems. He completed his PhD in Political Economy at the CORPNET group (University of Amsterdam), and his MSc in Computer Science at the University of Vermont.
Erik-Jan van Kesteren
Dr. Erik-Jan van Kesteren is assistant professor of data science at Utrecht University, and the team lead for the ODISSEI Social Data Science team ([https://odissei-soda.nl/](https://odissei-soda.nl/)). His background is in social sciences and statistics, with a focus on computation; he has worked on a wide range of topics, such as structural equation modeling, high-performance computing, and Bayesian statistics. Erik-Jan is a strong proponent of open science, which he puts in practice in his projects with the SoDa team. There, he consults and works with many different researchers, on topics such as inequality, citizen science, agent-based modelling, and synthetic data.
Gert Stulp
Gert Stulp is an associate professor at the department of Sociology at the University of Groningen. He studies causes of the variation in the number of children people have and would like to have, and employs diverse methods in his research including personal network data collection, simulation studies, and machine learning. He is also interested in how methods from data science methods can improve the social sciences.
Elizaveta Sivak
Elizaveta Sivak is a sociologist and a computational social scientist. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, where she studies the predictability of fertility outcomes. Before that, she was the head of the Center for Modern Childhood Research at HSE University. Her research interests involve the predictability of life outcomes, predictions in social science in general, and using machine learning methods and digital traces data to study parenting and childhood.
Varun Satish
Varun is a PhD student in Demography and Social Policy at Princeton University. Originally from Sydney, Australia, he is interested in studying whether there are limits to predictability in social data..png)
Yuki Takahashi
Yuki is a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University's Department of Economics. Yuki is an applied microeconomist working in the areas of Behavioral Economics, Gender Economics, and Labor Economics. Their research examines how psychological factors and institutions affect individual and group behaviors using experimental and observational data. Yuki received their PhD in Economics from the University of Bologna in July 2022. Yuki is non-binary (pronoun: they/them).
Rishabh Tyagi
Rishabh is a joint PhD Student at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany & Centre for Fertility and Health in Norway. Using German Socio-economic Panel Data and Norwegian Administrative Data, his dissertation project assesses the social, demographic, and health consequences of employment uncertainty for individuals and their families. Previously, he finished a Masters and M.Phil. in Biostatistics & Demography from IIPS Mumbai.
Bastián González-Bustamante
I am a post-doctoral researcher in Computational Social Science at Leiden University, Netherlands. I hold a DPhil (PhD) in Politics from the University of Oxford, UK. My interests lie in the intersection of comparative politics and government. Methodologically, my interests rely on quantitative text analysis, machine learning and causal inference..jpg)
Yael Broos
Yael Broos is a PhD-candidate at the department of Socio-medical Sciences at the Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management (EUR). Her research focuses on health spillovers in the family, with a specific focus on siblings and mental health effects.Goan Booij
Goan Booij is a PhD-student at the research institute of Child Development and Education of the University of Amsterdam. He has a background in philosophy and sociology. He currently studies the relationship between digital time use, digital literacy, and academic performances.
Henry Abbink
Henry Abbink is a non-PhD (junior) researcher at the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA) at Maastricht University. At ROA, he is currently engaged in evaluating primary school student performance as part of the Netherlands Cohort Study on Education (NCO). Next to that, he contributes to the Dutch labour market forecasts published by ROA. Henry enjoys working with Dutch administrative data (CBS microdata).
Tilbe Atav
Tilbe Atav is a PhD student at the Applied Economics department of the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam. Currently, her research interests lie in how environments or information individuals are exposed to may affect perceived opportunities, aspirations and choices of individuals.
Mathilde Theelen
Mathilde Theelen is a doctoral student at Maastricht University, where she aims to contribute to evidence-based methods for language learning. Her focus is driven by her desire to create more equal opportunities for children. Mathilde holds an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge and a MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the VU University.
Xinran Wang
Xinran is a PhD student in Environmental Psychology at the University of Groningen. She studies perceptions of the roles of different societal actors in addressing climate change. Using target sampling, large-scale surveys and social media data, her research aims to understand the social and psychological factors that motivate or inhibit societal-wide climate action. Previously, Xinran worked as a data scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications and holds an MA in quantitative methods in social science and a BS in math.
Jade Vrielink
Jade Vrielink is a PhD Candidate in Political Communication at Wageningen University and Research. She studies the impact of online data-driven campaigning (e.g. microtargeting) on voter attitudes and behavior using longitudinal surveys, experience sampling, data donations, and experiments. Her research interests include the interaction between social media, society and politics, political behavior, computational social science and gender and politics.
Ignacio Urria Yáñez
Ignacio Urria Yáñez is a PhD candidate in the Urbanism Department of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft. His research interests span sociospatial inequalities, urban segregation, neighbourhood effects, labour market and machine learning. His PhD project focuses on studying the spatio-temporal evolution of segregation using multiple geographical scales and residential characteristics. He holds an MSc in Human Geography from Utrecht University, and MSc and BA in Economics from Universidad de Chile. Prior to moving to the Netherlands, Ignacio was an analyst in the Chilean Ministry of Social Development.
Nicole Walasek
I am a postdoctoral researcher interested in how the environment shapes evolution and development. To study this broad question, I work at the interface of various disciplines, such as biology, ecology, psychology, and computer science. I have a background in cognitive science, computer science, and developmental psychology.
Amber Howard
Amber is completing her PhD between the department of Health Policy at the University of Melbourne, and the department of Geography, Planning, and Int. Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research describes and quantifies young adult’s changing housing arrangements over the 2000s, focusing on socio-economic inequalities.
Mayke Nollet
Mayke Nollet is a PhD candidate at the Department of Educational and Family Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She currently researches the labour market and educational outcomes of young people with mental health problems. Her research interests include social inequality, education, labour market, mental health, family dynamics, and big data usage.
Marlot Griep
Marlot is a PhD Candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on how teachers' mental well-being relates to their risk of long-term absenteeism or leaving the profession. Her goal is to identify indicators that can proactively signal higher risks of absenteeism or job attrition among teachers.
Iris ten Klooster
Iris ten Klooster is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Health, Psychology and Technology, and the Department of Biomedical Signals and Systems at the University of Twente. Her research focuses on utilising different types of data (e.g. data from electronic health records) to personalise eHealth technologies.
Flora Zhou
Flora Zhou is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Public Administration and Sociology in Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is working in the ERC-funded project “Childcare Strategies”. Her research interests include family sociology, gender inequalities, and social networks.
Andrea Gradassi
Andrea is a Psychology PhD student at the University of Amsterdam. He studies social learning strategies in adolescents and adults. He looks at what peers (close friends, popular, smart) are most influential within classrooms, what types of social cues (confidence, expertise, majority) people use when they look at others’ opinions.
Yuxuan Jin
Yuxuan Jin is a Ph.D. researcher at NIDI. In his Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Prof. Dr. Matthijs Kalmijn and Prof. Dr. Helga de Valk, he investigates the consequences of early parental death for partners and children using large-scale administrative and survey data. Before working at NIDI, he completed his Research Master’s degree in Sociology and Social Research at Utrecht University, where he wrote a thesis on the association between parenthood and health of people in same-sex and different-sex relationships.
Irene Tsitse
Irene Tsitse is a PhD candidate in Media and Creative Industries at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). Her PhD research explores the transformative potential of audience engagement in the cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSIs), focusing on the intersection of audience engagement, cultural entrepreneurship, and digitalization. Motivated by a research gap in understanding audience experiences in cultural sectors, her study aims to combine computational and qualitative methods to analyze audience/visitor behavior, ultimately contributing to the prosperity and sustainability of the CCSIs. Irene holds a Master's degree in Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship from EUR and a BA in Marketing and Communication from Athens University of Economics and Business.
Isabelle Salle (observer)
I am an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in macroeconomics at the University of Ottawa and a research fellow at the University of Amsterdam. I work on behavioral macroeconomics using surveys, experiments and models.Penn
All Participants
Xi Song
Xi Song is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research uses statistical, demographic, and computational techniques to understand how patterns of social inequality are created and changed within and across generations. Her current topics of investigation include the gap between factual and perceived inequality, multigenerational social mobility and kinship inequality, the evolution of occupational structure, and statistical methods for characterizing the link between intra- and intergenerational mobility. She received the 2021 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association. Her previous publications have received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association, the International Sociological Association, IPUMS, and the Demographic Research.
Daniel J. Hopkins
Daniel Hopkins is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania whose research centers on American politics, with a special emphasis on racial and ethnic politics, state/local politics, political behavior, and research methods.
Kiran Garimella
Kiran Garimella is an assistant professor of library and information science at Rutgers. Garimella’s research deals with using large-scale data to tackle societal issues such as misinformation, political polarization, or hate speech.
Afsaneh Razi
Afsaneh Razi is an Assistant Professor at the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University. Razi’s research expertise is positioned at the intersection of HCI, Social Computing, AI/ML, Privacy, and Online Safety.
Chris Callison-Burch
Chris Callison-Burch is an associate professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is best known for his research into natural language processing. His current research is focused on applications of large language models to long-standing challenges in artificial intelligence.
Brandon Stewart
Brandon Stewart is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and is also affiliated with the Department of Politics and the Office of Population Research. He develops new quantitative statistical methods for applications across the social sciences. Methodologically his focus is in tools which facilitate automated text analysis and model complex heterogeneity in regression.
Ian Lustick
Ian Lustick holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches Middle Eastern politics, comparative politics, and computer modeling.
Taylor Brown
Taylor Brown is a research scientist/engineer at Facebook. Brown studies group-level patterns using digital trace data and computational methods.
Mark Whiting
Mark E. Whiting builds systems to study how people behave and coordinate at scale. He is a Senior Computational Social Scientist at the CSSLab at the University of Pennsylvania working with Duncan J. Watts, in affiliation with Computer & Information Science in Engineering and Applied Science and Operations, Information and Decisions at Wharton.Rochester
All Participants
Cantay Caliskan
Cantay Caliskan is an assistant professor of instruction at the Goergen Institute for Data Science, University of Rochester. He studied political science, computer science, and statistics during his PhD, and received his degree from Boston University in 2018. Cantay received his BA in Economics, Mathematics, and Intl. and Global Studies from Brandeis University and his MA in International Relations from Koç University. His research interests include computational social science, specifically computer vision, social media analysis, and generative AI.
Ezgi Siir Kibris
Ezgi Siir Kibris is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and an alumna of the MS program in Data Science at the University of Rochester. She has MA degrees in Political Science and European Studies and BA in Economics from Sabanci University. Her dissertation research revolves around judicial politics, international courts, democratic backsliding, and gender. She is interested in quantitative methods, specifically causal inference, machine learning, and natural language processing.
Agnes Horvat
Agnes Horvat is an Associate Professor of Communication and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. Her research lies at the intersection of human-centered computing, computational social science, and communication. Using interdisciplinary approaches, her research group, the Lab on Innovation, Networks, and Knowledge (LINK), investigates how networks induce biased information production, sharing, and processing on digital platforms. For example, they study the impact of networks and diversity on scholarly communication, identify expressions of collective intelligence and opportunities for innovation in crowdsourcing communities, and develop tools to support creativity and predict success in culture industries. Agnes developed courses on networks, media, and AI to train students for careers at the intersection of creative occupations and data science. Her research and teaching have been recognized with an NSF CAREER and CRII Award. She received her PhD in Physics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Prior to becoming a faculty member at Northwestern, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO).
Dino P. Christenson
Dino Pinterpe Christenson is Professor (Ph.D., Ohio State University; B.A., University of Michigan) in the Department of Political Science at Washington University, a Faculty Affiliate in the Division of Computational and Data Science, and a Research Fellow at the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. Christenson studies American political behavior and quantitative methods, with recent work exploring presidential voting behavior, campaign dynamics in presidential primaries and caucuses, the coalition behavior of interest groups, and public opinion and the media environment of institutional outcomes. More generally, his research in American politics concerns electoral behavior, public opinion, political psychology, political communication, interest groups and judicial politics. He has broad methodological interests as well, including survey research, experimental design, longitudinal and nested data models, Bayesian analysis, social network analysis and causal inference.
Bruce Desmarais
Bruce Desmarais is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Faculty Co-Hire of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Penn State University. Professor Desmarais' research focuses on the development and application of statistical methods in the study of Social and Political systems that are characterized by interdependence and structural complexity. Network analysis is the primary methodological approach in his research. Areas of application include international conflict and cooperation among countries, campaign finance and co-sponsorship networks in the US Congress, digital communication networks in local government, diffusion of public policies across the US states, and the interconnectedness of scientific research and US regulatory policymaking. His current research agenda is generously supported by three grants from the US National Science foundation and one from the Russell Sage Foundation.
Bryce J. Dietrich
Bryce Dietrich is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University and research scholar at the Center for C-SPAN Scholarship and Engagement (CCSE). His research uses novel quantitative, automated, and machine learning methods to analyze non-traditional data sources such as audio (or speech) data and video data. These methods are used to understand the causes and consequences of non-verbal cues, such as vocal inflections and walking trajectories, especially as they relate to elite political behavior.
Gourab Ghoshal
Gourab Ghoshal is Professor of Physics and Astronomy with joint appointments at the departments of Computer Science and Mathematics. He came to Rochester from Harvard University, where he was a Research Scientist at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and a member of multidisciplinary Orgins of Life Initiative. Hailing from New Delhi, India, Professor Ghoshal got his BS and MS degrees at the University of London, UK (BS and MSc in theoretical Physics, 2004). He did his doctoral-thesis work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (PhD in Physics, 2009) during which he attended the prestigious Complex Systems summer school at the Santa Fe Institute, NM and the Theoretical Physics school at Les Houches near Chamonix in France. Following his PhD, he was a postdoctoral scientist jointly at Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School as well as a visiting scientist at the Media Lab, MIT.
Jonathan Herington
Jonathan Herington is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, and Assistant Director of Graduate Education in the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering, at the University of Rochester. Between 2014 and 2019 Jonathan was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Kansas State University. Previously Jonathan was a Research Fellow in the Medicine, Ethics, Society and History unit of the University of Birmingham. Jonathan completed my PhD in the School of Philosophy, at the Australian National University. Jonathan is a native of Brisbane, Australia and recieved a BA (Hons I) in International Relations and Philosophy, and a BSc in Microbiology, from the University of Queensland. Prior to undertaking my PhD Jonathan was located at the Centre for International Security Studies, University of Sydney.
Yichen Li
Yichen Li is currently a rising senior at the University of Rochester, where he specializes in Data Science and Business. His research focuses on advanced applications in computer vision, specifically developing methods to analyze political polarization and to measure 3D distances within 2D images. He also has significant experience in leveraging Large Language Models for predicting financial metrics such as stock prices and sales volumes for various companies.
Muchen Zhong
Muchen Zhong is a graduating senior at the University of Rochester, majoring in Data Science and Economics. Soon, she will be joining Brown University for the MS program in Data Science. Her recent research involves developing innovative methodologies in computer vision to quantify political polarization and constructing methods to measure 3D distances in 2D frames. She also has research experience in applying natural language processing and network analysis to explore the impact of AI agents on team dynamics, processes, and outcomes. She is interested in computer vision and financial data science.
Adiba Proma
Adiba Proma is a Computer Science PhD student at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on modeling human interactions within social networks, particularly exploring the impacts of these interactions in the contexts of climate change and elections. She is also keen on exploring how various technologies, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), recommendation algorithms, and user interface (UI) designs, influence social interactions on online platforms.
Amber Shen
Amber(Yiyang) Shen is a graduating MSW student at Columbia University. Amber's research interests encompass minority mental health, homelessness, poverty, aging, and stigma, with a keen focus on leveraging Artificial Intelligence in mental health interventions. She has gained hands-on research experience at Columbia Population Research Center and the Action Lab for Social Justice, where she spearheaded projects exploring topics ranging from longitudinal studies of community wellbeing to mental health in low-income neighborhoods.
Bibandhan Poudyal
Bibandhan Poudyal is a Physics PhD student at the University of Rochester specializing in complex network analysis, particularly its application to understanding how human mobility impacts urban well-being.
Dihan Shi
Dihan Shi is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He uses survey experiments and computer vision to study comparative political economy and public opinion. He also studies causal inference problems in survey experimentation and remote sensing. He holds a B.S. degree summa cum laude in Mathematics (Honors) and Political Economy (Honors) from Georgetown University (2022).
Haofeng Ma
Haofeng Ma is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at The University of Iowa. As a comparativist, he is broadly interested in comparative public opinion, language and ethnicity, and political economy. His methodological approaches include spatio-temporal statistics, Bayesian statistics, causal inference, natural language processing, and deep learning. He also utilizes GIS techniques, such as geoprocessing and remote sensing, to enhance data availability, analytics, and visualization. He holds an MS in Informatics from The University of Iowa (2023), a master’s degree in Political Theory from Sun Yat-sen University (2019), and a bachelor’s degree in Politics and Public Administration from Xiangtan University (2017).
Homayra Tabassum
Homayra Tabassum is a graduate student at the University of Rochester, where she is pursuing a master's degree in Data Science. Prior to this, she completed her undergraduate studies in Computer Science and Engineering. Homayra's academic and research interests bridge the domains of Data Science and Social Sciences, with a particular focus on advancing diversity and gender equity within STEM fields.
Jefferson Leal
Jefferson Leal is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Rochester. Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, he has an MA in Political Science and BA degrees in Economics and International Relations from the University of São Paulo. His research interests include Latin American Politics, populism, polarization, inequality, and democratic backsliding. His methodological interests concern causal inference, machine learning, and natural language processing.
Ke Xu
Ke Xu is pursuing a duel degree in Data Science and Business Analytics from the University of Rochester with interests in applied machine learning, neural networks, and image datas.
Neeley Pate
Neeley is a first year Ph. D. student in the Computer Science department at the University of Rochester. She previously graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a minor in Journalism. Currently, she works with the Rochester Human-Computer Interaction Lab (ROCHCI) with interests in online trust, misinformation and propaganda, and social network construction.
Nour Assili
Nour Assili is an undergraduate Data Science major at the University of Rochester, with a concentration in Economics. She has actively contributed to research projects at the university's Human Computer Interaction Lab. Nour was also a software engineer at early-stage startups, where she built applications at the intersection of tech and social sciences. Her academic and professional interests are centered around Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Blockchain technologies. Currently, she is exploring how Blockchain could ensure that profit-maximizing corporations do not totally control superintelligence.
Omer Antalyali
Omer Lutfi Antalyali currently holds a position at Suleyman Demirel University as a Professor of Management and Strategy. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Rochester's Psychology Department, focusing on a year-long engagement. His primary research project, employee meta-motivation, integrates his interests in leadership, motivation, and advanced statistical analysis. Recently, he has expanded his research scope into the realm of computational social science, embarking on a project aimed at predicting achievement goal orientation through vocal features. His work significantly enhances the intersection of management strategy and technology-driven psychological research, contributing valuable insights to both fields.
Pavithra Priyadarshini Selvakumar
Pavi Selvakumar, is a Ph.D. candidate from the Environmental Science Graduate Program at Oklahoma State University. After completing her Bachelor's in Information Technology at Anna University, India, she went on to earn her Master's in Environmental Assessment and Management at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. Her research interests include environmental stewardship, enhancing university campus sustainability, and promoting environmental sustainability through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). In the future, Pavi aspires to get into academia, pursuing path-breaking research in the field of environmental sustainability and being a part of an endearing teaching fraternity.
Sayli Shivalkar
Sayli Shivalkar is pursuing a Master's in Data Science at the University of Rochester. She focuses on creating data science systems that solve fundamental issues and generate measurable impacts. Having co-founded a data science startup in the agri-tech space to improve agricultural productivity, she aspires to use data to solve social issues. Her areas of interest are Responsible AI, knowledge graphs, signal processing, and AI Product Management. She has worked on applications of data science in NIR spectroscopy, LLMs, recommendation systems, CPG, knowledge graphs, and venture capital. Her motto is to learn and unlearn effectively with a passion for making data science accessible to everyone.
Suganya Schmura
Suganya Rajendran Schmura is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Rochester. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, Tamil heritage language maintenance and identity, language variation and change, linguistic anthropology, and arts-based ethnography. She is currently investigating a linguistic variable in Tamil that seems to be grammaticalizing, or shifting from a lexical word to a grammatical unit, by employing both quantitative and qualitative methods within a natural language corpus she created. Suganya holds an MS in Applied Linguistics from Texas A&M University-Commerce and a BS in Biological Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University.
Tianhui Wu
Tianhui Wu is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at The University of Iowa, with a keen interest in comparative public opinion and political behaviors. Her current research focuses on perceived corruption, mass media, and contentious politics, employing both statistical and computational methods. She earned her BA in Political Science and Public Administration from Fudan University and her MA in Political Theory from Sun Yat-sen University.
Wei-Lun Lo
Wei-Lun Lo is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Rochester. His research interests span health, causal inference, and family economics. His research investigates impacts of children’s health on families' decision-making. He is also broadly interested in applying and integrating techniques from analyses of text corpora and geographic patterns to generate new insights into healthcare fraud and abuse. He holds an MA in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BBA in Finance from National Taiwan University.
Yitao Yu
Yitao Yu is a new graduate Data Science student at the University of Rochester. During his undergraduate program, he primarily focused on studying Machine Learning and its various fields of application. He also uses Kaggle in his leisure time, learning to solve different tasks such as recommendation systems, image description, visual localization, time series, and more.
Zhe Chen
Zhe Chen is currently pursuing her doctoral degree at the Warner School of Education. Simultaneously, she is enrolled as a student in the M.S. in Data Science program at the Goergen Institute for Data Science. She holds a Master's degree in Education Policy from the University of Rochester and a Master's degree in International Education from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on examining education policy, social movements such as the opt-out movement and teachers' strikes, and rural education using national representative data.Rutgers
All Participants
Michael Kenwick
Michael Kenwick is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
Katie McCabe
Katie McCabe is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
Andrey Tomashevskiy
Andrey Tomashevskiy is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
Ethan Busby
Ethan Busby is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University.
Thomas R. Davidson
Thomas R. Davidson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University.
Kiran Garimella
Kiran Garimella is an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University
Jianing Li
Jianing Li is an Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University (Fall 2024)
Katya Ognyanova
Katya Ognyanova is an Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.
Robert Schub
Robert Schub is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
Tiago Ventura
Tiago Ventura is an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
Muhammad Ammar
Muhammad Ammar is an interdisciplinary academic from Pakistan and a PhD candidate in Political Science at Rutgers University. His research in comparative politics, which has appeared in Peace Review and the Journal of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, seeks to explore the mediatized performances of South Asian populism. Before coming to Rutgers, Ammar finished his Bachelor of Arts at Bennington College in Vermont, where he had a triple focus in Political Science, Theatre, and Literary Translation.Katelyn Barnes
Katelyn Barnes is a PhD student in Political Science at Rutgers University. Her research interests include Women, Peace, and Security research, specifically the effects of women's inclusion in the peace process. Methodologically, she is interested in using text analysis to understand the effects of gender equality provisions within peace treaties and the contexts in which these provisions are best implemented. Before coming to Rutgers, Katelyn studied at Queen's University Belfast as a Fulbright scholar in the Global Security and Borders program. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Dayton.
Kateryna Bystrytska
Kateryna Bystrytska is a PhD student at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University (media studies). She obtained her MA in public and organizational relations from Montclair State University as a Fulbright student from Ukraine. Kateryna's research focus is political communication and information warfare, especially the role of emerging media and technologies in wartime. She employs mixed methods to study the mediation of war through emerging platforms. Kateryna also worked as a journalist in Ukraine and a communication officer in governmental and international nongovernmental organizations.
Xiao Chen
Xiao Chen is Associate Professor of Management at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Xiao's primary research interests include goal setting and priming in organizational behavior, evidence-based management, and cross-cultural management. Xiao received his Ph.D. in Management from the University of Toronto and his M.A. in Asian Studies and Graduate Certificate in Survey and Data Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Sandra George
Sandra George is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Rutgers University with a focus on populism, South-Asia, environmental studies, and gender politics. Her research background includes collaborations with organizations like CUTS International and the Rohingya Human Rights Initiative. Sandra is the recipient of the Excellence Fellowship and has been recognized as a conference awardee at the upcoming European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR).
Laura Geronimo
Laura Geronimo is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. She begins a Postdoc in the Rutgers Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences this summer, supporting research efforts within the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH) focused on coastal climate adaptation.
Majka Hahn
Majka Hahn is a doctoral student in the Rutgers University Political Science department. Her primary research interest is the politics of reproduction and it's related social movements. Her current research examines the use and effectiveness of different social movement frames by the reproductive freedom movement in their abortion related campaigns. She is also working on a methodological project focusing on the relationship between the quantitative measurement of gender equality and the norms of feminist methodology. Prior to joining the PhD program at Rutgers, she received her MA in political science from McGill University and was the centre-wide research coordinator for the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity at the University of British Columbia.
Rachel Horvath
Rachel Horvath is a PhD student in the Political Science department at Rutgers University. She studies social media as both a non traditional news source and as a venue for social movement activism. Methodologically, she is interested in learning computational methods to analyze large sets of social media data. She is currently working on a sentiment analysis of Instagram captions posted by an activism account to understand how emotional appeals correlate with share rates. Rachel received her Bachelor’s of Arts from Lycoming College.
Pooja Iyer
Pooja Iyer (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin), as of Fall 2024 is an Assistant Professor of Advertising in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations, and Media Design College of Media, Communication, and Information at University of Colorado Boulder. Pooja’s research lies at the intersection of big data, privacy, and personalization in the advertising and marketing industry. She primarily studies the impact of big data and AI on emerging media, the politics of platforms, and consumer behavior. Pooja has spent almost a decade in advertising in strategic media planning as an Associate Media Director on brands such as Welch’s, RadioShack, Whole Foods Market, and American Petroleum Institute, among others. With extensive industry experience, Pooja has a keen interest in bridging the gap between academia and industry. Pooja has participated in many industry events including being on a professional panel discussion on location-based targeting and analytics. She has also guest lectured on big data and media strategy at Texas Christian University, Texas State University, and the University of Texas at Austin.
Melanie Kwestel
Melanie Kwestel is a doctoral candidate at Rutgers School of Communication and Information. Her research focuses on how organizations espousing minority opinions collaborate to gain saliency in larger networks to impact public or corporate policy. Her dissertation explores organizing around offshore wind energy on the east coast.
Chaosu Li
Chaosu Li is an assistant professor in the Urban Governance and Design Thrust at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). He received his master degree in City and Regional Planning from Peking University and Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from UNC-Chapel Hill. He has expertise in urban form, urban sustainability and resilience, and applied GIS.
Madeliene Merrick
Madeliene Merrick is a PhD student in sociology at York University. Her research focuses on culture, values, communications technology, and non-profit organizations. More specifically she builds upon her interdisciplinary background and professional experience within the Canadian non-profit sector to examine nongovernmental actors' use of social media to influence societal norms.
Lila O'Brien-Milne
Lila O’Brien-Milne is a doctoral student in Political Science at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on how state transformations affect women’s political power, with a particular focus on collective action. Before pursuing graduate school, she studied gender, development, and violence for a research firm in Washington, DC. She received her B.A. in Political Science from Bryn Mawr College and her M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from Tufts University.
Yehuda Perry
Yehuda Perry is a PhD candidate in Information Science at Rutgers University. His research focus in new methodologies for improving fairness in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms. Yehuda received his MSc in Applied Data Science from Syracuse University and BA in Social Science and Industrial Engineering from the OU of Israel. Yehuda is an experienced software engineer and data scientist.Katherine Scrivani
Yuehong Cassandra Tai
Cassandra Tai is a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Social Data Analytics at Penn State University. Her research examines elite behavior and public opinion using millions of social media posts, thousands of national survey datasets, Bayesian and text analysis, and machine learning methods.
Nan Yu
Dr. Nan Yu is a Professor of Communication at Nicholson School of Communication and Media with University of Central Florida. Her research focuses on health communication and communication technology. She currently serves on the editorial board of some leading journals in the field such as Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly and Mass Communication and Society.
Samantha Koprowski
Samantha Koprowski is a PhD student in Political Science at Rutgers University studying Women & Politics and American Politics.Singapore
All Participants
Han Li
Han Li is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Communication and New Media at National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on AI in healthcare, computational communication, human-computer interaction, and online support communities. As a computational and mixed-method researcher, she used a wide variety of research methods to explore how information and communication technologies can be designed and used to improve health and well-being, enhanced social relationship, and contribute to social good.
Rongxin Ouyang
Rongxin Ouyang is an PhD student at the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. He researches the societal and political implications of digital media using computational, causal, or quantitative methods; with a particular interest in the inequality and audience engagement of social media.
Anita Kuei-Chun Liu
Anita Kuei-Chun Liu is a Postdoctoal Fellow in the Department of Communication and New Media at National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on social movements, public opinion, and framing effects in political, health, and science information contexts. Her work draws methods from social and computer sciences to explore the online discussion and role of social media, in the promotion of social movements and social change, and the effects of campaign framing on public opinion(e.g., computational text analysis, network analysis and experiment). She recevided a M.A. in Communication and Information from Rutgers University–New Brunswick, and a Ph.D. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
Jinyuan Zhan
Jinyuan Zhan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication and New Media at National University of Singapore. Her research interests lie in health communication, human-machine relationship and media psychology. She is currently investigating the potential harms of AI and how they could impact human's mental and physical health.
Renwen Zhang
Renwen Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. Her research lies at the intersection of health communication, human-computer interaction, and interpersonal communication. She examines the design, use, and effects of digital technology for promoting wellbeing and mental health.
Subhayan Mukerjee
Subhayan Mukerjee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media, and a principal investigator at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community at the National University of Singapore. He researches online audiences using computational methods, and teaches courses in quantitative methods, programming, and data visualization.
Prasanta Bhattacharya
Dr. Prasanta Bhattacharya is a Senior Scientist and Innovation Lead with the Social and Cognitive Computing Department at the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR Singapore, where he works on network science and behavioral analytics. Prasanta holds a Ph.D in Information Systems from the Department of Information Systems and Analytics, National University of Singapore, where he studied network science with a special focus on predictive and inferential methods in large social networks. His current research agenda aims at understanding the role of big data in emerging social and business applications from finance, education and healthcare. Prasanta actively collaborates with major industry partners from around the world, and has presented his research in leading computer science, information systems and marketing science venues.
Noshir Contractor
Dr. 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 former President of the International Communication Association (ICA). Professor Contractor has been at the forefront of three emerging interdisciplines: 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.
He Tianyu
Dr. Tianyu [tea-n-you] is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organisation at the National University of Singapore Business School. She received her.D. in Management from INSEAD; M.A. in Sociology from Emory University; LL.B in Sociology and B.S. in Psychology from Peking University. She is curious about characteristics that set high-performing groups apart and seek to discover ways to enhance collaborative problem-solving and creativity. Employing a dynamic mixed-methods approach, her research delves into well-established aspects of designing groups, such as effective hierarchies and leadership, while also exploring exciting new frontiers such as the integration of technological tools and Artificial Intelligence in collaboration.
Yingdan Lu
Yingdan Lu (PhD, Stanford University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on digital technology, political communication, and information manipulation in authoritarian and democratic contexts. Her research employs both computational and qualitative methods to understand how authoritarian governments use digital media and artificial intelligence to maintain their rule, and how individuals experience visual media and the impacts. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Political Communication, New Media & Society, Human-Computer Interaction, Computational Communication Research, and among other peer-reviewed journals.
Jiaxin Pei
Jiaxin Pei is a fifth-year PhD Candidate at the School of Information, University of Michigan. He works on Human-centered AI, NLP, Information Systems and Computational Social Science. He is the author of POTATO, an open-source machine learning annotation system used by worldwide institutions. His work has received best paper and honorable mention awards at multiple conferences and workshops.
Koustuv Saha
Koustuv Saha is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2021. His research interests are in social computing, computational social science, human-centered machine learning, and FATE. He adopts machine learning, natural language, and causal inference analysis to examine human behavior and wellbeing using different forms of digital data, including social media and multimodal sensing data. His work questions the underlying assumptions of data-driven inferences and the possible harms such inferences might lead to. His research is situated in an interdisciplinary and human-centered context and bears implications for various stakeholders. His work has been published at various venues, including CHI, CSCW, ICWSM, IMWUT (UbiComp), Scientific Reports, JMIR, FAccT, among others. He is a recipient of the 2021 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, Foley Scholarship Award from the GVU Center, Snap Research Fellowship, and a finalist of the Symantec Graduate Fellowship. His research has won the Outstanding Study Design Award at ICWSM, and has been covered by several media outlets, including the New York Times, Vox, CBC Radio, NBC, 11Alive, the Hill, and the Commonwealth Times. He was previously a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Montreal, in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE) group. During his Ph.D., he did research internships at Snap Research, Microsoft Research, Max Planck Institute, and Fred Hutch Cancer Research. Earlier, he completed his B.Tech (Hons.) in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. He was awarded the NTSE Scholarship by the Govt. of India, and he has six years of overall industry research experience.
Joe Simons
Dr. Joe Simons is a Principal Scientist and Group Manager (Social & Behavioural Inference) in the Social & Cognitive Computing (SCC) Department at the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) and Lead of A*STAR’s Social Sciences & Technology Horizontal Technology Programme Office (SST HTCO). A social psychologist by training, he has extensive experience collaborating with computational scientists and leading interdisciplinary research teams. His work applies methodologies from both behaviorual and computational sciences – such as predictive modelling and language processing - to better address social-behavioural questions. His research has been featured in outlets including Communication Research, IEEE Pervasive Computing, and Media Psychology
Chris Chao Su
Chris Chao Su (Ph.D., The Chinese University of Hong Kong) is an assistant professor of Emerging Media Studies (EMS) and Computing & Data Science (CDS) at Boston University, USA. His research examines the intersection of media audiences, social media, and platform governance, employing computational methods. His work has been published in the Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Digital Journalism, The International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, International Journal of Communication, etc.
Liang Ze Wong
Dr. Liang Ze Wong is a Senior Scientist at IHPC. He also teaches business analytics at NUS Business School, where he is an adjunct assistant professor. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Washington, where he researched abstract algebra and topology. His current interests are in natural language processing, topic modelling, data analytics, and in applications of large language models to qualitative social science research. He was an attendee of SICSS-Singapore 2023.
Diyi Yang
Diyi Yang is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. Her research focuses on human-centered natural language processing and computational social science. She is a recipient of Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2021), NSF CAREER Award (2022), ONR Young Investigator Award (2023), and Sloan Research Fellowship (2024). Her work has received multiple paper awards or nominations at top NLP and HCI conferences (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, SIGCHI, and CSCW).
Chao Yu
Chao Yu (Ph.D., Cornell University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on social impacts of new media. He uses big data studies to uncover hidden patterns on new media platforms that can create inequalities or biases, as well as identifying policies and strategies to improve them.
Alvin Zhou
Dr. Alvin Zhou is an Assistant Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research centers around computational social science and strategic communication. His work has appeared in journals across communication subfields, including New Media & Society, Journal of Communication, Journal of Public Relations Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Mass Communication and Society, Public Relations Review, Social Media + Society, and Political Communication. Dr. Zhou earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School. Prior to that, he earned an M.A. in Statistics and Data Science from the Wharton School and an M.A. in Strategic Public Relations from the University of Southern California Annenberg School. He graduated from Tsinghua University with dual degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Journalism.
Xueyan Cao, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Xueyan Cao is a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interest involves health communication and human-machine interaction. She attempts to explore the interaction between health beliefs and the media environment through the computational approach.
Yi Ting Chen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Yi Ting Chen is a MA Research student at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication in the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include computational communication, social media and news. She is particularly keen in exploring the impact of regulations on news production and consumption.
Victoria Chua, Nanyang Technological University
Victoria Chua is a master’s student in Psychology (Research), and the mental health product manager in Mindsigns Health, a start-up focused on neuropsychiatric care. Victoria’s research interests involve drawing upon psychological and computational methods to analyse and understand teamwork communications, parent-child interactions, extremist content and digital mental health.
Jianing Deng, Duke University
Jianing Deng is a master student at Duke University, political science department. She majors in Behavior and Identity and sub-major in Political Methodology at Duke. Her research attempts to investigate political communication, especially propaganda in authoritarian regime, with a regional focus on China. Methodologically, she interest in using computational methods to analyze the dynamics of state-citizen interaction in digital spaces. Prior to graduate school, she received BA in political science at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou in 2023.
Min Gong, National University of Singapore
Min Gong is a first-year PhD student at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, and her research interests include the trade-off between data use and privacy protection, the balance between privacy policy formulation and generative AI evolution, racial representation and meritocracy in public service systems, etc.
Kunmei Han, National University of Singapore
Kunmei Han is a PhD candidate in Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at National University of Singapore. Kunmei’s research focus on corpus linguistics and clinical linguistics. Her current study investigates language changes in a normal aging process. Kunmei got her bachelor’s degree from Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Yuhan Hu, University of Oxford
Yuhan Hu is a DPhil candidate in Politics at University of Oxford and currently an exchange scholar at Yale University. She applies computational methods to study contentious politics under authoritarian contexts. Her ongoing DPhil thesis examines the authoritarian regimes’ responses to collective action.
Tengjiao Huang, DSO National Laboratories
Dr. Huang Tengjiao, Senior Social and Behavioural Research Scientist at DSO National Laboratories, leverages psychological insights to bolster national security. Holding a Ph.D. in Psychology from Singapore Management University, she has published research that informs and addresses critical global issues like climate change. Her expertise includes motivation, individual differences, and decision-making, with a current interest in harnessing computational techniques to address societal challenges.
Xiaoyun Huang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Xiaoyun Hunag is an MPhil student in Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. With an interdisciplinary background in both engineering and social science, she conducts mixed-method projects that combine perspectives of computational social science and qualitative studies. Currently, she is working on her MPhil thesis on feminism and digital communities.
Jianfeng Lan, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Jianfeng (Jeff) Lan is a Ph.D. student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, School of Media and Communication. His research specializes in human-machine communication, with a focus on the socio-psychological impact on various social relationships such as intimacy, trust, and collaboration. His previous research encompassed topics like virtual uploaders (VUP), gender stereotypes in machine interactions, and the dynamics of human-machine love affairs.
Gionnieve Lim, Singapore University of Technology and Design
Gionnieve Lim is a doctoral student at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. Her work lies at the intersection of human-AI interaction and misinformation, where she investigates the use of automated labelling interventions to mitigate misinformation on social media. She is interested in how collaboration takes place between humans and AI and takes a human-centered approach in her work, focusing on aspects like trust and agency.
Xinyi Liu, Northwestern University
Xinyi Liu is a Master’s student at Nanyang Technological University, and an incoming student at Northwestern. She is interested in experimental and computational methods to study digital media technologies in various topics.
Siyuan Brandon Loh, Institute of High Performance Computing (Astar)
Brandon is concurrently a research engineer at the Institute of High Performance Computing and is pursuing an MS in Statistics at the National University of Singapore. He is incredibly passionate about advancing social science research through honest and transparent data science practises.
Qianfeng Lu, Università della Svizzera italiana
Qianfeng Lu is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Communication, Culture, and Society at the Università della Svizzera italiana (University of Lugano) in Switzerland. Her research focuses on patient-provider communication, patient empowerment, and health literacy. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Medical Internet Research, BMC Public Health, and Patient Education and Counseling. Her latest research explores physicians' roles in protecting patients from misinformation on social media.
Tianqi Song, National University of Singapore
Tianqi Song is currently a PhD student in Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. Her work lies at the intersection of computer science, design and psychology, including human-centered AI, human-AI collaboration and visualization. Her recent work has focused on designing multi-agent systems for social good and exploring AI literacy for marginalized groups.
Jiajun Tang, Nanjing University
Jiajun Tang is a master's student at the School of Information Management, Nanjing University. His research interests focus on library and information science. He attempts to study issues related to reading in society using methods such as large-scale text analysis and complex network analysis.
Youyi Wei, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Youyi Wei is a PhD student in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are digital journalism and computational social science. She is exploring visual media in witness news and gatekeeping dynamics on social media.
Tianyi Yang, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Tianyi Yang is a PhD student in Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include online collective action, youth culture, and algorithmic impact. She is exploring popular culture topics by combining computational methods with qualitative methods.
Xuzhen Yang, Michigan State University
Xuzhen is an incoming PhD student in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. Her general research interests lie in computational social science, news platformization, mobile media, and media ecology. From a computational methodology perspective, she is particularly drawn towards social network analysis, automated content/text analysis, and causal inference. She is currently using the Large Language Model to examine the manipulative tactics applied by news media across multiple platforms.
Guangyu Cui
Guangyu is a research assistant at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community at the National University of Singapore majored in Data Science and Analytics. His research interest lies in utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches and Large Language Models to better understand human linguistic behaviours on online communities and social media.
Xuejiao Lin
Xuejiao Lin is a Ph.D. candidate in Marketing at the School of Business, Renmin University of China. She is also a visiting Ph.D. student at the National University of Singapore, specializing in Communication and New Media. Her research focuses on social media marketing and the impact of social factors on consumer behavior.UCLA
All Participants
Jennie Brand
Jennie E. Brand is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is Co-Director of the Center for Social Statistics (CSS) at UCLA. She has been Chair of the Methodology Section and the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and Vice-President of the Board of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28). She previously served on the councils of the ASA Methodology, Sociology of Education, and Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility sections. She was elected to the Sociological Research Association (SRA), an honor society for excellence in research, in 2019, and received the ASA Methodology Leo Goodman Mid-Career Award in 2016, and honorable mention for the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility William Julius Wilson Mid-Career Award in 2014. Prof. Brand is a member of the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was previously a member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey (GSS). She is Associate Editor of AAAS’s Science Advances, the open access extension of Science magazine, and serves on the editorial boards of Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, Sociological Methods and Research, Sociological Science, and Sociology Compass. She also previously served on the boards of American Sociological Review, Demography, and SAGE Research Methods. Prof. Brand studies social stratification and inequality, mobility, social demography, education, and methods for causal inference.
Ian Lundberg
Ian Lundberg is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. His research develops statistical methods and applies those methods to questions about inequality, poverty, and mobility. After completing his PhD in sociology at Princeton University, Ian spent one year as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Ian enjoys hiking, surfing, and making oatmeal with blueberries.
Kristin Liao
Kristin Liao is a PhD student in Sociology, a Master's student in Statistics and Data Science, and a NICHD trainee at the California Center for Population Research at UCLA. Kristin studies the social stratification and mobility of diverse immigrant populations in the US labor market and how higher education and family demographic processes shape their heterogeneous trajectories. Kristin is also interested in using causal inference and computational methods to motivate development in social theories.
Christina Wilmot
Christina Wilmot is a Ph.D. student in sociology at UCLA. Previously, she studied computer science and worked as a software engineer at Google. She is interested in the varying intersections of technology and society, including using novel computational methods to analyze social information, studying online social behavior, and looking at the effects of the adoption of new technologies on a society. She also aims to make computational methods more accessible to social researchers from a variety of substantive and methodological fields.
Shibing Zhou
Shibing Zhou is a doctoral student in the UCLA Sociology department. Her research interests lie in the intersection of political sociology and science and technology studies. Methodologically, She is interested in text analysis. She holds a BS in Physics and Math from the University of Michigan and a MA in Sociology from the University of Chicago.
Saadia Gabriel
Saadia Gabriel is a Data Science Faculty Fellow at NYU and incoming UCLA Computer Science Assistant Professor. Her research revolves around natural language processing and machine learning, with a particular focus on building systems for understanding how social commonsense manifests in text (i.e. how do people typically behave in social scenarios), as well as mitigating spread of false or harmful text (e.g. Covid-19 misinformation). Her work has been covered by a wide range of media outlets like Forbes and TechCrunch. It has also received a 2019 ACL best short paper nomination, a 2019 IROS RoboCup best paper nomination, a best paper award at the 2020 WeCNLP summit and a 2023 MIT Generative AI Impact award. She was named on Forbes' 30 under 30 2024 list. She previously was a MIT CSAIL Postdoctoral Fellow and received her PhD from the University of Washington.
Chad Hazlett
Chad Hazlett is a professor at UCLA in the Department of Statistics and Data Science and in the Department of Political Science. His methodological work focuses on 'feasible' or 'practical' causal inference: developing research methods that enable researchers across disciplines to more feasibly make credible causal inferences from the available data and assumptions. His substantive work has focused on civil war, indiscriminate violence, and mass atrocity.
Nathan Hoffmann
Nathan Hoffmann is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he focuses on international migration, education, sexuality, and quantitative methods. As a social demographer, he is interested in how state policies and other national institutions affect the decisions and well-being of immigrants. He also engages in methodological research with the aim of educating social scientists in advanced statistical and machine learning methods. His work has been published in Social Forces, International Migration Review, Population Research and Policy Review, and other venues. He holds master's degrees in Statistics and Sociology from UCLA and in Social Policy from University College London.
Nanum Jeon
Nanum Jeon is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and an M.S. Student in Statistics and Data Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is forging an academic path at the intersection of sociology, statistics, and data science, affiliated with the Social Inequality Data Science Lab (SIDS-Lab) and the California Center for Population Research. She is advised by Jennie E. Brand and Mark S. Handcock. Before coming to UCLA, she worked in public policy think tanks, including the Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo, Japan.
Allison Koenecke
Allison Koenecke is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. Her research on algorithmic fairness applies computational methods, such as machine learning and causal inference, to study societal inequities in domains from online services to public health. Koenecke is regularly quoted as an expert on disparities in automated speech-to-text systems. She previously held a postdoctoral researcher role at Microsoft Research and received her PhD from Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering.
Gabriel Rossman
Gabriel Rossman is a professor of sociology at UCLA. He studies diffusion of innovation, moral disreputable economic transactions, and the entertainment industry. His work uses simulation, diffusion analysis, social networks, vignette experiments, and plain old regression.
Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld
Professor Steinert-Threlkeld is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. His research seeks to understand protest dynamics using natural language processing, computer vision, and large-scale simulations. He has studied protests around the world, including the Arab Spring, East Asia, and the Americas. His newest work looks at evasion of the Great Firewall in China during COVID-19, signalling on social media during the Syrian civil war, how state violence can make protests smaller or larger, and the effect of social media taxation. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and World Development and received coverage from Al-Jazeera, The Atlantic, Business Insider, The Economist, The New York Times, and WIRED (2).
Shuhan (Alice) Ai
Shuhan Ai is a doctoral student at UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, majored in Higher Education and Organizational Change. Her research examines how college experiences facilitates women of color's STEM career aspiration and trajectories. She is very interested in longitudinal studies and causal inference, as well as how to use machine learning in higher education research.
Luoman Bao
Luoman Bao is an Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. Her research areas include aging, health, and family, focusing on aging experiences, the involved inequalities, and their implications for older people’s health. She is also interested in applying causal inference and machine learning methods to research.
Ayumi Hashimoto
Ayumi Hashimoto is a visiting scholar at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a post-doctoral fellow at the Faculty of Economics at Keio University, holding a PhD in Health Sciences and Nursing from the University of Tokyo. Her research interest is evaluating efficiency of public health policies.
Efraín García Sánchez
Efraín García Sánchez, Ph.D., is Economic Mobility Fellow at SPARQ, Stanford University. His research examines how individuals perceive, understand, and respond to social and economic inequality. He is interested in the psychosocial processes shaping people's attitudes toward policies to reduce poverty and inequality.
Earl Greer
Earl Greer is a PhD student in Health Policy & Management at UCLA. His research interests focus on big data analytics and machine learning with correlations to healthcare delivery and health outcomes. He holds a B.S. in Sociology and an MPH in Health Policy and Management from Texas A&M University.
Tianji Jiang
Tianji Jiang is a PhD candidate in information studies at UCLA. His research interests include data curation, information behaviors, and science of science. His ongoing project is studying the reusability of scientific data, and exploring how to facilitate data sharing and reuse to benefit social science research.
Honeiah Karimi
Honeiah Karimi is a Ph.D. candidate in Education with an emphasis in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests include applications of NLP methods in educational research, educational measurement, and language learning in Virtual Reality. She holds a BA and an MA in Linguistics.
Meiyi Li
Meiyi Li is a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research centers on family, health, housing, and life course. She studies how the intersection of housing and life-course events generates inequality across life. She also examines the process by which health inequality is generated and perpetuated across generations and over time. Methodologically, she has an active interest in causal inference in population studies.
Qianyi Lu
Qianyi Lu is a doctoral student in the Sociology Department of University of Illinois at Urbana-Chaimpan. She enjoys exploring how the intersection of social stratification, occupations, and family relations shapes people's well-being. Her current research applies computational methods to marriage archives in China to investigate the gender dynamics after marriage law reform. Before the PhD program, she earned an MA in sociology from the Renmin University of China and a BA in economic statistics from Jinan University.
Xiaojie Shen
Xiaojie Shen is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Peking University and a visiting student at the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China, Princeton University. He received his B.A. in Public Management with a concentration on demography from Renmin University of China. His research interests intersect family demography and social stratification. He seeks to utilize computational methods to understand changing family behaviors and values among young people in China.
Diana Torres
Diana Torres is a Ph.D. student at UCLA studying Higher Education. Her research explores college affordability and students’ labor market outcomes, with a focus on Latinx and first-generation college students. She has worked as a Data Fellow at The Education Trust and held teaching assistantships for introductory R courses.
Sara Tyberg
Sara Tyberg is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. Her research uses mixed methods to examine race, gender, and class privilege, specifically exploring how privileged groups experience and respond to adversity. Sara also serves as a research assistant for the Mass Shootings in America project at UCSB.
Coral Utnehmer
Coral Utnehmer is a recent UCLA graduate with a BA in Sociology. She is interested in researching intersubjective consensus and competing perspectives. Past and current research focuses on diverse gender identities in interaction.
Michele Wong
Michele Wong is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Initiative to Study Hate, housed in the Division of Social Sciences at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and MS in Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her program of research seeks to understand how intersecting oppressions, such racism and sexism manifest in gendered racism to influence health and well-being among Asian American women both structurally (e.g., through systemic mechanisms within institutions such as the workplace) and through individual perceptions.United Arab Emirates (Coming Soon!)
All Participants
Uruguay
All Participants
Guillermo Lezama
Guillermo Lezama is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born and raised in Uruguay, where he also completed his undergraduate studies at the Universidad de la República (Udelar). His research interests lie in the field of Political Economy, specifically in the different approaches that can be used to address Political Economy questions. He is particularly interested in the application of text-learning methods and applied microeconomics to study political behavior.
Elina Gómez
Elina Gómez is a Sociologist, Master in Contemporary Latin American Studies and PhD candidate in Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of the Republic. She is a professor and researcher at the Methods and Data Access Unit (UMAD) of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of the Republic. Her work focuses on the field of computational social sciences and massive text processing. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in programming and text analysis with R.
Fabricio Carneiro
Fabricio Carneiro is a Political Scientist, Master in Political Science by the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella of Buenos Aires and PhD candidate in Political Science by the same University. His research agenda is focused on issues of comparative political economy and comparative politics, in particular wage bargaining models, social policies and redistributive policies.
Nicolás Schmidt
Nicolás Schmidt is a PhD Candidate in Political Science of the University of the Republic (Udelar). He is a member of the coordination team of the Methods and Data Access Unit of the Faculty of Social Sciences. His research agenda focuses on the field of political parties, electoral systems and political regimes, as well as statistical methods applied to political science.
Ivan Schuliaquer
Ivan Schuliaquer is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET, Argentina), professor at the School of Politics and Government of the National University of San Martín (UNSAM, Argentina) and associate researcher at the IRMECCEN (Sorbonne Nouvelle, France). He is a Political Scientist, and he holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Information and Communication Sciences from the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. His research focuses on media systems, political communication, social media, comparative politics and political polarization.
Sergio Toro
Sergio Toro is PhD in Political Science. Professor of the School of Government at the Universidad Mayor. He specializes in comparative politics, Chilean politics and data science for public policy. His specialty is comparative politics, Chilean politics and data science for public policy, subjects in which he has been responsible for FONDECYT and FONDEF projects.
Martín Opertti
Martín Opertti is a Ph.D. Student in Political Science at Duke University. His research focuses on mass political behavior and psychology, with a focus on political information processing and political identities. He is also interested in the application of social network analysis and text as data methods to study online political behavior, particularly political homophily in online interactions.
Germán Rosati
Germán Rosati is a sociologist, Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires, and Master in Generation and Analysis of Statistical Information from the National University of Tres de Febrero. He is an Adjunct Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina. He coordinates the factor~data-laboratory of Computational Social Sciences in the University Diploma in Computational Social Sciences and Digital Humanities at EIDAES-UNSAM. His research focuses on social and agrarian structure and also explores possible applications of Natural Language Processing techniques in the Social Sciences.
Ignacio Zuasnabar
Ignacio Zuasnabar is Sociologist, Master in Society, Economy and Politics of Latin America by the UPV. Professor at the Catholic University of Uruguay and the University of Montevideo on Political Behavior and Public Opinion. Public opinion researcher. Director of the Public Opinion Area of Equipos Consultores. Chair of the Professional Standards Committee of WAPOR (World Association for Public Opinion Research), and member of the Board of Directors of that organization. Consultant to several international organizations.
Jimena Torres
Jimena Torres Álvarez es Licenciada en Ciencia Política y Maestranda en Información y Comunicación (FIC-Udelar). Actualmente se encuentra realizando su tesis de Maestría sobre políticas de telecomunicaciones y medios en Uruguay. Es asistente de investigación del proyecto “Política, polarización y redes sociales en Uruguay” financiado por la fundación Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Colabora en el proyecto de investigación “Política, medios y redes en escenarios polarizados una comparación entre Argentina, Brasil y Uruguay” del Área de Medios, Discursos y Política de la EPyG-UNSAM.
Andrés Wilkins
Andrés Wilkins is a bachelor in Sociology (Universidad de la República, Uruguay) who is intrested in educational inequalities and poverty in Latin America.
Goodfred Schwendenwein
Goodfred Schwendenwein es Licenciado en Ciencia Política y Magister en Derechos Humanos y Democratización. Docente de Ciencia Política y Derecho Electoral en la Universidad de la República.
Patricia Catz
Patricia Catz is a sociologist from Universidad de la República (Uruguay). She has completed various postgraduate courses in data analytics and works in the public sector as the head of a territorial information system. She works on the processing and visualization of sociodemographic data at the subnational level, and she is interested in the visualization of geographic data.
Virginia Recagno
Virginia Recango is an economist from the University of the Republic (Uruguay) specialized in data analysis, with over a decade of experience in statistical analysis, coordination, and communication. She is interested in territorial data analysis and promoting gender equity in technology.
Oscar Javier Maldonado Castañeda
Oscar Javier Maldonado Castañeda is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Colombia). He is currently Director of the Digital and Inventive Methods Laboratory (DiSoR-LAB) at the Universidad del Rosario.
Simón Herrera
My name is Simón Herrera and I am a 20 year old, Cuban born Uruguayan Political Science student at the University of the Republic. I am interested in quantitative social science research, as well as international politics and geopolitical analysis.
Favio Di Ciocco
I'm a PhD student in Physics at the Buenos Aires University. In my research I study political polarization mechanisms applied to complex networks and agent based models. I simulate and analyze the dynamics of these models and then compare the results with data from surveys or taken from social networks platforms.
Daniel Soto
Graduate in Sociology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, with a specialization in Data Science for Public Management. Currently working as an Educational Policy Analyst at the Ministry of Education. Interested in NLP, machine learning, and developing interactive data visualization applications.
Manuela Rivero
Sociologist, research assistant at Cifra, a public opinion consultant in Uruguay. I have studied about the social dilemmas of death and related debates, such as euthanasia. I'm interested in incorporate the daily use of computational social sciences in the profession and in the lines of research that I could approach in the future. Also, for my previous lines, it is quite important to maximize the analysis with the use of its tools.
Joaquín Gimeno
Undergraduate student of Political Science
Adrián Morchio
High school teacher. I work in educational centers of formal secondary education. In addition, I studied a degree in Education at the Faculty of Humanities and Educational Sciences of UdelaR.
Gabriela Mathieu
My professional work is developed in the field of data science applied to the analysis of political and social reality. I have been working in R for more than 10 years as a data scientist/analyst and teacher. I have experience in R package development, Shiny applications and Machine Learning techniques. I also handle Python and SQL, among other languages.Sofía Machado
Joaquín Trinidad
Sara González
Sara González is an associate degree in Social Communication and a student of Sociology.She has work experience in systematization and monitoring of public policies. Her research interests focus on the field of Digital Sociology and the application of the multimethod approach. Her undergraduate thesis studies the Framing and agenda settings of crime news through a multi-method approach.2023
Abu Dhabi
All Participants
Bedoor AlShebli
Bedoor AlShebli is an Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at NYUAD. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Engineering in 2017 from Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, and her MSc in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Bedoor's research focuses on using data science techniques to study social phenomena, with a particular emphasis in the Science of Science. She is interested in the social and economic benefits of diversity, as well as the dynamics of social interaction and cohesion, and frames social science problems in the contexts of data science, big data, and applied machine learning. Her work appeared in major academic journals, including Nature Human Behavior, Nature Communications, Science Advances, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Cumulatively, her work contributes to the fields of computational social science, data science, and machine learning.
Kinga Makovi
Kinga Makovi is an Assistant Professor at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is a co-PI of the Center for Interacting Urban Networks at NYUAD, CITIES. Prior to joining NYUAD, she earned a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and a MS in Mathematical Economics from Corvinus University of Budapest. Makovi's research addresses questions at the intersection of network science, the social determinants of health and environmental behavior, using computational and experimental methods. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and has appeared in Sociological Science and Network Science.
Mario D. Molina
Mario is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Social Science Division at New York University Abu Dhabi, and he will start as an assistant professor at NYUAD in the Fall of 2024. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Cornell University, an MA in Sociology from Universidad Catolica de Chile, and a BA in Philosophy from Universidad de los Andes (Chile). His research lies at the interface of economic sociology, social networks, and computational social science. He broadly considers how organizational structures and network dynamics impact beliefs about unequal rewards and prosocial behaviors and the mechanisms that feedback to sustain or disrupt these social systems. His work has appeared in Organization Science, Science Advances, and the Annual Review of Sociology, among other outlets.
Minsu Park
Minsu Park is an Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi. He develops and applies quantitative and computational methods to study the consumption and production of creative work. His current projects focus on how cultural artifacts/interests flow worldwide and how social traces, such as ratings, reviews, and reviewer identities, shape audiences’ perceptions and engagements online. His research inhabits an interdisciplinary nexus between data science and social science, simultaneously drawing on and contributing to both, and has been published in top-tier venues in both computer and information science conferences (e.g., ISMIR, ICWSM) and interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Science Advances, Nature Human Behaviour). He received his doctorate in Information Science at Cornell University, where he was a member of the Social Dynamics Lab. He is also affiliated with the Center for Data Science at New York University.
Luca Maria Pesando
Luca Maria Pesando is an Associate Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at NYU-AD. Luca holds a PhD in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MA and BA in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. His research lies in the areas of social, economic, and digital demography and explores the interactions between family change and educational inequalities in low- and middle-income countries. More recently, he has conducted research using social media data from Google and Facebook. Having worked with JPAL, the OECD, UNICEF, and other NGOs, Luca has extensive experience in the policy world.
Abdullah Almaatouq
Abdullah Almaatouq is a computational social scientist and Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on improving cooperation, coordination, and collective intelligence in decision-making systems, such as teams, committees, crowds, markets, and elections. Abdullah also explores ways to advance social and behavioral research methodology through innovative research designs and theory-building strategies, with the ultimate goal of developing a deeper understanding of collective decision systems and how to design them effectively in various contexts. He is affiliated with the MIT Center for Computational Engineering, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and the MIT Connection Science Research Initiative. Abdullah holds a PhD in Computational Science and Engineering, as well as dual master's degrees in Media Arts and Sciences (MIT Media Lab) and Computational Science and Engineering from MIT. Prior to joining MIT, he earned his undergraduate degree from Southampton University in the United Kingdom. Professor Almaatouq will give a talk on January 18th, 2024 (tentative).
Edmond Awad
Edmond Awad is a Senior Research Fellow at The Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at University of Oxford. Concurrently, Edmond is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Economics and the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Exeter. In addition, Edmond is an Associate Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Before joining the University of Exeter, Edmond was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Media Lab (2017-2019). In 2016, Edmond led the design and development of Moral Machine, a website that gathers human decisions on moral dilemmas faced by driverless cars. The website has been visited by over 10 million users, who contributed their judgements on 100 million dilemmas. Another website that Edmond co-created, called MyGoodness, collected judgments over 3 million charity dilemmas. Edmond’s work appeared in major academic journals, including Nature, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour, and it has been covered in major media outlets including The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais. Edmond has a bachelor degree (2007) in Informatics Engineering from Tishreen University (Syria), a master’s degree (2011) in Computing and Information Science and a PhD (2015) in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Khalifa University (UAE), and a master’s degree (2017) in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Edmond’s research interests are in the areas of AI, Ethics, Computational Social Science and Multi-agent Systems.
Milena Tsvetkova
Milena Tsvetkova is Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University and postdoctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute. In her research, she uses web-based experiments, agent-based modeling, network analysis, and machine learning on online data to investigate fundamental social phenomena such as cooperation, social contagion, segregation, and inequality. Her work has been sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and Germany’s Volkswagen Foundation, published in high-impact disciplinary and general science journals such as New Media & Society, Sociological Methods & Research, EPJ Data Science, and Science Advances, and covered by The New York Times, The Guardian, and Science, among others. Professor Tsvetkova will give a talk on January 11th, 2024.
Kareem El-Rafei
Kareem is a Research Associate in the Social Science Division at New York University Abu Dhabi. He holds a MSc in Data Analytics from Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as a MSc and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the American University in Cairo. His research lies at the intersection of Computational Social Sciences, Data Science and Machine Learning. His work basically focuses on the development of ML models that analyze big data to address critical questions in the field of Social Sciences such as investigating coverage bias and the migration of scientists. He is advised by Dr. Bedoor Al Shebli at NYUAD and is highly interested in the integration of Machine Learning and Social Sciences.
Fengyuan "Michael" Liu
Michael is a Global PhD Fellow at New York University, advised by Professor Talal Rahwan and Professor Bedoor AlShebli. His research focuses on computational social science and the science of science. Using methods from social science, network science, and computer science, he studies various aspects of scientific editors and the publication process of scientific papers. His work has appeared in Nature Human Behaviour and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as being featured in media outlets such as Nature News, Times Higher Education, and AAAS Eureka Alert. When he is not working, you will likely find him jogging or playing chess.
Thomas Marlow
Thomas Marlow is a postdoctoral fellow at the New York University Abu Dhabi, Center for Interacting Urban Networks (CITIES). Thomas received his PhD in Sociology from Brown University in Spring 2020. His research sits at the intersection of environmental and urban sociology. It seeks to use innovative computational social science methodologies to answer questions about the emergence and maintenance of urban and environmental inequalities during global climate change.
Maria Sahakyan
Maria Sahakyan obtained her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Khalifa University. Currently she holds the position of a postdoctoral associate at New York University Abu Dhabi, in Computational Social Science. She primarily focuses her academic endeavors on computational social science and explainable artificial intelligence by exploring the societal and economic advantages associated with diversity, while also leveraging XAI methodologies as versatile instruments for data analysis.
Anahit Sargsyan
Anahit Sargsyan is a PhD student at TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology. Her research lies at the intersection of Computational Social Science, Data Science and AI. From deciphering the complexities of social media networks to investigating the subtle nuances of information decay patterns, she aims to understand how people interact and behave in the digital landscape.
Abdul Basit Adeel
I am an analytical and computational sociologist currently enrolled in a dual-title Sociology and Social Data Analytics (STEM) Ph.D. program at The Pennsylvania State University. My interests include collective behavior, social complexity, networks, and social cognition. I use agent-based modeling, epidemiological methods, spatial econometrics, and network analysis, among other techniques, to understand (1) how collective behavioral patterns emerge from autonomous, spontaneous interactions, and (2) how things (ideas, norms, behaviors, innovations, products, etc.) spread.
Abdullah Alibrahim
Dr. Abdullah Alibrahim is an Assistant Professor at the College of Engineering and Petroleum, Kuwait University, specializing in Systems Engineering. Dr. Alibrahim is a Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative and a Visiting Research Fellow at the London School of Economics Middle East Centre, among other prestigious institutions. His work focuses on innovative engineering approaches to tackle crucial healthcare challenges, leveraging systems engineering, complexity science, and data analytics to design impactful health policies. He has published and presented extensively on healthcare policy across diverse settings on quality of care, patient choice, and politics of healthcare.
Mohammed Alsobay
Mohammed Alsobay is a PhD candidate in the Information Technology group at MIT Sloan, advised by Prof. Abdullah Almaatouq. His research focuses on the design and analysis of systems in which humans and algorithmic agents interact, with the goal of achieving collective outcomes that exceed what is achievable by either type of agent on its own. In parallel, he explores how adaptive experimentation and virtual labs can be used to improve and scale social science research.
Jan Batzner
Jan Batzner is a full-time Researcher at Weizenbaum Institute Berlin, the German Internet Institute, and a doctoral researcher in Computer Science. He graduated with a Master in Social Data Science from Columbia University in New York City. Before his PhD, Jan worked as a Solutions Engineer for the American data storage and cloud computing company NetApp facing the globally largest automotive clients. Jan is a Fellow and a Next Generation Scholar of the International Cooperation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and a Fellow of the Bavarian Elite Academy (BEA).
Rafiazka Millanida Hilman
Dr. R. M. (Rafiazka) Hilman is affiliated with Computational Science Lab (CSL) at the Informatics Institute (IvI) and Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), University of Amsterdam (UvA). She holds a PhD in Network and Data Science from Central European University (CEU). Specialized in Spatial Data Science and Computational Social Science, she focuses on urban dynamics and urban complex system. Currently, she is working on structure and dynamics of multidimensional segregation.
Hazem Ibrahim
Hazem Ibrahim is a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at NYU, specializing in Computational Social Science. His broad research interests focus on algorithmic bias in social media recommender systems, gender and ethnic representation in media, and science of science. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from NYU Abu Dhabi and his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.
Kashif Imteyaz
Kashif is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Northeastern University's Khoury College. His research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, with a focus on social computing. He is interested in designing and evaluating computational systems that address complex social problems. Kashif takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on social and cognitive sciences to inform the development of these computational tools.
Selcan Mutgan
Selcan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University, Sweden. She holds a PhD in analytical sociology and has a background in economics and demography. Her research primarily concerns spatial income inequality, as well as school and residential segregation. Her current project is related to understanding how school and residential choices of parents are linked and how these two choices jointly affect school segregation. In her research, she utilizes population level Swedish micro-data, and employs methods such as choice modeling and agent-based modeling, among others.
Guanghui Pan
Guanghui Pan is currently a DPhil student in sociology at the University of Oxford. His research interests focus on subfields including social stratification, social inequality, and quantitative methods. His DPhil thesis mainly discusses applying doubly robust machine-learning methods to analyze the causal relationship among time-related social and demographic variables.
Abbas K. Rizi
Abbas is a Doctoral Researcher at the Computer Science Department of Aalto University, working on problems in Network Science, particularly Network Epidemiology. His interest lies in modeling spreading phenomena and evaluating control strategies. He develops reasonably simple mathematical models to investigate how pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions influence epidemics. He’s grown up in the Physics culture, and likes borrowing the tools and perspective of that field and trying to combine them with new ideas and techniques to tackle interdisciplinary problems.
Kiran Sharma
Kiran Sharma holds the position of Assistant Professor in the fields of Computer Science and Data Science at BML Munjal University. She successfully earned her PhD in Data Science in 2020 from Jawaharlal Nehru University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Science of Science at Northwestern University. Her primary research areas encompass computational social science and the science of science. Leveraging a blend of methodologies drawn from data science, network science, machine learning, and computer science, she investigates a wide spectrum of social phenomena and explores the dynamics of scientific paper publication. Her research contributions have been published in esteemed journals (Q1) such as Scientific Reports, Scientometrics, Multimedia Tools and Applications, New Journal of Physics, and Physics-A. Currently, Kiran is actively engaged in a research project supported by ICSSR, Ministry of Education, New Delhi, focused on "Empowering Diversity Fostering Queer Entrepreneurship in India." Her dedication to both academia and the exploration of diverse research domains underscores her commitment to advancing knowledge and societal empowerment.Accra
All Participants
Emmanuel Olamijuwon
Emmanuel Olamijuwon is a Lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, UK. His research interest lies at the intersection of technology, sexuality, & population health in low-and-middle-income countries. His recent projects combine data from traditional data sources (such as the DHS), with digital traces (Facebook and Twitter) and Online surveys to illuminate the complexity of a number of social and health issues such as knowledge inequality, suicide ideation, as well as sexual and reproductive health.
Fidelia Dake
Fidelia Dake is a Senior Lecturer at the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS), University of Ghana. Her research focuses broadly on population health and international development. Her research interests include nutrition and physical activity, obesity and non-communicable diseases, socio-environmental determinants of health, urban health, health statistics, health-financing and population ageing. She is also interested in using methods in computational social science to study health and lifestyle behaviours including dietary practices, physical activity and travel behaviours.
Lateef Amusa
Lateef Amusa is a Statistician and Data Scientist with a PhD in Applied Statistics from the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. He is a faculty member in the Department of Statistics, University of Ilorin, and currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre for Applied Data Science at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Lateef is a tech enthusiast and is mainly interested in big data analytics and machine learning. He attended the second SICSS held at the Unversity of Capetown in 2019.
Ayaga Bawah
Prof. Ayaga A. Bawah is an Associate Professor of Population Studies, and Director, Regional Institute for Population Studies, University of Ghana, and a Research Affiliate of the Population Studies Center (PSC), University of Pennsylvania. He has expertise in population and health research in Africa, particularly in research methodology, longitudinal data analysis and modelling of demographic processes, and evaluation of health interventions, including maternal and child health, fertility, reproductive health, including family planning programmes. He is a member of Ghana’s Food and Drugs Authority’s Technical Advisory Committee on Clinical Trials (TAC-CT), the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), the Union for African Population Studies (UAPS), and the Population Association of America. He has published widely in several top-tier peer-reviewed journals and contributed several book chapters in the fields of population and health.
Sibukele Gumbo
Sibukele Gumbo is the Director of the NEMISA Eastern Cape eSkills CoLab, based at Walter Sisulu University in South Africa. With nearly 15 years of experience, she passionately advocates for information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education and rural development. Currently pursuing a DPhil in Applied Data Science at the University of Johannesburg, Ms. Gumbo holds a BSc in Computer Science (Honours) and an MSc in Computer Science, both cum laude, from the University of Fort Hare. Recognized for her exceptional contributions, she has received numerous awards, including the 2013 Eastern Cape Women in ICT Award, 2019 Walter Sisulu University Vice Chancellor award for Support Services- Exemplary Achievement and Performance, and 2020 Walter Sisulu University Vice Chancellor award for Community Engagement - Outreach and Community Service, reflecting her unwavering dedication and excellence in the field.
Blessing Ogbuokiri
Dr. Blessing Ogbuokiri is a postdoc and instructor at York University's African-Canada Artificial and Data Innovation Consortium Lab in Toronto, Canada. His work focuses on the intersection of AI and health, helping communities and governments tackle infectious diseases. His recent project involves using data from unconventional sources like social media to create early warning systems for disease outbreaks. He collaborates with researchers from various fields and is currently leading NeurIPS 2023 Affinity workshops and organizing the Black in AI workshop. This shows his commitment to making AI inclusive and sharing knowledge in the community. Through his efforts, he is using AI to address real health issues effectively.
Danielle Jade Roberts
Dr Roberts is a senior lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and holds a PhD in Applied Statistics. She has vast experience in teaching and developing undergraduate and postgraduate Statistics and Data Science modules and has been involved in the supervision of several Statistics and Data Science Masters students. She has also been a reviewer for international ISI journals. Her research interests lie in taking a data-driven approach to solve real-world problems using applied statistics and machine learning. Her focus has been on public health and societal issues in Africa, where resources are limited.
Amr Abdelwahed
Amr Abdelwahed is an assistant professor of the Population and Migration Research Pillar in the Faculty of Graduate Studies for Statistical Research (FGSSR) at Cairo University. Amr Abdelwahed completed his PhD in Social Statistics and Demography at the Asian Demographic Research Institute (ADRI), Shanghai University, in 2021. His research focuses on international migration aspects. His current research involves migration and social cohesion in destinations, migration impacts and their underlying mechanism, and their related theoretical and policy implications in both Egypt and the international context.
Alex Adegboye
Alex Adegboye is a PhD candidate and faculty at Covenant University, Nigeria. He has some peer-reviewed articles indexed on ABS, SCOPUS, Web of Science and ABDC. Recently, he interned with UNU-WIDER, Helsinki as a Visiting PhD Fellow. He has research affiliations with reputable organizations such as CEPDeR Nigeria, EXCAS Belgium, ICTD UK, UNU-WIDER Finland etc. His research areas include Sustainable Development, Taxation, Governance, Knowledge economy and Impact Evaluation Research.
Ayodele Akinyele
Ayodele Akinyele is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology (Demography and population studies unit), University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Her dissertation focuses on maternal tetanus immunization and neonatal health status in Ibadan urban slums. She is very much interested in data and computational studies and how this can shape social demographic studies. She is also a teaching assistant at the Center for General Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.Charles Asabere
Charles Asabere is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ghana's Regional Institute for Population Studies. He investigates how social inequalities impact demographic trends. His research examines death registration coverage, mortality variation, and causes of death across space. He aims to utilize nontraditional data sources to answer pertinent demographic questions.
Jude Ewemade
Jude Ewemade is an early career demographer specializing in migration patterns, migrant integration, and reproductive behaviours. With a keen interest in computational social sciences, Jude aims to tackle complex demographic and social challenges in Africa through innovative research methods and data-driven solutions.Amos Langat
Amos Kipkorir Langat is a PhD candidate in Mathematics at the Pan African University Institute for Basic Sciences Technology and Innovation. He has a Master of Science in Applied Statistics and has numerous research publications. His current research interests are statistical modelling in infectious diseases and agriculture.
Lerato Makuapane
Lerato Makuapane is a Ph.D. student at the University of the Witwatersrand, studying the role of household members in adolescent girls' termination of pregnancy decisions. With a Masters in Health Demography, she is an aspiring computation social scientist focused on sexual and reproductive health data. She has four years of experience as a Wits Analytics and Institutional Research Unit project coordinator.
Chukwuedo Oburota
Chukwuedo Oburota is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economics, University of Calabar, Nigeria. She is also affiliated with the Health Policy and Training Research Program (HPTRP) at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria where she is a research fellow. Her research interests are focused on addressing inequalities in access to income and opportunities.
Michael Arthur Ofori
Michael Arthur Ofori is currently a PhD. Candidate at the Pan African University Institute for Basic Sciences, Technology and Innovation. He holds Master of Philosophy in Statistics from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. His research interest includes maternal and child health and health statistics.
Tosin Oni
Tosin Oni (PhD in Demography and Social Statistics, 2023) is a Research Associate at the Central Office of Research, Obafemi Awolowo University. Using computational methods, he integrates data from established sources (e.g. DHS) with public APIs (e.g. Twitter) and primary surveys to harness evidence for advancing sexual and reproductive health.
Onyinyechi Ossai
Onyinyechi Ossai, a University of Nigeria doctoral student, holds a BSc (Geography) and an MSc (Urban Geography) from the same university. Her Ph.D. research focuses on employing integrated multidimensional indicators to assess housing quality among low-income households in an African city. Her interests include settlement geography, urban-rural disparities, and their interconnections.
Mohamadou Salifou
Mohamadou Salifou is a laureate of the pre-doctoral programme at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco and is part of the Data Science, Activity Analysis and Steering of Education and Training team. He holds a Master's degree in Statistics applied to life and is interested in demographic and biostatistical issues, particularly fertility, child mortality, early diagnosis of diseases, and the drop-out and retention of pupils in secondary education. His current research focuses on artificial intelligence in the early detection of school drop-outs and the contribution of AI to stroke diagnosis.Atlanta
All Participants
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Dr. Albrecht’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study fear, violence, and data distortions. She is particularly interested in the nexus of fear and risk-taking behaviors, digital trace data, and the impact of law on decision-making. She frequently serves as a computational science expert for the defense on active legal cases about life without the opportunity of parole, felony murder, gang enhancements, and the Racial Justice Act. She is presently a Fellow with CJARS where she is conducting research on felony case processing speeds across the United States.
Olga Churkina
Olga Churkina is a PhD Candidate in Public Policy jointly at Georgia State University and Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include experimental and quasi-experimental methods for education and labor market policies, microeconomics models of human behavior, and applications of big data. Her background is in Quantitative Economics and she is currently involved in the Smart Cities project as a member of the Data Science and Policy Lab at Georgia Tech. Furthermore, she is working on a prosocial behavior research at GSU ExCEN as well as a labor market field experiment for her dissertation.
Ryan Ellis
Ryan Ellis is a PhD Candidate in the School of Economics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include migration and borders, health, and development economics. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Ryan worked as an educator and financial counselor with immigrant-led non-profit organizations in Nashville, TN.
Raeda Anderson
Raeda Anderson is an experienced research scientist and data scientist at Shepherd Center and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University. For over a decade, she has been working in Statistical Data Analysis, Student Development, Quantitative Research, Social Network Analysis, and Statistical coding (SPSS, STATA, SAS, MPlus, HLM7, and R) with the focus on the hospital & health care industry.
Daniel Dench
Daniel Dench is an Assistant Professor in the School of Economics and the Health Economics & Analytics Lab (HEAL) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He works on issues related to tobacco and nicotine policy, school choice and enrollment mechanisms, and runs field experiments related to student motivation and cheating. In addition to Georgia Tech, Daniel is a faculty affiliate with Notre Dame's Lab for Economic Opportunity and is a research economist for the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Alfredo Deza
Alfredo Deza is a software engineer at Microsoft and an Adjunct Professor at Duke, speaker and author of several books about DevOps and Python, including Python For DevOps and Practical MLOps, and former Olympic athlete. With almost two decades of DevOps and software engineering experience, he teaches Machine Learning Engineering and gives lectures around the world about software development, personal development, and professional sports.
Casey Wichman
Casey Wichman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Economics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a University Fellow at Resources for the Future. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he served as the Research Director of the Energy & Environment Lab at the University of Chicago and as a Fellow at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC. He is an applied microeconomist working on issues at the intersection of environmental and public economics. His research spans water and energy demand management, valuation of environmental resources and infrastructure, urban transportation, understanding the drivers behind public goods provision and prosocial behavior, demand for outdoor recreation, and climate change.
Brad Willingham
Brad Willingham is a Research Scientist at Shepherd Center whose work focuses on the development of innovative technologies and strategies to advance neurorehabilitation. He is originally from the Atlanta area and started his career in rehabilitation working as an Exercise Physiologist at Shepherd Center. Through this experience, he became interested in scientific questions that could guide evidence-based treatment strategies and developed research collaborations that led him to complete his PhD in Exercise Physiology at the University of Georgia. Before his recent return to Shepherd Center, Brad Willingham spent the past four years serving as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health where he received advanced training in neuromuscular physiology and bioenergetics.
Stephen Abeyta
Stephen Abeyta is a doctoral candidate at Northeastern University's School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. His research focuses on work-related issues, particularly understanding how workplaces can be a unique space of violence, victimization, and harm. He is also interested in understanding how the evolving nature of the workplace will affect workers’ exposure to adverse work-related experiences.
Salome Apkhazishvili
Salome Apkhazishvili is a Ph.D. student at Georgia State University Communication Department. Her research interests are in intergenerational communication and media literacy, more specifically, how new digital technologies shape communication and knowledge exchange via and about technology. After earning her undergraduate degree in Journalism and Mass Communication, Salome Apkhazishvili worked as a reporter for the major national media outlets in Tbilisi, Georgia for six years. She is a recipient of the Fulbright Graduate Scholarship, Edmund S. Muskie Professional Fellowship, and Vaclav Havel Journalism Fellowship. Salome’s master thesis The National Idea in Georgian Political Caricatures was presented at TEDx Youth Tbilisi Conference, at World Communication Association Conference, and published as a book, which became the finalist of the major literary award “SABA” in her home country. Salome Apkhazishvili’s working experience includes several research and advocacy projects in media and digital literacy. In 2021-2022, she served as a communications officer at the European Communication Research and Education Association Children, Youth, and Media section. Since 2020, she has co-produced the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy, the professional development event for media educators.
Elizabeth Chan
Elizabeth Chan is a second-year PhD student in Social and Personality Psychology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include time use, current affairs, and well-being. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how people can allocate their limited time to maximize well-being using various statistical methods such as compositional data analysis and cluster analysis. Prior to graduate school, she completed her Bachelor of Science in Psychology at the University of Toronto.
Jane Daquin
Jane Daquin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at The University of Alabama. Her research focuses on individuals’ experiences with and perceptions of the criminal legal system, with a particular focus on carceral experiences (e.g., victimization in prison). Additionally, her work focuses on the effects of the prison experiences on reentry for formerly incarcerated individuals. Currently, she is statistical consultant in one of the research units at The University of Alabama.
Caitlin A. Dorsch
Caitlin A. Dorsch is a doctoral student and graduate research assistant in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia State University. She began serving as President of the Criminal Justice Graduate Student Association in 2022 and received the Department’s Excellence in Leadership Award in 2021. She graduated with a B.A. in Criminology from the University of Lynchburg in 2020. Her primary research investigates the quality of administrative data in the criminal justice system. Her secondary research examines the victimization of subgroups.
Desha Elliott
Desha Elliott obtained her BA from Northern Kentucky University (NKU) while starting her first tech company. She completed her MS in Management at Strayer University. After graduating from Strayer, she created PB7APP, an education technology app for student athletes and was Editor in Chief for nationally distributed education and entrepreneurship magazine. She is a PhD Candidate in the Whitney M. Young, Jr., School of Social Work at Clark Atlanta University. She is a founding member of the intramural Professional Doctoral Network (Clark Atlanta University’s first doctoral student centered organization), serves as student researcher for The Center for Social Reform, Equity and Innovation and the IN Her Hands project and a hackathon advisor of the AUC Data Science Initiative. In her private practice, she pioneered a blueprint for the Black Farmers Equity Initiative. Her areas of focus are economic development, entrepreneurship and technology.
Yi Feng
Yi Feng is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Her current research focuses on the development of a personalized approach to enhance working memory in children, along with exploring individual differences in skill learning. She has a strong interest in integrating computational modeling with research in psychology and education to optimize learning performance for individuals.
Shrabani Ghosh
Shrabani Ghosh is a PhD student in the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests include social media mining, machine learning and graph theory. In social media analysis, she focuses on sentiment analysis, misinformation propagation and community clustering. Additionally, she does large graph mining for link prediction and community detection.
Michelle N. Harris
Michelle N. Harris is an Assistant Professor in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Program in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Scents at University of Texas at Dallas. Through her research, she examines topics related to mental health and victimization, and how these two topics intersect with various processes. Using statistically sophisticated techniques, her research involves a multidisciplinary, theoretically grounded approach through which she generates policy recommendations on topics related to psychosocial and developmental explanations of criminological processes and victimization.
Muhammed Rashedul Hasan
Muhammed Rashedul Hasan is pursuing his Ph.D. in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is an established academic with more than ten years of experience in a university setting. His scholarly contributions appeared in publications by various prestigious academic publishers such as Sage and Palgrave Macmillan. In addition, he has been active in academic conferences and presented his work in competitive forums. His current research interest includes the social and political consequences of communication technologies in an increasingly complex globalized context. Hasan earned his BA with Honors and MA in Communication and Journalism from the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. He also holds a Master of Global Media Communication degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Rachel Heiter
Rachel Heiter is a PhD student at Georgia State University in the Cognitive Psychology department. Her research interests are primarily centered around the study of extremist beliefs. She aims to further her work through examining what external factors contribute to the endorsement of extreme beliefs and determining the viability of inoculation interventions against them.
Yumin Hong
Yumin Hong is a PhD student in the Economics department at The University of Texas at Austin. Her current research focuses on exploring the effects of exposure to extreme weather events in early life on health and labor market outcomes.
Anqi Hu
Anqi Hu is a PhD student in sociology at Emory University. Her research interests include Asian American identities, racial and political inequalities, and algorithmic biases. Her current work focuses on applying mixed methods to examining the development of ethnic and cultural identities among Asian American adolescents. Her other project involves using social network analysis to investigate the racial disparities in the mental health of survivors following deaths of family members.
Hamida Khatri
Hamida Khatri, a PMP® (Project Management Professional) certified gender-based violence expert and a social justice advocate stands at the forefront of technological and sociological research, possessing a dynamic blend of skills in project management, research development, strategic management, design, innovation, and emerging technologies. She is furthering her academic journey by pursuing a Ph.D. in Arts, Technology, & Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. Simultaneously, she’s advancing her skills in emerging technologies by attaining a Professional Certificate in Augmented/Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and a Post Graduate Program Certificate in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning from Texas McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Hamida is the Director and driving force behind VR Catalyst, an innovative non-profit organization leveraging virtual reality gaming simulation and therapy to support victims and survivors of gender-based violence. Hamida’s scholarly work intriguingly intersects Computational Social Science, Victimology, and Philosophy of Psychiatry, while embracing the rich cultural contexts of Islamic Art, Persian Literature, and South Asian Studies. This distinctive interdisciplinary approach empowers her to analyze the complex psychological and social impacts of gender-based violence on its victims and survivors. Committed to utilizing innovative research methodologies, Hamida integrates social simulation, modeling, network analysis, and media analysis through games and animation. Hamida’s multifaceted approach epitomizes her commitment to bridging the gap between technology and human experiences, promising profound insights into the realm of gender-based violence.
Emily Eunji Kim
Emily Eunji Kim is a Ph.D. student in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interest lies in the intersection of technology assessment and comparative politics with a special focus on the measurements of states’ capabilities in emerging technologies. Her current works include measuring labor susceptibilities triggered by artificial intelligence (AI) as a part of the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment and measuring states’ institutional preparedness for AI. She received her M.A. from Seoul National University and is pursuing M.S. in statistics from Georgia Tech. She served as a researcher at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Evaluation and Planning before joining her study at Georgia Tech.
Maxim Malikov
Maxim Malikov is a PhD student in the Computational Social Science program at George Mason University. His research focuses on computational simulations with social inclination, in order to gain a deeper understanding of how societies and organizations emerge, evolve, and perish. His methodology includes the use of Natural Language Processing tools for empirical data extraction and Agent Based Modeling to simulate the social interactions, with the goal of learning about our past and applying that knowledge towards our future.
Sari Mentser
Sari Mentser is currently pursuing her PhD at the School of Business Administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In her research, she takes a cross-cultural approach to studying values and moral judgments. She enjoys utilizing a variety of methods to answer her research questions, including meta-analyses, text analyses, and structural equation modeling.
Jasmine (Jay) Moore
Jasmine (Jay) Moore is a PhD student in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology in the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab. She has developed programming and research in injury and violence prevention working to help establish national adaptations of the Cardiff Model for Violence Prevention. Jasmine’s research utilizes mixed methods to study technology’s mediation of direct and structural violence.
Sedat Ors
Sedat Ors is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is passionate about research in Environmental Resource Economics, Climate Change, and Development Economics. Sedat completed his master’s degree in economics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. With a keen interest in understanding the economic implications of environmental issues, Sedat delves into the study of sustainable practices. He firmly believes that innovative solutions can be found to promote economic growth and environmental preservation by exploring the intricate relationship between economics and the environment. In addition to his focus on Environmental Resource Economics, Sedat is intrigued by Development Economics and the socioeconomic factors that shape communities and nations. Through his research, he aims to contribute to the field's advancements and facilitate positive change.
Munirat Sanmori
Munirat Sanmori is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Georgia State University with academic credentials in Gerontology (M.A) from Georgia State University and Library and Information Science (MLIS), (BSc) from the University of Ibadan and University of Ilorin, Nigeria respectively. Her research focuses on global inequalities in access to medical and other services, specifically concerning vulnerable populations such as older adults, racial minorities, and individuals with disabilities. Her goals include conducting research, influencing policymaking, and providing services to support the well-being of diverse and underserved individuals.
Germans Savcisens
Germans Savcisens is a Ph.D. student in Computational Social Science at the Technical University of Denmark and a lecturer in Algorithmic Fairness & Ethics at the IT University of Copenhagen. His main research focuses on using emerging deep learning models to uncover complex patterns in socio-economic, health, and behavioral data. Meanwhile, he also works with natural language modeling for public discourse and sentiment analysis. His other interests include algorithmic auditing & explainability, network analysis, and foundation models. He holds a master's degree in Human-Centered AI.
Hilal Sert
Hilal Sert is a Ph.D. student at Georgia State University, in the Political Science program. Hilal was born and raised in Ankara/Turkey. Se obtained her B.A. in International Relations from Bilkent University and M.A. in European Studies from the Sabanci University. Her research interests include terrorism, conflict, war termination and authoritarian regimes.
Xiaotian Zheng
Xiaotian “Timo” Zheng is a current doctoral student in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. He received his Bachelor of Law and passed the Chinese Bar exam at Shanghai University of Politics Science and Law in 2018. Later, he gained his Master of Social Science at University of Macau in 2020. His research interests are Quantitative Research Methods, Statistical Modelling, Community/Street Level Crime and Deviance Behaviors, and Deterrence. As one of the members of LGBTQ group, he is also planning to conduct research to better understand the health and victimization issues among LGBTQ members at the community level.Beijing
All Participants
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.
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.
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.
Nanxiao Zheng
Nanxiao Zheng is an incoming MPhil student in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests lie in Visual Communication and Political Communication, focusing on online communities, online multimodality, and nationalism. He is keen to apply methods to understand social media participation and social networks.
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.Berlin
All Participants
Lena Hipp
Head of the Work & Care research group at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and professor of Social Inequality & Social Policy at the University of Potsdam. Researchess social inequalities related to paid and unpaid care work and relies on a broad spectrum of methods and data, including survey, experimental, and digital data.
Stefan Munnes
Sociologist and research fellow in the Work & Care research group at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Interested in all kinds of social inequalities, currently researching gender inequalities and antisemitism. Furthermore, mainly engaged in computational methods, such as (automated) text analysis and graphical illustrations. Likes to share this knowledge and ask new questions and work through challenges in a team. ast year, he participated in SICSS Lisbon.
Armin Sauermann
Armin Sauermann is a researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He recently completed his Sociology Masters at the University of Potsdam and will pursue his PhD. Armin analyzes large-scale observational data and is learning to collect and analyze internet-based data to study group processes and political extremism. Last year, he participated in SICSS Helsinki.
Helena Mihaljevic
Helena Mihaljević is a mathematician by training and professor of Data Science at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (HTW Berlin). Her research focuses on analyses of data and technologies, typically applying methods from machine and deep learning, natural language processing and statistics. She works in inter- and transdisciplinary projects that involve algorithmic methods and large data sets for the analysis of social or political phenomena, or projects that investigate the effect of data-driven and usually opaque algorithmic technologies on societal developments. She is interested in algorithmic detection and analysis of conspiracy theories and antisemitic speech in texts from online and social media. 03/07 Exploring the Benefits and Challenges of Automated Classification of Political Short Texts: A Case Study of Conspiracy Theory and Antisemitic Narratives
Elizabeth Bruch
Elizabeth Bruch is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, and an External Faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. From 2017-2020, she led the Computational Social Science Initiative at the University of Michigan. Starting in 2023, she will be the Social Science Associate Director for the Michigan Institute for Data Science. Her research focuses on the quantitative study of human behavior, and what it implies for larger scale social patterns. 04/07 Competition in Online Dating Markets
CorrelAid
Sebastian Zezulka is a PhD student in the reserach group "Epistemology and Ethics of Machine Learning" in the Cluster of Excellence "Machine Learning for Science" at the University of Tübingen. His work focuses on methodological questions of fair machine learning, bringing together insights from philosophy of science, evidence-based policy making, and machine learning. In 2017, an internship brought him to CorrelAid. After working in the project team and the local chapter Stuttgart, he was board member for education in 2022. Since the end of 2022, he acts as the chair of the board of CorrelAid. CorrelAid is a non-partisan non-profit network of data science enthusiasts who want to change the world through data science. They dedicate their work to the social sector and those organizations that strive for making the world a better place. 05/07 Data4Good - data science with and for non-profits
Sophia Hunger
Sophia Hunger is professor of Computational Social Sciences at the University of Bremen and research fellow at the Center for Civil Society Research. Until April 2023 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center and involved in a research project on protest and political radicalization in Germany, after receiving her doctorate from the European University Institute in 2020. Her research focuses on protest movements, political engagement, party competition, political communication, and applied quantitative methods, particularly quantitative text analysis and automated event extraction. Currently, her largest methodological undertaking is the automatization of Protest Event Analysis with cutting-edge methods in order to facilitate research on how protest shapes and affects modern societies. She is furthermore interested in developing new methods to measure positions, polarization, and resonance in political communication and public debate. 06/07 Automatic protest event analysis
Christian Rauh
Christian Rauh is a senior researcher in the Global Governance unit of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and a Professor for the 'Politics of Multilevel Governance' at the University of Potsdam. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of EU studies, international relations and comparative politics. His is particularly interested in decision-making of the European Commission and the public political debates about European and international institutions. Christian's work aims to combine solid theory with innovative empirical analysis - often involving web scraping, quantitative text analysis, and advanced data visualization. 07/07 How web scraping and large-N text analyses can shed light on (European Union) politicsCalabar
All Participants
Inyang, Juliet John
Inyang, Juliet is a co-founder of Academic Hive and an academic staff at the Department of Marketing, University of Calabar. Her research interest is in the areas of consumer culture, service innovation, process improvement, higher education, digital transformations and sustainable development. Specifically, she is interested in combining computational, quantitative and qualitative methods to unravel key insights about human behaviour in society. Juliet participated in the 2022 SICSS-Paris location.
Grace Ihejiamaizu Paul-Anietie
Grace Ihejiamaizu is a co-founder of Academic Hive and an academic staff (Lecturer II) at UNICAL. She is currently undertaking her PhD in North America. Her research interest is in improving the lives of women social entrepreneurs in Nigeria through employability, entrepreneurship and digital skills.
Inyang, John Okiri
John is a postgraduate student and early-career faculty at the Department of Economics, University of Calabar. He is a researcher and project manager with a keen interest in health economics, development economics and public sector economics research.
Otobi,Augustine Ogbaji
Augustine is an avid researcher who loves to use computational tools to investigate the WHY, WHEN, WHERE and HOW of events, patterns and systems represented by numbers and other data structures. He is a postgraduate student in the department of Computer Science and his research area is in Data Science/Machine Learning. His research spans climate-related issues, fraud and risk prediction in insurance, expert systems and distributed databases. Augustine participated in the 2022 SICSS-Covenant location.
Professor Bassey Igri Okon
Bassey Igri Okon is a Professor of Animal Science (specialization- Animal Production) and currently the Director of Research and Development at the University of Calabar. Bassey takes pleasure in guiding and facilitating trainings and group activities of young academics and researchers at the University of Calabar.
Professor Joseph Eyo Duke
Joe Duke is a Professor of Business Management and the Dean, Faculty of Management Sciences at the University of Calabar. His expertise is in Human Capital development and HRM practices.
Professor Mbe Nja
Mbe Nja is a Professor of Mathematical Statistics; Director, Open and Distance Learning Centre, and former Director, Centre for Teaching and Learning Excellence all in the University of Calabar. His interest is in Experimental Design (Generalized Linear Models) and his proficiency is in Algorithm development using R, MATLAB and SPSS. He is also a Fellow, Royal Statistical Society (London).
Elijah Appiah
Elijah Appiah is an Economist and Data Scientist who loves using data to solve economic problems. With expertise in econometric modeling and data science, he has trained numerous students worldwide in the field of data science. Elijah is proficient in various data science tools, including but not limited to Python, R, SQL, Tableau, and TensorFlow, enabling him to employ advanced data analytics and machine learning techniques. He is currently a Ph.D. Economics student at the National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA) in Bangkok, Thailand. Elijah has authored books, namely, “Data Analysis with R Programming” and “Simplified Mathematical Economics”.
Precious Adebola
Precious Adebola is a public health scientist with broad research interests in the intersection of computation and technology with health and genomic data. She has a Master of Public Health from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and a Master of Science in Bioinformatics from Covenant University, Nigeria. She currently works as a bioinformatician with the Global Health Research Unit for the Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance, Ibadan, Nigeria.
Edith Darin
Edith Darin has been mapping and estimating population for the WorldPop research group at the University of Southampton since 2018. She develops advanced statistical models to tackle outdated or incomplete population count mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. She led collaborations with the Burkina Faso and the Mali Statistics offices to fill the gaps in their census (2020 and 2022) caused by security challenges. To ensure knowledge transfer she developed courses in close partnership with UNFPA. Her work has been featured in several peer-reviewed publications (Remote Sensing, Nature Communications, Gates Open Research) and relayed by different institutions (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GRID3).
Dr. Idongesit Efaemiode Eteng
I am Dr. Idongesit Efaemiode Eteng, an accomplished academic and researcher with a Ph.D. from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria's premier institution. With over 17 years of teaching experience, I have had the privilege of imparting knowledge to students from diverse backgrounds. My publication record and international research presentations in Ghana, Scotland, London, and the USA underscore my global academic presence. I specialize in Software Engineering, Data Science, Machine Learning, and Formal Methods, with a particular focus on health and education applications, reflecting my commitment to real-world problem-solving. Some of my notable projects include collaboration tools for academia-industry partnerships and medical support tools for health issues. Proficient in programming languages like Java, Python, and R, I am also known for my excellence in public speaking, and I have recently published a novel titled 'THE CALL,' adding a creative dimension to my professional portfolio.
Rhoda Asuquo
Rhoda Peter Asuquo is a young medical doctor currently practicing in Akwa Ibom State. She is passionate about changing the narrative in the Nigerian health sector. She is research-driven and strongly believes that solutions to advancing health in Nigeria and beyond are through research hence her pursuit of a Masters degree in Research and the application of data science in genomics can bring change in the area of prevention through medical genetic studies. Twitter
Lawrence Nsor
Lawrence Nsor is a Professional Registered Land Surveyor, registered by the Surveyors Council of Nigeria, and Self-taught Data Scientist. He is founder and Director of Vantage Survey and Mapping Services a company registered by the Corporate Affairs Commission, offering services in the fields of GIS, Land, engineering and Property Surveys, Data Collection and Analysis, GIS Web Development, and other Data, GIS & Survey Consultancy services.
Yohanna Waliya
Yohanna Joseph Waliya is a lecturer at the University of Calabar, Calabar-Nigeria. He obtained M.A. French Studies (Twitterature;Twitterbot poetry) at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. He is a Nigerian digital poet, distant writer, ludokinetic writer, novelist, playwright, python programmer, winner of the Janusz Korczak Prize for Global South 2020, Electronic Literature Organization Research Fellow, UNESCO Janusz Korczak Fellow, Creator & Curator of MAELD and ADELD [2022 Emerging Open Scholarship Award: Honourable mention by The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI)], Executive Director of AELA& ADELI (https://africanelit.org ), International Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Web and Social Media [ICWSM ] Scholar 2021-2022, Scrimba Scholar 2022-2023, and Hastac Scholar 2021-2023. He writes in English and French. Among his works are: La récolte de vie (play), Monde 2.0 (play), Hégémonie Disparue (novel), Quand l’Afrique se lèvera (novel), Homosalus (digital poetry), Momenta (digital poetry), @TinyKorczak (Twitterbot-poetry), Climatophosis (digital poetry: The best use of DH for Fun 2020), Inferno 2.0 (ludokinetic poetry) etc. Linkedln, Google Scholar
Olufemi Popoola
Olufemi Popoola is a research fellow at the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research, Nigeria. His research interests are in the areas of development economics, innovation studies, food security and climate change. He is experienced in handling large datasets and data analysis.
Olawale Akinrinde
Dr Olawale Akinrinde teaches & conducts research in Defence, Security and Strategic studies in the Department of Political Sciences, Osun State University, Nigeria. Dr Olawale holds an outstanding PhD in Defence and Strategic Studies from the prestigious Nigerian Defence Academy, with an M.Sc. in International Relations from Nigeria’s Premier University, the University of Ibadan, and a First-Class Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and International Relations from Osun State University. Linkedln, Google Scholar
Oluwadamilare Odu-Onikosi
Oluwadamilare Odu-Onikosi is a PhD Student in Project Management at the Lagos State University and a Research Scholar at the Research Methods Program 2023 of the Leaders of Africa Institute. His interest gravitates around Project Management, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Data Analytics. He is the Chief Innovation Officer at Innovation Etcetera, a firm with vast expertise in Project Management, Research & Development and Training. He earned the Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) in Economics and Computer Science from the Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education, a Bachelor of Technology (Honours) degree in Management Technology and a Master of Science degree in Project Management (Distinction) from the Lagos State University.
Doris Addo
Doris Elemi Addo is a Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Education, Faculty of Arts and Social Science Education University of Calabar and Ph.D Student in UNN. She has acquired knowledge through training attended, practical hands-on experience,featured in paper presentations and publications. Her research interest includes Pollution and waste management, Environmental awareness, Conservation and Geography.
Emmanuel Michael
Emmanuel Ikpe Michael, Ph.D., is a passionate researcher, academician with expertise in microbiology and public health. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Microbiology and has published scientific studies in prestigious journals. With a strong background in teaching and instructional techniques, Emmanuel is committed to engaging students in research-based and high-performance learning sessions. He possesses a range of skills in microbiology techniques and the identification of microorganisms. Emmanuel has also gained extensive research experience through various projects and has received training in project management and health safety and environment.
Bassey Onugu
My name is Bassey, I hail from Biakpan in Biased Local Government Area of Cross River State, Nigeria. I attended Hope Waddel Training Institution, Calabar for my post-primary education . I am currently undertaking a ph.d in health services marketing in the University of Calabar, Calabar, Nigeria. I also work as a school leader in a high school in Cross River State, Nigeria and have special interest in early child development. The institute of chartered Accountant of Nigeria gave me three awards for my outstanding performance during its 2011 ATS examination. My hubbies are singing and reading stories.
Abubakar Aliyu
Abubakar Aliyu is a Technical Writer with a background in computer engineering and an emphasis on Machine learning and Data science. He has a broad interest in harnessing Data science for social good—Governance and Social justice—and is affiliated with the Arewa Data Science Academy and the Almajiri Child Rights Initiative. Medium - Edet Okon (1).png)
Edet Okon
Edet Okon is an accomplished professional, nearing completion of an MSc in Business Management at the University of Calabar. His academic focus spans international business, sustainability, innovation, and technology management. Edet excels as a management analyst at Henshaw Capital Partners Limited, and he is the founder and CEO of Eds Global Consults, a consulting firm guiding SMEs to enhance their productivity. Additionally, he is a published author, and recipient of numerous awards and academic scholarships.
Felix Eke
Felix Eke is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, University of Calabar, Nigeria and has a Ph.D in Development Economics from the same University in 2016. His research is focused on Institutional efficiency/strengthening and development.
Mercy Ebele Eboh
Eboh Mercy Ebele is an assistant Lecturer at Delta State University Abraka, Nigeria. Her scholarly pursuits concentrate on Digital marketing and Brand Management. she has a deep passion for exploring the Dynamics of the digital world of marketing. Her works illuminates the ever_evoving marketing strategies that can be employed to navigate the digital market space.
Uduakobong Otu
My name is Uduakobong Effiong Otu, I am a PHD student in the University of Calabar studying Marketing. My research interest are includes logistics and supply chain management, product packaging, Marketing research and Methodology. I am very keen on quantitative research.
Edward Afu
Edward Ayim Afu is an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Environmental University of Calabar, Nigeria. With a research interest in climate change mitigation, adaptation & sustainable development, environmental politics & governance, sustainable tourism & ecotourism.
Chidera Eze
Eze Chidera Prince is a graduating masters student of Management Infromation System in the Department of Computer and Information Science. He uses deep learning algorithms in developing intrusion detection models that can combat different kinds of cyber-attacks on autonomous vehicles. Scopus
Igharo Amechi Endurance
My name is Igharo Amechi Endurance from Edo State of Nigeria, i have bachelor and masters degree in economics from the Ambrose Alli University, ekpoma and the Usmanu Danfodiyo University sokoto. I'm currently a PhD student in the department of economics, university of calabar.
Bibiana Ineji
Bibiana Ineji is a communication researcher in the Department of Mass Communication, at the University of Cross River State, Nigeria. Bibiana Obtained her PhD in Development Communication and Political Communication. Her research interest is in social and behavior change communication in developing nations. She uses mixed-method; qualitative, and quantitative research to address social problems. She holds. a Bachelors degree in Mass Communication and a Masterss degree in Mass communication; Social and behavior change communication option.
Sarah Enwa
My name is Sarah Enwa a PhD student of Agricultural Economics, Faculty of Agriculture, State University Abraka Nigeria. My research interest include, Agribusiness management, Production and development economics. I currently have about 15 schorlarly published articles
Dibie Nkechi Patricia
Dibie Nkechi Patricia is a dedicated Ph.D student of Business Management at Delta State University, Abraka also serving as a Graduate Assistant lecturer in the University. My passion lies in acquiring new knowledge and sharing it with the younger generation. I am committed to enhancing students' academic performance and adding value to the educational system,Through quality research, teaching and mentoring.
Joseph David
Joseph David is Research and Teaching Assistant at Lagos Business School, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos. He is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR), Nigeria. Joseph’s research interest revolves around development economics, public finance, corruption, energy economics, and the economics of crime (with a bias in money laundering). His current research focuses on determining the quantum, flows, and laundering of illicit funds associated with criminal and illegal activities such as grant corrupt practices, kidnapping, terrorism, and tax evasion, amongst others, in Nigeria, Africa, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Joseph participated in the 2022 SICSS-Covenant.
Sven Lampe
Sven Lampe works as a research assistant at the University of Oldenburg. He holds a two-subject bachelor's degree in computer science and German studies as well as a master's degree in computer science. He is currently project coordinator for research field 1 in the joint project Wärmewende Nordwest (Heat Turnaround Northwest), in which he is working on reducing heat losses in residential buildings. He was teaching assistant in 2022 for SICSS JIAS/IPATC and in 2023 for SICSS IPATC, both at the University of Johannesburg.Chile
All Participants
Andrés Abeliuk
Andrés Abeliuk is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile and a researcher at the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA). His research studies the relationship between algorithms and humans in social computing systems, applying machine learning models, optimization, game theory, and online experiments to drive collective behavior toward more efficient social outcomes. In 2016, he received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Melbourne, Australia. His thesis was on the optimality and predictability of socially influenced online markets.
Pablo Beytía
Pablo Beytía is a lecturer of digital methods for social research at the Institute of Sociology of the Catholic University of Chile and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social Sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is also a research fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society (Germany) and director of the social analytics platform Monitor Social (www.monitorsocial.cl). His doctoral research focuses on how Wikipedia frames information about humans by creating biographies that establish content inequalities favoring specific social groups. Pablo’s research interests include digital discourse, open knowledge, platform power, digital social memory, and artificial intelligence for social data reporting.
Juan Reutter
Juan is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and the institute for Mathematical Engineering and Computing of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and is the deputy director of the Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD). His research interest has to do with mathematical foundations of data management, web data and data science. Juan received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2013, and his thesis was awarded the BCS distinguished dissertation award. Juan's work has been also recognized with the Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award, and best paper awards at PODS 2011, ISWC 2019 and an outstanding paper award at ICLR 2022.
Hernán Sarmiento
Hernán Sarmiento is a postdoctoral researcher at Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD). He is finishing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile. His interests include social network analysis using data mining and machine learning approaches applied to several topics, such as crisis informatics, polarization, and disinformation.
Pedro Seguel
Pedro Seguel is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer in Management of Information Systems at McGill University. His research combines computational social sciences (i.e., NLP) and qualitative methodologies to study the diffusion of new technological practices. His thesis focuses on how institutional pressures -expressed in discourse dynamics- can explain changes in digital innovation and IT workforce. Additionally, He is interested in the broader impacts of emerging technologies, including projects in fairness and accountability in AI Systems and the institutionalization of carbon-aware computing.
Claudia López Moncada
Claudia's research and teaching activities focus on human-centered computing. Her projects concentrate on two broad lines: social computing and human-centered artificial intelligence. She is the co-director of the user-experience (UX) Lab at UTFSM, Chile. Also, she is an associate researcher at the National Center of Artificial Intelligence (CENIA) and a principal researcher at the Millennium Nucleus Futures of Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR). Currently, she serves as general co-chair of CSCW'24 and as a member of the Steering Committee of ChileWiC. She has a Ph. D. in Information Sciences and Technology from the University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Felipe Bravo-Márquez
Felipe Bravo-Marquez is Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile, Associate Researcher at the National Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CENIA) , and Young Researcher at Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD). He conducted his PhD degree in the Machine Learning Group at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, where he also held a research fellow position for two years. He currently holds an Honorary Research Associate position with this group. Previously, he received two engineering degrees in the fields of computer science and industrial engineering, and a masters degree in computer science, all from the University of Chile. His research interests and expertise lie in the acquisition of knowledge and information from natural language, spanning the overlapping fields of natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and information retrieval (IR). During his research career he has developed several NLP and ML methods for the analysis of opinions and emotions in social media, as well as other applications focused on fairness, health, education, among others. His work has been published in top tier AI conferences and journals e.g., IJCAI, ICWSM, SIGIR, EACL, COLING, ECAI, JMLR, Knowledge-based Systems. He has been part of the program committees of important conferences in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, including ACL, AAAI, EMNLP, NAACL, IJCAI, and ECAI.
Juan Pablo Luna
Investigador Asociado VioDemos. Profesor titular de la Escuela de Gobierno de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Participa en el Instituto Milenio Fundamento de los Datos, en el Instituto Milenio para la Investigación en Violencia y Democracia y en el Centro de Ecología Aplicada y Sustentabilidad. Actualmente es investigador responsable del proyecto FONDECYT “Unequal Democracies in Weak(er) States. Assesing Latin America’s Development Trap” (2023-2026) y en 2023 recibió la beca The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation para desarrollar la investigación “Organized Crime, State Crises, and the Consolidation of Violent Democracies”. Doctor en Ciencia Política de la University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sus principales intereses de investigación son crimen organizado, representación política,sistemas de partido, capacidad del Estado y el desarrollo de metodologías que combinan ciencia social computacional con análisis cualitativo clásico (thick data).
Marcelo Mendoza
Marcelo Mendoza received his master's degree in informatics from the Federico Santa María Technical University, Chile, and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Chile. He held a postdoctoral position at Yahoo Research. He is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He is a founder and former President of the Chilean Association for Pattern Recognition. He is currently principal researcher at the National Center for Artificial Intelligence and Associate Researcher at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data. His research has addressed the relationship between the stance of Twitter users and the veracity of their messages, the design and implementation of automated predictive model for fake news, the possibilities and limitations of sentiment analysis models on social networks, the relationships between opinion dynamics and political election outcomes, analysis of television media bias using NLP, the predictive power of reactions from Twitter users to infer earthquake damage levels, the use of the transformer architecture's self-attention mechanisms for stance classification, the develop of bot detection methods based on network features, and the predictive capacities of graph neural networks to anticipate controversy in social media conversation threads.
Jazmine Maldonado
Jazmine Maldonado is the Chief Executive of the Innovation and Technology Transfer Direction at the Millenium Institute Foundational Research on Data. She holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Chile, where her research areas of interest focused on Information Retrieval, Data Mining, and Data Visualization. Currently, she is dedicated to management and agile methodologies applied to data science projects. Jazmine is also a co-founder of an NGO called Niñas Pro, which aims to empower girls through teaching them to code.
Gonzalo Rivero
Gonzalo Rivero is the associate director of Data Labs at Pew Research Center. He is an expert in social research methodology with a focus on computational social science and reproducibility. In his research, Rivero studies public opinion, political behavior, and political representation particularly in the context of digital politics. Prior to joining Pew Research Center in 2021, Rivero worked as statistician and data scientist at the Statistics and Evaluation Sciences Unit of Westat and at the Scientific Research Group of YouGov. He holds a doctorate in Politics from New York University. He is most recently the co-author of Retooling Politics: How Digital Media are Shaping Democracy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.
Mauricio Bucca
Mauricio is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Previously, he was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute and earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at Cornell University. He studies labor market inequalities, intergenerational mobility and beliefs about inequality using a combination of statistical modeling, empirical strategies for causal inference, and experimental and computational methods. His work has been published in academic journals such as Science Advances, Sociological Methods and Research, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, and covered by popular media outlets such and the New York Times, Washington Post, New Scientist, Science Daily, among others.
Antonio Diaz Araujo
Antonio will be part of a Panel on Chilean industry experience in computational social science applications. He is an Industrial Civil Engineer from the University of Chile, Partner and General Manager of Unholster, Founder of Decide Chile, entrepreneur, director of companies, and startup investor. He has over 20 years of experience in Big Data, optimization, data mining, and optimization technologies for large volumes of data.
Cristián Ayala
Cristián will be part of a Panel on Chilean industry experience in computational social science applications. Cristián is an Industrial Civil Engineer and Master in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is the Director of DESUC and has extensive experience leading multidisciplinary teams in studies linked to the public and private sectors, with various methodologies and analysis techniques. He has specialized in designing and surveying complex quantitative studies and the application of studies through digital platforms.
Alexandra Uribe
Alexandra Uribe is an Economist graduated from the University of Chile, currently working in a civil organization called Elige Educar. Her work focuses on teachers working in the field of school education, specifically on researching topics related to teachers' trajectory and retention, working conditions, and their first years of experience.
Sam Plummer
Sam Plummer is an Associate Research Scholar at the Columbia University Justice Lab where she studies punishment and inequality in the United States. She also has research interests in gender and critical social theory. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019.
Paula Reveco
Paula Reveco is a professor of the methodological lines of research for the career in psychology and social sciences at the USACH, the UNIACC and the UDP, in Chile. She has a master's degree in statistics from the UC and a psychologist from the UChile. Her interests are equality towards women, open science, inclusion, decentralization and climate change.
Alonso Silva Espinoza
Sociologist graduated from the University of Valparaíso, currently in the process of obtaining a Master's degree in Science, Technology & Society at the Alberto Hurtado University, with interests on the implications of the advancement of digital technology, including the use of big data for decision-making, cyberdemocracy and algorithmic governance.
Kevin Carrasco
Kevin Carrasco is a sociologist and has a master's degree in social sciences from the University of Chile. His lines of research focus mainly on the quantitative study of social reality, addressing issues of citizenship education and meritocracy, as well as labor relations in the context of the new digital delivery platforms. All within the framework of open science.
Rebeca Orellana-Parada
Rebeca is in the process of completing her Master's program in Sociology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and holds a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from the University of Chile. She possesses a keen interest in public opinion studies and the dynamics of social interactions within social media, forging connections between the social sciences and computational sciences. Alongside her academic endeavors, she has dedicated herself to teaching, with a focus on both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and has actively participated in research on social movements.
Sebastian Ascui
Sebastian is an anthropologist and a PhD Student in Sociology and Social Policy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR. His main research interests are in research methods, mathematical sociology, big data techniques, applied econometrics for Public Policy, and Machine Learning.
Cesar Marin Flores
Cesar Marin Flores is an Engineer and holds an MSc in Data Science. He works as a Data Scientist at the Institute of Data Science at the Universidad del Desarrollo. His research focuses on the impact of mobility on public policies. Currently, he is actively involved in a project investigating the patterns and dynamics of mobility in Santiago. By leveraging digital traces derived from telecommunications data, Cesar utilizes data-driven approaches to inform decision-making processes in this area.
Felipe Labra
Felipe Labra is a PhD candidate at the University of Chile (Territory, Space and Society Doctoral Program). He studies digital territories and digital nature generated by grassroots social movements as seeds of transformative change. His methodology approach combines digital etnography, netnography and neogeography, using methods like data mining and online interviews for discourses analysis, social network analysis, web-based geosurveys and geospatial platforms analysis. He tries to have an interdisciplinary approach intersecting digital geographies, critical GISciences, political ecology and sustainability sciences, applied on social-ecological transformations studies.
Ximena Catalán
Ximena Catalán is a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Education at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and in the Millennium Nucleus Students' Experiences of Higher Education. Her research interests focus on evaluating programs and policies related to the transition to higher education from an equity perspective, utilizing a diverse range of methods. Additionally, she is insterested in diversifying the dissemination of scientific evidence to reach broader audiences, including policy makers and institutional actors.
María Jesus Meléndez Berndt
Sociology thesis student in Universidad de Chile. Her undergraduate thesis studies Chilean politics through methodologies such as network analysis and semantic analysis. She has experience working as a teaching assistant in courses such as Introduction to Data Science and ¿Do science and technology have gender?.
Isis Urgell
Isis Urgell is a PhD candidate at Monash University, Australia, in Philosophy of Science and Epistemology. She obtained a BA-MA in Philosophy with an orientation in Formal Logic from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her current research topic is the influence of political polarization on the evaluation of scientific content in social media. From a methodological point of view her research employs social network analysis and content analysis to understand large patterns of speech and online behaviour related to anti-science attitudes, misinformation spread and political polarization. She is also interested in how political and moral values shape science perception in social media environments. Other interests include corpus analysis and community detection methodologies.
Daniel Saavedra
Daniel Saavedra is a mathematician engineer who holds a master's degree in engineering sciences from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. At present, he is pursuing a Ph.D in statistics with a specific focus on machine learning, educational data analysis, and longitudinal observational studies.
Adolfo Fuentes
Civil Industrial Engineer and Master of Science in Engineering, Universidad Diego Portales, Diploma in Business Intelligence, Universidad de Chile, Diploma in Data Science and Big Data Analytics, MIT, Data Science & AI Engineer Professional Certificate, IBM, Ph.D. Student in Complex Systems and Social Complexity, Universidad Del Desarrollo. Professional with 9 years of experience developing actionable predictive models using Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques in leading Retail and Services companies in Marketing, Commercial and Customer Care areas.
Roberto Cantillan
I am a doctoral student in Sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and an assistant at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Labor Market Mismatch (LM2C2). My doctoral research uses a structural and network perspective to analyze mobility, diffusion, and segregation patterns in the Chilean labor market from an intragenerational viewpoint.
Valentina González
Valentina González is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She holds a BA in Philosophy and Mcs in Social Sciences. She is a student researcher at the Millennium Institute for Care Research (MICARE). Her current research explores different dimensions of gender-based inequalities in caregiving over time from panel data.
Javiera Rosell
Javiera works at the Center of Studies of Old Age and Aging Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where she also serves as a professor in the School of Psychology. Additionaly, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Millennium Institute of Care Research (MICARE). Her primary research interest is around the impact of technology on the well-being of older adults.
Patricia Chandía González
Patricia Chandía González is a sociologist and master's student in the Artificial Intelligence program at the Catholic University of Chile. She currently works as a Research Analyst at the CoE Research and Data Science Department of Caja de Compensación Los Andes, a non-profit organization. Here, Patricia leads data-driven initiatives and applies AI tools to improve the management and delivery of benefits to affiliates and their families.
Jan Dimter
Jan Dimter is a sociologist from the University of Chile specialized in Computational Social Sciences. He is currently involved in research projects at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), the Center for the Study of Conflict and Social Cohesion (COES), and Fondecyt. His expertise lies in political sociology, social movements, network science, data mining, NLP, and urban analysis.
Sebastián Massa
Cientista Político. Magíster en Ciencias Sociales mención Sociología de la Modernización, Universidad de Chile. Diplomado en Estadística, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Diplomado en Estudios Latinoamericanos, Universidad de Santiago. Ha ejercido labores de consultor y docencia a nivel de postgrado en FACSO, Universidad de Chile, nivel de Educación Continua por la Facultad de Matemáticas UC y pregrado por la Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez.
Sebastián Ferrada
Sebastián was a postdoctoral researcher at Linköping University. His research interests include Graph and Multimedia Databases, and Federated Heterogeneous Data Management. He obtained his PhD from Universidad de Chile in 2021.
Jorge Ortiz
I am finishing a Master's program in Computer Science at the University of Chile and I have a Bachelor's degree in Linguistics from Catholic University of Chile. I am excited to continue growing my skills and making a positive impact as a data scientist.
Gabriel Iturra
I am Gabriel. I am currently working on my master’s thesis on Incremental Text Representation under the supervision of Felipe Bravo-Márquez at the University of Chile. I am a member of the ReLeLa research group at DCC UChile, and my research interests include Incremental Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Streaming Data. Besides research, I really enjoy teaching. In my spare time, I enjoy doing exercises and learning new things from books and videos. I specialize in extracting knowledge and information from unstructured data, focusing on natural language text and streaming learning. My research interests encompass several interrelated fields in this domain: Natural Language Processing, Data Stream Mining, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.
Cinthia Sánchez
Cinthia Sánchez is a PhD Candidate in Computing at the Computer Science Department (DCC) of the University of Chile. She holds a Master's degree in Computer Science (University of Chile) and a degree in Computer Engineering (Agricultural Polytechnic University of Manabí, Ecuador). Her research work is related to data mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and information retrieval. Cinthia participates as a Student Researcher at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (Development of Robust Information Structures Project) and the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (Human-Centered AI line) of Chile. She is a Teaching Assistant for the Data Mining course (DCC, and Postgraduate Diploma in Data Science and Engineering), and an Instructor of Visualizations in Python course (Postgraduate Diploma in Python applied to Data Science) at the University of Chile.Edinburgh
All Participants
Christopher Barrie
Christopher Barrie is Lecturer in Computational Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He specializes in the study of protest, conflict, and communication. He is particularly interested in advancing the use of use digital trace, news, and communications data to study populations that have traditionally been 'hard-to-reach' in the empirical social sciences.
Tod Van Gunten
Tod Van Gunten is a comparative economic and political sociologist with interests in social networks, development, organizations, globalization, the sociology of knowledge and professions, and sociological theory. His empirical research centers on elite political networks and the economic sociology of financial institutions, particularly in Latin America.
Aybuke Atalay
Aybuke Atalay is a PhD student based in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. She is particularly interested in the role of automated accounts (i.e. bots) in social media manipulation and online disinformation in hybrid regimes. She is currently investigating bots in the Turkish Twittersphere.
Walid Magdy
Walid Magdy is a faculty member at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC), part of the School of Informatics, the Univeristy of Edinburgh. He is also a faculty fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. His main expertise is in computational social science, data mining, and natural language processing. He holds a PhD degree from the School of Computing, Dublin City University (DCU). He has a large industrial background from working earlier for Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), Microsoft, and IBM.
Björn Ross
Björn Ross is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computational Social Science at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation. In his research, he primarily uses computational methods from agent-based modelling, natural language processing and social network analysis to study social media and related technologies. A key focus of his research is to explore different aspects of social media, such as misinformation, hate speech, and the malicious use of automation (bots), as well as how social media can be used effectively for social good, such as in crisis communication.
Akın Ünver
Akin Unver is an associate professor of International Relations at Ozyegin University, specializing in conflict research, computational methods and digital crisis communication. He is a fellow of Carnegie Endowment's Digital Democracy Network and serves as a member of TikTok's MENA-T Security Advisory Council. Previously he served as a Research Associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs, Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow at GUARD (Global Urban Analytics for Resilient Defence) at the Alan Turing Institute. He is the author of ‘Defining Turkey’s Kurdish Question: Discourse and Politics Since 1990’ (Routledge Series in Middle Eastern Politics). He is the Istanbul organizer of the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) and the founder of the Istanbul Twitter Developers' Community.
Abdullah Almaatouq
bdullah Almaatouq is a computational social scientist and Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on improving cooperation, coordination, and collective intelligence in decision-making systems, such as teams, committees, crowds, markets, and elections. Abdullah also explores ways to advance social and behavioral research methodology through innovative research designs and theory-building strategies, with the ultimate goal of developing a deeper understanding of collective decision systems and how to design them effectively in various contexts.
Paola Tubaro
Paola Tubaro is Research Professor in sociology and technology at the National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS) on the Paris-Saclay campus. She was previously a Reader in economic sociology at the University of Greenwich, London. Her research is inter-disciplinary and leverages synergies between sociology, network science, machine learning and artificial intelligence. She is currently researching the place of human labour in the global production networks of artificial intelligence, and the social conditions of digital platform work in French- and Spanish-speaking countries. She has also extensively published in the fields of data methodologies and research ethics.
Dilara Keküllüoğlu
Dilara is a Research Associate (Postdoc) at School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK. She is currently working on a Responsible AI project where she aims to make socio-technical organizations answerable for the automated actions they take where these actions can harm people. Her research interests are responsible AI, privacy on social media, human computer interaction, computational social science. She has a PhD from School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh with a thesis titled “Analysing Privacy in Online Social Media” (Supervised by Walid Magdy and Kami Vaniea). Her PhD focused on privacy on social media, especially unintended disclosures and user understanding of privacy controls.
Ugur Ozdemir
Ugur is a Lecturer in Quantitative Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include comparative political behavior, formal models of electoral politics, and quantitative methods. He is a dedicated advocate of bridging the gap between theoretical modeling and empirical analysis.
Inge Stortenbeker
Inge Stortenbeker is a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In her current research, she focuses on news media reports and online discussions about public cancer screening programmes, using quantitative content analysis and computational methods.
Simon Ullrich
Simon Ullrich is a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen's Center for Social Data Science. He studies controversies around the green energy transition in a research approach that combines digital methods, SNA, and netnography.
Darja Wischerath
Darja Wischerath is a PhD candidate at the University of Bath. Her research explores how belief in conspiracy theories can lead to violence and violent extremism through the mediating factors of psychological needs, social networks, and ideological narratives. They primarily use online text data and text mining for their analyses.
Maurice Schumann
Maurice P. Schumann is PhD candidate at the Hertie School in Berlin. His dissertation focusses on repression and technology in electoral autocracies. He is also interested in violence dynamics in civil wars. Before starting his PhD, he worked as Consultant at the UN and as Research Assistant at Uppsala University.
Yuan Zhang
Yuan Zhang is a PhD student in Media and Communication Science at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on the spillover effects of online incivility to offline political activism. She seeks to use computational techniques, such as natural language processing and network analysis, to solve social science problems. - Fabio Carrella.JPG)
Fabio Carrella
Dr. Fabio Carrella is a Senior Research Associate at the School of Psychological Science of the University of Bristol. He is a member of TeDCog, a research group that studies pressure points between human cognition and online technologies. His current interests concern misinformation and political discourse analysis through computational methodologies.
Lubna Amro
Lubna Amro is a postdoctoral researcher at TU Dortmund University on the project From Prediction to Agile Interventions in the Social Sciences (FAIR). Her research focuses on developing and applying statistical methods for multivariate data with robust properties even in the case of heteroscedasticity, small sample sizes, and missing values. - Erin Walk.JPG)
Erin Walk
Erin Walk is a PhD Candidate in Social and Engineering Systems at MIT. Her work focuses on using social media and other data sources to understand conflict and support hard to reach populations, with projects examining narratives around violence and refugee return in Syria and polarization in the US.
Alberto Arletti
Born in Modena, I first studied psychology and neuroscience both in Italy, Padua and the U.K., UCL. Now, I am pursuing a PhD in statistical science at the University of Padua specialising in non-probability samples.
Siyu Liang
Siyu Liang is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research utilizes computational methods to study how the media shapes public opinion in the US and China. Methodologically, she is interested in text analysis, natural language processing, and social networks. Siyu received her BA in Political Science and Statistics from UW-Madison in 2021.
Jose Manuel Camacho Rodriguez
Jose Manuel Camacho Rodriguez is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Madrid. His primary research interests encompass Cybersecurity and Machine Learning, with a special focus on their applications to online misinformation, including detecting fake news and bots in social media.
Miriam Milzner
Miriam Milzner is a research associate and doctoral candidate at Free University and Weizenbaum Institute Berlin. Drawing from Computational Social Science, she analyzes logics of digital information infrastructures and dynamics of coordinated information manipulation. Prior to the Ph.D., she received a M.A. in Communication Science and a B.A. in Communication Science, Political Science, and Economics.
Emily Godwin
Emily Godwin is a second-year PhD student on a Cyber Security CDT programme based at the University of Bath. As a social scientist, she brings a unique yet valuable perspective to the field with an exploration of the development and dissemination of harmful conspiracy theories online.Selin Akaraci
Selin is an urban planner and public health researcher, holding a PhD in public health. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Queens University Belfast, examines the relationship between built environment features and non-communicable diseases. Selin is also investigating the potential use of AI methods to semi-automate evidence synthesis.
Danae Sanchez Villegas
Danae Sanchez is a PhD student at Sheffield University under the supervision of Dr. Nikolaos Aletras. Her research interests include NLP and CSS with focus on understanding the social and commercial aspects of language specifically from social media, and analysing the relationship between text and image content of social media posts. - Anna Blair.jpg)
Anna Blair
Anna is an MSc student of Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Her dissertation is examining the worlding practices of LGBTQ+ people who use Minecraft. Prior to her masters, she obtained a Bachelors of Architecture at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her architectural research was situated in the current housing crisis. It proposed the introduction of a spatial commons to one of Ireland's most underprivileged housing estates. Anna also has contemporary art and writing practices which she will use in her future research to facilitate becoming a transdisciplinary researcher and practitioner.
Angela Rijo
Angela Rijo holds a masters in psychology and is currently pursuing a PhD in computational social psychology. She is working as a research assistant at SPAC - Social physics and Complexity Lab. Her research interests concern how group affiliations and prior beliefs condition reasoning and decision making.
Desislava Bocheva
Dessi Bocheva is a PhD candidate at the University of Bath aiming to utilise machine learning methods to classify online communities by their represented social identities. She is interested in examining the variation of social identity membership in online groups what this means for subgroup formation and group fracturing mechanisms.
Feng Han
Feng Han is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research includes political communication, social movement, and digital governance. Her dissertation research focuses on online grievances and government responsiveness in China. Her research primarily relies on computational text analysis of digital data and social media.
Christian Oswald
Christian Oswald is a Research Associate at the Center for Crisis Early Warning at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany. He obtained a PhD in political science from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His research interests are explaining and predicting political violence and instability using quantitative and computational methods.
Enming Kang
Enming Kang is a postgraduate student studying digital sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He has conducted research on exploring the motivations of people consuming digital products in games. He is also interested in social media platforms and their algorithms, misinformation online and identity politics.
Costanza Marconi
Costanza Marconi is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Economics at University of Bergamo (Italy). Her research interests include the application of machine learning and computational methods in public economics and public finance. Her work so far has been focused on health, local policy-making and social capital formation. Costanza holds a MSc in economics from University of York and a double MSc in international politics and economics jointly from the Catholic University in Milan and the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle-Wittenberg. She is currently in the last leg of her PhD journey, waiting to defend her thesis on the relation between health and migration in the UK and Germany.
Manu Singh
I am a doctoral candidate at Columbia University in the Political Science department. Before this, I was a Research Specialist II at the Empirical Studies of Conflict group at Princeton University. I have also consulted at UN OCHA Centre for Humanitarian Data as their predictive analytics fellow. I got my Master of Arts degree from Columbia University in Applied Statistics with a Data Science Concentration. My research interests include social media, political communication, electoral politics, geospatial data analysis, bayesian statistics, causal inference, and machine learning.
Bernardo Villegas
Bernardo is a Data Scientist and Sociologist, He is an MSc student at the University of Edinburg and broadly interested in social data science, computational social science, especially in Natural Language Processing and ML interpretability
André Kupfermann Rodarte
André is a second-year PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin (School of Journalism and Media). He holds an MPhil in the Sociology of Media and Culture (St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge) and an undergraduate degree in Social Communication (ESPM, Brazil). He is a graduate research fellow of the Propaganda Research Team at the Center of Media Engagement. His research interests include political representation, media sociology, and computational propaganda, with an empirical focus on Latin America.
Humeyra Biricik
Humeyra Biricik is a Doctoral student in Politics at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include the interactions between political Islamists and Naqshbandi tariqas in Turkey, the role of women in Turkish politics, as well as the evolution of political rhetoric used by right-wing Turkish political party leaders.
Selin Akaraci
Selin is an urban planner and public health researcher, holding a PhD in public health. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Queens University Belfast, examines the relationship between built environment features and non-communicable diseases. Selin is also investigating the potential use of AI methods to semi-automate evidence synthesis.
Cecilia Rollano
Cecilia Rollano is a lecturer and researcher at the UNED in Spain, where she is working on her thesis on digital identity. She holds a degree in Pedagogy and her research interests include computational methods, platforms, gender and video games, among others.
Lara Dal Molin
Lara is a PhD student in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies and Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, part of the joint programme in Social Data Science with the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests concern the intersection between Artificial Intelligence, language and gender, which she investigates through the social study of GPT language models. Lara also co-coordinates the AI Ethics and Society group at the University of Edinburgh and is a tutor in the Schools of Social and Political Science and Informatics.FGV/ECMI Brazil
All Participants
Amaro Grassi
Amaro Grassi is a Project Coordinator at the School of Communication, Media and Information at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV ECMI). He is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Institute of Social and Political Studies at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ), a Master in Sociology at the same institution, and has a major in Social Sciences at UFRGS.
Dalby Dienstbach
Dalby Dienstbach has a PhD in Linguistics at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), a professor at FGV ECMI and a member of the research group on Communication, Society and Digital Media (FGV). He works academically and professionally in the fields of cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and social network analysis.
Danielle Sanches
Danielle Sanches is a professor at FGV ECMI and a PhD in History of Science at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in cooperation with the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/FioCruz. She currently works on Digital Methods, focusing on the influence of the algorithm culture on social practices.
Denisson Silva
Denisson holds a PhD in Political Science (UFMG), a Master's degree in Sociology and is a Social Scientist (UFAL). He has experience in Political Science, working mainly on the following themes: political parties, party migration, electoral results, and campaign financing. Researcher at the Center for Legislative Studies (CEL/UFMG), the Citizenship and Public Policy Group (UFAL), and research fellow at EMCI-FGV.
Lucas Roberto
Lucas Roberto da Silva is a professor and researcher at the School of Communication, Media and Information at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV ECMI), where he works on data extraction and analysis of social networks. He has a major in Mathematics at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) and is a Master in Computer Science at the Department of Informatics in PUC-Rio. His main lines of research are Analysis of Social Networks and Natural Language Processing.
Polyana Barbosa
Polyana Barboza is a professor working with data extraction and analysis on social networks at FGV ECMI. She has a major in Applied Mathematics at the School of Applied Mathematics of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV EMAp) and is a Master in Computer Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Her main lines of research are Social Network Analysis in Digital Media and Multi-agent Systems in Software Engineering.
Sabrina Almeida
Sabrina Almeida is a political scientist. She has a PhD in Political Science (UFMG) and is a researcher and professor at FGV ECMI. She studies political behavior with an emphasis on participation and political intolerance, as well as research methods on social networks.
Victor Piaia
Victor Piaia is a PhD in Sociology at the Institute of Social and Political Studies (IESP-UERJ). He is a professor at FGV ECMI and a member of the Study Group in Political Sociology and Digital Transformations and in Communication, Society and Digital Media. He studies the political effects of transformation in daily communication, focusing on social media platforms and messaging apps.
Guilherme Felitti
Guilherme Felitti is the founder of Novelo Data, a São Paulo-based data analytics studio focused on creating tools to help analyze large volumes of data. Among the main issues Novelo Data chooses to focus on are the environment, democracy and disinformation campaigns. Novelo Data's main area of specialization is in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, with in-house training and refinement of models to process Portuguese language. Insights from Novelo Data have already been published by global vehicles, such as Le Monde, Associated Press, BBC and El País, and Brazilian ones, such as Jornal Nacional, Piauí, Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo, Veja and O Estado de S. Paulo
Leonardo Nascimento
Leonardo F. Nascimento is a professor at the Federal University of Bahia. As the Digital Humanities Laboratory (LABHDUFBA) coordinator, he has contributed to research in digital sociology, digital humanities, and computational social science. He is the author of the book “Sociologia Digital: uma breve introdução - EDUFBA – 2020”. In his current research, he is collaborating with InternetLab, UFSC, and AI for Society on a project investigating the intersection of instant messengers and political violence and utilizing a combination of natural language processing (NLP) techniques and mixed qualitative approaches, including discourse analysis and online ethnography.
Tai Nalon
Tai Nalon is founder and CEO of award-winning fact-checking and disinformation monitoring company Aos Fatos. She leads the team that won the Gabriel García Márquez Innovation Award in 2020; the Digital Media LATAM award for best digital project in 2020; the Claudio Weber Abramo Data Journalism Award in 2019; and was a finalist for the Online Journalism Awards in the General Excellence category for micro-networking in 2019. With over 14 years of experience in journalism newsrooms and innovation projects, she has worked for several media companies in Rio, Brasília, and São Paulo, including Folha de S.Paulo, piauí, G1, and Veja, always focusing on national politics and public policy. Tai holds a BA in Social Communication, majoring in Journalism, from Uerj (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro).
Alexsandra Cavalcanti
Alexsandra Cavalcanti is a master's student of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco. She is criminal lawyer and has experience on international humanitarian law. Her current research is about the general-raporteur amendments.
Baruque Rodrigues
Baruque Rodrigues is a PhD candidate at UFPE. Studies elections and electoral fraud. Worked as a Data Scientist at CGEE and CEPAL.
Daniel Bonatto Seco
Daniel Bonatto Seco is a Digital Humanities MA student at UFRRJ, Research Fellow in CPDOC/FGV and Data Specialist at Tree Intelligence, a stakeholder management and consulting firm. Works in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Digital Collections, Network Science, Social Network Analysis (SNA), Social Listening and R&D.
Eliana Loureiro
Eliana Loureiro is a PhD student in Human and Social Sciences at UFABC. She is also a professor and coordinator at FAAP. She is interested in studying computational methods for research on social networks. Her dissertation is about the TikTok algorithm on the reach of fake news posts by presidential candidates during the 2022 elections.
Guilherme Alves
Guilherme Alves is a Master's student in Political Science at The Institute of Social and Political Studies (IESP). He holds a BA in International Relations from the Federal Fluminense University (UFF). His research agenda focus mainly on the following topics: theories of democracy, information in democracies; manipulation and disinformation;
João Camargos
João is currently an MA candidate in Political Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. He is also a data analyst at the Instituto Ver: Pesquisa e Comunicação Estratégica. João's research is located in the subfield of Political Psychology, aiming to understand the dissemination of elite beliefs and their effects on behavior.
João Gabriel Ribeiro Pessanha Leal
PhD student in Public Health at the National School of Public Health Sergio Arouca (ENSP/FIOCRUZ). Conducts research and statistical analyses focused on databases of sociodemographic, demographic, health, and political behavior/attitude information. Predominantly studies determinants of public policies in Brazilian municipalities. Works on the following themes: Political Parties and Financing of Social Policies, with a focus on the Unified Health System (SUS); Federal Parliamentary Amendments and Financing of the SUS.
José Galdino Neto
José Francelino Galdino Neto is temporary lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the State University of Paraíba, and is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco. He has broad interests in international relations theories and foreign policy analysis. His thesis explores the existence of Latin American theories in International Relations. And he is also adjunct editor of the Journal of Scientific Initiation in International Relations at the Federal University of Paraíba.
Mayres Pequeno
Mayres is a master's student in the Department of Political Science at UFPE, where she also conducts research in the Laboratory of Computational and Experimental Political Science. Currently, her research is focused on attitudes towards marginalized groups and preferences for electoral quotas, using experimental methods. Additionally, she has a bachelor's degree in Social Sciences and works as a Public Policy Evaluation as a Data Science Manager in Recife.
Mozara Rodrigues
Mozara Rodrigues is a political scientist graduated from Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, where is currently pursuing a masters in political science. Her research focuses on democracy support in the Latin American region, using surveys and multivariate statistics to analyze the most important factors to increase the democracy support among citizens.
Pedro Amaral
Pedro Amaral is a researcher and project leader at Law and Technology Research Institute of Recife, focusing on privacy and surveillance. He is a Ph.D. student at Federal University of Pernambuco, researching on democratic oversighting the public security intelligence sector in the context of digitalized societies and tools of surveillance.
Reinaldo Silva
Project coordinator at Abraji (Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism) - extensive experience in data journalism and data science for different organizations and transparency and open data projects for journalists and civil society. I coordinate data journalism and data science projects on the Judiciary (Ctrl+X - https://www.ctrlx.org.br/ - and Publique-se - https://publiquese.org.br/), on evidence-based investigations (CruzaGrafos - https://cruzagrafos.abraji.org.br/conteudo/metodologia/), and a partnership with Google News Initiative to collect documents of public interest to supply Pinpoint (https://journaliststudio.google.com/pinpoint/) - a reading project with OCR (Optical character recognition) to find entities in documents and audio transcription. In the last few months I have also started studying machine learning and Artificial Intelligence applied to journalism - as a fellow of Journalism/AI at Polis LSE (https://github.com/JournalismAI/attackdetector).
Renan Mattos
Renan Mattos is a PhD student in Sociology at the Fluminense Federal University (PPGS-UFF), with a study period at the Nova Institute of Communication (ICNOVA). He is currently pursuing an MBA in Data Science at UFF and is a member of the research group Discourse, Social Networks, and Socio-political Identities (CPDA-UFRRJ) and the Digital Sociology Laboratory (UFF). His main lines of research are digital sociology, discourse analysis, and populism.
Renata Zampronio
Renata Zampronio is a master student in the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP) Social Science department. Her current research examines resistance practices of young latin migrant women at workplace. She holds a Bsc in Production engineering at University of São Paulo (USP) and she is a member of Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) research group on Children and Youth.
Tomás Borges
Tomás Borges is pursuing a Master's degree in Political Science at IESP-UERJ. He holds a BA in Foreign Languages Applied to International Relations at CEFET-RJ, with an exchange program at Sciences Po Strasbourg. His main interests include distributive politics, citizens' political behavior and social protection in developing countries.
Yulieth Martinez Villalba
Yulieth Martinez is a doctoral researcher in Political Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. Her Ph.D. research focuses on understanding the determinants of emergency policymaking within Regional International Organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is interested in researching Regional Integration, International Institutions, Gender, Comparative Studies, and Emergency Politics.Howard/Mathematica
All Participants
Terri Adams, Ph.D.
Terri Adams, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University, and she currently serves as the Associate Dean for Research with the Graduate School. Additionally, she serves as the Deputy Director of the NOAA Cooperative Science Center for Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology (NCAS-M) at the university. In addition to her administrative duties, Dr. Adams’ conducts research that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examine issues that have both theoretical and practical implications. Her specific research interests include emergency management, policing, violence, and the impact of trauma and disasters on individuals and organizations. Her most recent work centers on the decision-making processes of both individuals and organizations in the face of crisis events. Her most recent publication, Policing in Disasters: Stress, Resilience, and the Challenges of Emergency Management is co-authored with Dr. Leigh Anderson.
Naniette H. Coleman
Naniette H. Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and a UC-National Lab In-Residence Graduate Fellow at Los Alamos National Lab. Since 2016, Naniette has directed the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy at Berkeley. Naniette is an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Center for Long-term Cybersecurity, and the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at Berkeley as well as the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. Naniette’s research sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically Naniette’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as work for two international organizations, and two universities.
Rebecca (Linchi) Hsu, Ph.D.
Dr. Rebecca Hsu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Howard University, Washington, D.C. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Washington, Seattle. Her research concentrates on household economics, intimate partner violence, and the economics of crime. She is currently working on projects on the CARES Act and domestic violence. She has published her research in journals such as Economic Inquiry, Review of Economics of the Household, Feminist Economics, Journal of Family and Economic Issues, and Journal of Economic Studies among others.
Nicole Jenkins, Ph.D.
Nicole is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University. She received her Doctoral degree from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in the Department of Sociology in 2020. She obtained an M.A. in Sociology in 2017 and B.A. in Sociology in 2015 from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. In 2013, she received an A.A. in Criminal Justice after serving six years of active duty in the United States Air Force as Military Police. She is a proud advocate for social justice and is committed to teaching with such emphasis in topics such as race and ethnic studies, sociology of poverty, problems of the black community, and research methods.
Anthony K. Wutoh, Ph.D., R.Ph.
Anthony K. Wutoh, Ph.D., R.Ph. is the Provost of Howard University. He previously served in various roles at the University including as Dean of the College of Pharmacy and Assistant Provost for International Programs. Dr. Wutoh has also served as Director for the Center for Minority Health Services Research, and the Center of Excellence. Dr. Wutoh received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1987. He then completed a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy, and Doctor of Philosophy in Pharmacy Administration (Pharmacoepidemiology) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore School of Pharmacy. Dr. Wutoh has varied research interests including pharmacoepidemiology, international health, health services/outcomes research, and evaluation of large population databases, particularly in the area of AIDS and HIV infection in older patients. Dr. Wutoh has received over $50 million dollars in grant funding from several sources including; NIH, CDC, USAID, HRSA, AHRQ and foundations, and has published numerous research articles on HIV disease, medication adherence, disease state management, and various other topics in respected research journals, including; the Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Services Research, AIDS & Behavior, the Journal of the National Medical Association, and the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association.
Henry C. McKoy, Jr., Ph.D.
Dr. Henry C. McKoy, Jr. is the inaugural Director of the Office of State and Community Energy Programs (SCEP) in the United States Department of Energy. The newly created SCEP, within the Office of the Under Secretary for Infrastructure, manages $16 billion dollars in federal funding and supports the transition to an equitable clean energy economy by working with community-level implementation partners and State Energy Offices. SCEP manages the Weatherization Assistance Program, State Energy Program, Community Energy Programs, and Energy Future Grants. He is a seasoned professional in business, community and economic development, policy, government, finance, energy, philanthropy and the academic worlds. Prior to the Presidential appointment to the US DOE, Dr. McKoy served on the faculty at North Carolina Central University School of Business where he led the entrepreneurship program, with additional academic appointments at Duke, the UNC-Chapel Hill, and Harvard. He is a former senior banking executive, successful entrepreneur, and former Assistant Secretary of the NC Department of Commerce. Henry has been a Fellow of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC-Chapel Hill, an affiliated faculty of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, as well as an Aspen Institute Scholar. McKoy has won many awards and honors. He has been a sought-after consultant by both government and private industry regarding inclusive entrepreneurship and economic development policy. He has also been an active economic development professional, focused on economic inclusivity in mixed-use real estate projects. He is a regular contributor to media – television, radio, and print. Dr. McKoy engages in over 120 media interviews annually with local, state, regional, national, and international media. He speaks on dozens of academic and public panels a year speaking on his research across the US, and publishes in peer-reviewed journals, as well as mass media publications. His most recent writing appears in the new book The Pandemic Divide: How Covid Increased Inequality in America (Duke University Press), where his chapter, Race, Entrepreneurship, and COVID-19: Black Small Business Survival in Prepandemic and Postpandemic America analyzes and speaks on the impact that COVID has had on the Black economic landscape. He holds degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School (B.S.), Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment (M.S.), and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of City and Regional Planning with concentrations in Economic Development, Entrepreneurship, and Impact Economics and Investing (Ph.D.).
Latanya Sweeney, Ph.D.
Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Editor-in-Chief of Technology Science, and the founding Director of the Public Interest Tech Lab, Data Privacy Lab, and the Tech Science Program at Harvard. Sweeney creates and uses technology to assess and solve societal, political and governance problems, and teaches others how to do the same. She pioneered the field known as data privacy and her work is cited in the HIPAA Privacy Rule and other federal privacy regulations worldwide. Her work on discrimination in online ads ignited the new research area known as algorithmic fairness. She is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, with more than 100 academic publications, 3 patents, 7000 academic citations, and 3 company spin-offs. She has received numerous professional, academic and lifetime achievement awards and testified before federal and international government bodies. Among other federal appointments, Sweeney formerly served as the Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. In 2018, Harvard launched its new Program in Technology Science, which prepares students for jobs as technologists that work in the public interest. The program is based on Sweeney's prior success at teaching students to scientifically assess unforeseen consequences in technology and to work in civil society organizations, government, and technology companies. Sweeney joined with 50 scholars worldwide to launch the Technology Science Initiative to promote the approach broadly. Sweeney earned her Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2001, being the first black woman to do so. Before joining Harvard as a faculty member, Sweeney was the Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where she taught computer science, technology and policy from 1998 to 2011. She and her spouse currently serve as the X.D. and Nancy Yang Faculty Deans of Currier House at Harvard College. Professor Sweeney also serves as a member of the inaugural global Technology Policy Council of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest association of computer scientists and professionals.
Jeff Bernson, M.P.A, M.P.H.
Mathematica, a full-service research and analytics firm committed to helping address the world’s most pressing development challenges, announced that Jeff Bernson has been named senior vice president and general manager of the International Unit. Bernson takes on this role as Mathematica’s expanding global footprint provides its partners with an unparalleled combination of regional and local expertise and the backing of a deep bench of experts committed to helping them make a difference. ‘As an organization committed to driving global impact, our International Unit is critical to our mission to improve well-being around the world,’ said president and chief executive officer Paul Decker. ‘Jeff’s focus on partnerships, analytics, and innovation, combined with his passion for advancing global health equity, will help us grow our work and its impact with new clients and in new areas.’ Bernson brings critical experience and demonstrated success in technology development, commercialization, and market innovation, having most recently been chief programs and innovation officer at PATH. During his time at PATH, he also served in a variety of roles including vice president of technology, analytics, and market innovation, and as a senior director working in its Nairobi, Kenya office. ‘Mathematica’s comprehensive intersectoral approach, coupled with its ability to help translate evidence into impactful policies and actions, makes a meaningful difference in the lives of people around the world,’ said Jeff Bernson. ‘I am looking forward to helping the team drive positive change.’
Deen Freelon, Ph.D.
Deen Freelon is an Associate Professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina and a principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). His theoretical interests address how ordinary citizens use social media and other digital communication technologies for political purposes, paying particular attention to how identity characteristics (e.g. race, gender, ideology) influence these uses. Methodologically, he is interested in how computational research techniques can be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of communication science. Freelon has worked at the forefront of political communication and computational social science for over a decade, coauthoring some of the first communication studies to apply computational methods to social media data. Computer programming lies at the heart of his research practice, which generates novel tools (and sometimes methods) to answer questions existing approaches cannot address. He developed his first research tool, ReCal, as part of his master’s thesis, and it has since been used by tens of thousands of researchers worldwide. His scholarship has been financially supported by grantmakers including the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Spencer Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation; and published in top-tier journals including Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Freelon earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2012 and formerly taught at American University in Washington, D.C.
Desmond U. Patton, Ph.D.
Desmond Upton Patton studies the impact social media has on well-being, mental health, trauma, violence and grief for youth and adults of color. He leverages social work thinking, data science, qualitative methods, and community partnerships to develop strategies to support digital grief and trauma and reduce on and offline gun-related violence. Desmond Upton Patton is the Brian and Randi Schwartz University Professor and the thirty-first Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor. He has joint appointments in the School of Social Policy & Practice and the Annenberg School for Communication along with a secondary appointment in the department of psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine.
Imani N. S. Munyaka, Ph.D.
Dr. Munyaka earned her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Dayton and an M.S. in Computer Science from Kentucky State University. She earned a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from the University of Florida where she conducted research as a member of the Human-Experience Research lab and Florida Institute for Cybersecurity. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Her research intertwines security, privacy, and computer interaction with a general goal of equity in experiences and outcomes for marginalized identities.
Iya Funlayo E. Wood, Ph.D.
Iya Funlayo earned her PhD in African and African American Studies and Religion at Harvard University and her research centers philosophical and theological aspects of Ifá-Òrìsà tradition as practiced in Nigeria and in the Americas, and cross-cultural analysis of Yoruba religious concepts and practice – within all of which she privileges Yoruba language as a conduit to understanding. Her work has been published in various scholarly and public venues and she has appeared in documentaries for PBS and the National Geographic Channel. Spirit permeates both her scholarship and her service, and she founded Ase Ire in 2010 as a place to share her spiritual gifts and the things she has learned from her teachers with the world, especially with those new to African Spirituality.
Ifeoma Ajunwa, J.D., Ph.D.
Professor Ifeoma Ajunwa, J.D., Ph.D., is an award-winning tenured law professor and author of the highly acclaimed book, The Quantified Worker, published by Cambridge University Press. At Emory, she is the AI.Humanity Professor of Law and Ethics and Founding Director of the AI and the Law Program. She is also the Associate Dean for Projects and Partnerships at Emory Law (starting January 2024). Professor Ajunwa was recruited from the University of North Carolina School of Law where she was a tenured law professor and the Founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making Research (AI-DR) Program at UNC Law. Professor Ajunwa is currently a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP). She has been a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University since 2017. She was a 2019 recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and a 2018 recipient of the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Dr. Ajunwa’s research interests are at the intersection of law and technology with a particular focus on the ethical governance, privacy, and discrimination issues associated with workplace AI and automated decision-making technologies. She also has an interest in the generative power of art for law with a focus on law and literature and law and film.
Lindsey D. Cameron, Ph.D.
Lindsey D. Cameron is an Assistant Professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on how algorithmic management is changing the modern workplace, especially individual’s behaviors at work. Professor Cameron has an on-going, five-year ethnography of the largest employer in the gig economy, the ride-hailing industry, exploring how algorithms are fundamentally reshaping the nature of managerial control. She is currently studying how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting gig workers on different platforms (e.g., TaskRabbit, Instacart, AmazonFlex) as well as examining how ride-hailing drivers on three continents navigate disputes. Professor Cameron’s work has been published in leading academic journals, including Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and proceedings of the Association of Computing Machinery and the Academy of Management. She has also published opinion pieces in Fast Company, Kiplinger’s, and the Society of Human Resource Management’s flagship magazine People & Strategy and her research has been mentioned in numerous media outlets including Bloomberg, NPR’s Marketplace, Fast Company, the World Economic Forum, CNBC, Forbes, The Skim, and Inc.
Charlotte Garden, J.D.
Charlotte Garden is a Law professor at the University of Minnesota, and specializes in labor law, employment law, and constitutional law. Her interests include the intersection of workers' rights and the Constitution, and how law supports (or undermines) worker voice and power. Prior to coming to the University of Minnesota, Professor Garden was a professor at Seattle University School of Law where she served as Co-Associate Dean for Research & Faculty Development. In 2016 she was a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law. Professor Garden clerked for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She received her J.D. from NYU School of Law (2003) and her B.A. from McGill University (2000).
Gabrielle Rejouis, J.D.
Gabrielle Rejouis is an advocate for ending surveillance at work at United for Respect and the Athena Coalition. Before joining United for Respect, she managed the federal technology and antitrust lobbying portfolio at Color Of Change. She also worked at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law where she co-organized the Color of Surveillance: Monitoring Poor and Working People conference. Gabrielle received her J.D. from Georgetown Law with a Certificate in Refugee and Humanitarian Emergencies. She earned her B.A. in History from the New Jersey Institute of Technology where she was an Albert Dorman Honors scholar.
Keith E. Sonderling, J.D.
Keith E. Sonderling was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, with a bipartisan vote, to be a Commissioner on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 2020. Until January of 2021, he served as the Commission’s Vice-Chair. His term expires July of 2024. Prior to his confirmation to the EEOC, Commissioner Sonderling served as the Acting and Deputy Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division at the U.S. Department of Labor. Before joining the Department of Labor in 2017, Commissioner Sonderling practiced Labor and Employment law in Florida. Commissioner Sonderling also serves as a Professional Lecturer in the Law at The George Washington University Law School, teaching employment discrimination. Since joining the EEOC, one of Commissioner Sonderling’s highest priorities is ensuring that artificial intelligence and workplace technologies are designed and deployed consistent with long-standing civil rights laws. Commissioner Sonderling has published numerous articles on the benefits and potential harms of using artificial intelligence-based technology in the workplace and speaks globally on these emerging issues.
Howard University
Howard University has long held a commitment to the study of disadvantaged persons in American society and throughout the world. The goal is the elimination of inequities related to race, color, social, economic and political circumstances. As the only truly comprehensive predominantly Black university, Howard is one of the major engineers of change in our society. Through its traditional and cutting-edge academic programs, the University seeks to improve the circumstances of all people in the search for peace and justice on earth.
Mathematica
Mathematica is the insight partner that illuminates the path to progress for public- and private-sector changemakers. We apply expertise at the intersection of data, methods, policy, and practice, translating big questions into deep insights that weather the toughest tests. Driven by our mission to improve public well-being, we collaborate closely with our clients to improve programs, refine strategies, and enhance understanding.
SICSS-Howard/Mathematica
The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS) were created to provide free training to the next generation of researchers at the intersection of social science and data science— and to incubate cutting-edge research across disciplinary boundaries. Participants at each institute a) hear lectures by leading scholars in the field on a range of subjects from automated text analysis to experiments on social media platforms; b) participate in group training exercises; and c) launch interdisciplinary research projects. SICSS thus aims to provide open, high-quality training in computational social science to researchers around the world in order to accelerate the growth of the field and ensure that it develops practices that are in the long-term interests of science and society. Lectures are live-streamed to all SICSS sites from a central location and supported via a vibrant online community that includes open-source education materials that can be used for further self-study or as a model for computational social science courses within other organizations.
D-Lab
D-Lab 1) helps Berkeley graduate students, faculty, and staff move forward with world-class research in data intensive social science and humanities; 2) assists the Berkeley community with the full range of research development, research design and data acquisition. We offer guidance in statistical methods and results to data visualization and communication; 3) creates a learning community that teaches workshops and offers consultations.
Deloitte Center for Health Solutions & the Deloitte Health Equity Institute
The mission of the Deloitte Health Equity Institute is advancing health equity to make an impact that matters. To do it, we’re creating cross-sector collaborations and tools aimed at addressing disparities in the drivers of health, racism and bias, and structural flaws in the health system. Our goal is to create exponential change that will lead to a world in which health isn't determined by race, gender, ability status, or zip code. One in which all people have the fair and just opportunity to achieve their full potential in every aspect of their health and well-being.
Federal Reserve Board of Governors
The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. It performs five general functions to promote the effective operation of the U.S. economy and, more generally, the public interest.
Los Alamos National Laboratory
The Los Alamos National Laboratory‘s mission is to solve national security challenges through simultaneous excellence. LANL achieves maximum impact on strategic national security priorities by integrating research and development solutions with operational excellence and community engagement.
Polarization Lab
The Polarization Lab at Duke brings together scholars from the social sciences, statistics, and computer science to study how to bridge America’s partisan divide. Our mission is two-fold. First, we aim to produce the highest quality research about how social media shapes political polarization, drawing upon the latest advances in social psychology, political science, and machine learning. Second, we aim to translate the insights from our research into tools that people can use to hack political polarization from the bottom up. We work closely with other groups working to counter political polarization in the non-profit sector, private sector, and governments. Some of our work has shaped products created by social media companies.
The Data Nutrition Project
Our belief is that deeper transparency into dataset health can lead to better data decisions, which in turn lead to better AI. Founded in 2018 through the Assembly Fellowship, The Data Nutrition Project takes inspiration from nutritional labels on food, aiming to build labels that highlight the key ingredients in a dataset such as meta-data and populations, as well as unique or anomalous features regarding distributions, missing data, and comparisons to other ‘ground truth’ datasets.
vary CSS
Computational Social Science is an exciting new field of research, and we think it should be diverse and inclusive as it grows. To this end, we provide links to resources, which are intended to support new and emerging CSS scholars currently underrepresented in the field. We also maintain a database of these scholars, which can be used for collaboration and networking, or for finding new voices to speak at conferences, on panels, and in workshop tutorials. These resources are compiled and updated by the CSS community.
Neena Albarus
Neena Albarus is a Ph.D. student in Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. She has an MSW from The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Her research expertise spans quantitative, qualitative, and participatory methods, with a focus on polydrug use, mental health, and citizen security in Jamaica.
Mango Jane Angar
Mango Jane Angar is a Political Science Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on Political Violence and Disability Politics. In particular, she examines how state institutions, society, and disabled persons organizations conceptualize and define disability.
James Asare
James Asare is a Ph.D. student in Mathematics and Science Education at Washington State University. His background in pure, applied, and computational mathematics fuels his research interests in CSS, gerrymandering of school districts, post-secondary math education barriers of under-served communities, and the cultural impacts of international graduate TA experiences.
Ayana Best
Ayana Best is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Howard University. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. Her forthcoming book focuses on the effects of state-sanctioned violence on Black women’s political participation and civic engagement.
Rohitha Edara
Rohitha Edara is a Ph.D. candidate in Education Policy at Pennsylvania State University. She is interested in studying issues at the intersection of education policy, inequalities/segregation, and international development.
Dereje Ferede
Dereje Ferede played a role as Lecturer, Project Coordinator, and IT Specialist. His background is Information Systems. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in Information Systems at Addis Ababa University. He has one publication and one work-in-progress paper. His research interests are AI, IS Security, Digital Strategy, Computational Sciences, and FinTech.
Joyonna Gamble-George
Joyonna Gamble-George is a postdoctoral fellow in the Behavioral Sciences Training Program at New York University. Her research interests are computational methods that can monitor, predict, and prevent biopsychosocial factors, including social connectedness or exclusion, that contribute to substance misuse, mental health problems, and health risk behaviors in adolescents and adults.
Beth Head
Beth Head is currently a Sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Florida, where she studies measurement as a form of social and epistemic power.
Kevin Igwe
Kevin Igwe is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is involved in data strategy implementations at CLEVVA PTY LTD. With a Master's degree in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Psychology, his research focuses on leveraging AI to promote prosocial behavior and mental health.
Rebekah Jones
Rebekah Jones is a Political Science Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. Rebekah’s work examines the political economy of crime policy. Specifically, how configurations of American political institutions shape how vulnerable populations experience our democracy. Before Berkeley, Rebekah received a B.S. from Cornell University in Development Sociology, with distinction in research.
Joel Martinez
Joel E. Martinez is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Data Science Initiative and Department of Psychology. Their research investigates how data-driven methods help us measure collective and idiosyncratic understandings of contemporary topics within race/ism, sexuality, and migration discourses.
Jia Pang
Jia Pang is a Ph.D. student at Claremont Graduate University, pursuing research in the field of education. Her research interests encompass a broad range of topics, including social media's impact on students' learning, the analysis of large-scale assessment data in education, and the growing phenomenon of shadow education.
Jackeline Romio
Jackeline Aparecida Ferreira Romio is Programme Specialist in UNFPA LACRO. She holds a post-doctoral degree in social psychology (USP), and a doctorate and a master's degree in demography (UNICAMP).
Mateo Servent
Mateo Servent is a political scientist and a master's student at CIDE. He is interested in CSS methods for experimental research and the study of scientific knowledge production from a comparative perspective. He is the founder of a student journal and an Erasmus+ Scholar at Otto Suhr Institute.
Rasheed Shabazz
Rasheed Shabazz is a journalist, urban planner, and historian. He is currently the inaugural Black Muslim Experiences Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Shabazz' research is on the Black Press, Black masjids, neighborhood change, and the intersections of race, religion, and housing outcomes.
Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith is an Assistant Professor at Beloit College. He teaches a wide range of courses in the Economics and Business Department, including Principles of Economics, Quantitative Methods, Econometrics, Corporate Finance, and Health Economics. His research focuses on Health Economics, with a secondary focus on Financial Economics, and Economic History.
Brittany Torrez
Brittany Torrez is a postdoctoral fellow at University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. She employs multiple methodologies to further the study of diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations. Her current research examines the psychological processes and organizational practices that reproduce racial inequality in the workplace.
Jia Wu
Jia Rung Wu, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation Counseling Program in the Department of Counselor Education of Northeastern Illinois University. Her programmatic research includes: Minority Students Success and Mental Health, Health Promotion, and Positive Psychology, Evidence-Based Rehabilitation Practice, and Test Construction and Research Methodology.
Naniette H. Coleman
Naniette H. Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and a multi-year UC-National Laboratory Graduate Fellow (Los Alamos). She is the only social scientist selected for this distinction in the history of the program. Since 2016, Naniette has directed the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy (Coleman Research Lab) at Berkeley. Naniette is an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Center for Long-term Cybersecurity, and the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at Berkeley as well as the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. Naniette’s work sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically, Naniette’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as work for two international organizations, and two universities.
Akira Bell
Akira Bell is Mathematica’s Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. She oversees technology infrastructure and governance and leads strategy for delivering innovation in support of client and internal business function needs. Before joining Mathematica in 2018, Bell led the IT function for Aramark’s higher education business unit. Previously, she served as a divisional Chief Information Officer within the Hess Corporation and held various program management, application development, and technology consulting roles with UnitedHealth, IBM Global Services, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. While at Hess, she guided IT strategy during the acquisition of its retail division by Marathon Speedway and was part of the team recognized by CIO magazine with a CIO100 Award for delivering innovative IT solutions during Hurricane Sandy recovery. Bell earned a B.S.E. in Operations Research from Princeton University, where she serves as an alumni mentor for women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Calvin Hadley, Ph.D.
Calvin J. Hadley serves as the Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the President at Howard University. Hadley works to broker strategic partnerships that advance the University's mission: Truth and Service. Since joining Howard in 2014, he's negotiated numerous partnerships along several student programs. The most notable of these include: Howard's partnership with Google and Amazon Studios to create the Howard West Campus in Silicon Valley and the Howard Entertainment Campus in Hollywood, a partnership with the District of Columbia Public Schools which led to the creation of a dual-enrollment program that allows high school juniors and seniors to earn college credit at Howard University, and a lecture series with Congressman Elijah Cummings, former Director of the FBI James Comey, former Mayor of Washington, D.C. Vincent Gray, and others.IAS
All Participants
Jacob Habinek
Jacob Habinek is an associate professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology and director of the Swedish Interdisciplinary Research School in Computational Social Science. A computational and economic sociologist by training, his interests include the sociology of markets, science, and culture. His empirical research centers on the development of scientific disciplines, the dynamics of financial markets, and the selection of Nobel Prize laureates.
Carl Nordlund
Carl Nordlund is an associate professor (docent) at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University. Obtaining a PhD in human ecology from Lund University in 2010, this was followed by fellowships in Budapest, Florence, and Lund, before starting at IAS in 2018. His substantive interests is in inter-ethnic family formation and labor market structures, economic globalization, as well as the development of network-analytical methods, particularly deterministic blockmodeling methods.
Anastasia Menshikova
Anastasia Menshikova is a PhD student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology in Norrköping, Sweden. Her research focuses on discovering and explaining inequalities, biases, and discriminatory practices using textual digital traces. Besides that, she is interested in social and cultural change - how changes in individual opinions, beliefs and meanings lead to shifts at a collective level. She is generally curious about using computational text analysis to answer sociological questions.
Elis Carlberg Larsson
Elis Carlberg Larsson is a PhD student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology. In his research, he utilizes computational techniques, such as text analysis, agent-based modeling, and machine learning to analyze large-scale datasets, including Swedish register data and newspaper data. The aim of these analyses is to investigate various social mechanisms that operate in social systems.
Hendrik Erz
Hendrik Erz is a PhD student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology. With a background in history, political science, and sociology, he specializes in the policymaking process in the U.S. Congress. Methodologically, he focuses on the use of large language models (LLMs) for text analysis. He is also interested in the ethics and political implications of artificial intelligence more broadly.
Alexandra Rottenkolber
Alexandra is a PhD Student in Analytical Sociology at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, Sweden. In her past work, she has used a variety of methodological approaches — ranging from natural language processing to network analysis — to study attention dynamics in parliaments, the digital development of nations, as well as gender segregation in the STEM disciplines. In her PhD, she plans to extend and build on this existing work.
Maël Lecoursonnais
Maël Lecoursonnais is a PhD student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology. His research interests span spatial inequalities, causal inference, and applied machine learning. His current project investigates the consequences of spatial inequalities on life-course outcomes such as education or income, using causally-oriented methods and/or machine learning algorithms.
Carly Knight
Carly Knight is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University. She is a cultural and economic sociologist who uses quantitative methods, including computational methods, to study changing cultural schemas around market behavior. Her primary research focuses on how both regulators and lay audiences talk about abstract market actors, like corporations, and how the metaphors they use influence their opinions about corporate regulation.
Hui Sun
Hui Sun is an assistant professor in the House of Innovation at Stockholm School of Economics. Her work combines experiments, natural language processing and computational simulations to study the role of cognition in network mobilization, organizational design, and meaning making in entrepreneurship.
Andrea Voyer
Andrea Voyer is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University. In her current research, she uses computational methods of text analysis to study social inclusion and exclusion on the basis of immigration, ethnicity, race, and class. Her research analyzing etiquette books, funded by the US National Science Foundation, has been published in Sociological Methods and Research and Poetics.
Adel Daoud
Adel Daoud is Senior Associate Professor at Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, and Affiliated Associate Professor in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for the Social Sciences, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Previously he held positions at Harvard University, University of Cambridge, and the Alan Turing Institute. Between September 2023 and June 2024, he will be a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. His researh has both a social-scientific and methodologically orientation. For the social sciences, he researches the effect of international development interventions (e.g., anti-poverty policies) on global poverty, but also the impact of sudden shocks (e.g., economic, political, and natural disasters). Daoud implements novel methodologies in machine learning and causal inference to analyze the causes and consequences of poverty. Daoud leads The AI and Global Development Lab (more information at global-lab.ai) and also the creator of a new podcast called the Journeys of Scholars (available on YouTube and Spotify).
Martin Arvidsson
Martin Arvidsson is a postdoctoral researcher at the institute for analytical sociology, Linköping University. He uses computational methods and large-scale data to investigate how individuals come to influence one another, and how individuals in interaction bring about different collective outcomes, such as segregation and inequality.
Jeongho Choi
Jeongho Choi is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political science from the University of Iowa, USA. He received BA and MA in Political Science from Kyung Hee University, South Korea. His research interests include comparative politics and political methodology, with particular focuses on populism, public opinion, text analysis, and machine learning.
Christina Cano
Christina is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and Fellow with the Center of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale interested in racial capitalism, critical geography, settler colonialism, political economy, and mixed methods. Their research examines how states define, police, and prisonize communities through mapping, technology, and infrastructure.
Zhuojun Gu
Zhuojun Gu is a PhD student at the Department of Psychology at Lund University in Sweden. His interest is in the intersection between computational psychology and clinical psychology, especially depression and anxiety. His current research focuses on using computational methods, e.g., large language models, to investigate human-centered, clinically aligned psychometric research. His work is trying to extend the horizons of more accurate diagnosis of mental disorders as well as precise treatment prediction for mental health.
Maarja Vollmer
Maarja is a doctoral researcher at University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) within a project on narratives of crisis and their influence on migration policies. Her background is in sociology and migration studies. Her research interests include migration governance, migration policy formation, securitisation of migration, citizenship, and text-as-data methods.
Marcel Kappes
Marcel Kappes is PhD student at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim. In his empirical research, he uses quantitative-, network-, and computational methods to investigate the consequences of issue changes in social movement organizations and immigrants’ job careers in the German labor market.
Axel Norgren
PhD student in Economics at Linköping University. An interdisciplinary social scientist that has an interest in quantitative methods from analytical sociology as well as other fields. My research revolves broadly around education and more specifically around school choice, the effectiveness of accountability systems, turnaround schools etc.
Steven Bao
Steven Bao is a doctoral student in Sociology at the Ohio State University. His research interests lies in the broader area of sociology of work, social movement, and political sociology. His current projects include the relationship between state response and social movements, new forms of labor organizing and precarious work in contemporary society. Methodologically, he is interested in combining qualitiative methods with computational techniques.
Gong Zhang
My name is Gong Zhang, a PhD student at the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, TU Delft. I have been focusing on using computational technologies in the field of the built environment and social science, such as urban morphology, human well-being, and heritage sustainable development.
Susanne Böller
Susanne Böller is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Bonn. Her research examines the emergence of social and symbolic boundaries among adolescents. As part of the Emmy Noether group "Sorting Decisions and Peer Processes in Schools" (SPINS) she analyses how school principals' decisions regarding classroom placements affect peer relations at secondary schools.
Julia Gottstein
Julia Gottstein is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. Her dissertation project explores dark participation and the perception of its moderation in Czech media. She uses computational methods to examine mediated interactions in the social media comments section of news media outlets.
Regan Smock
Regan Smock is a graduate student at the University of Iowa, interested in social psychology and culture.
Matias Piqueras
Matias is a PhD student in Computer Science at Uppsala University, where he is part of the InfoLab as well as the CHANSE funded PolarVis project. He has a background in Political Science and is interested in the development of computational methods for studying visual political communication.
Bea Treena Macasaet
Bea is a PhD student in social sciences at the University of Luxembourg. Positioned within the science of science, her dissertation aims to investigate, via computational and network methods, information flow across disciplinary boundaries on the level of researchers and organizations. She also has research experience in scientific migration, productivity, and policy within the contexts of Taiwan and Indonesia.
Cristóbal Moya
Cristóbal Moya is a researcher at the Chair of Social Inequality and Social Structure Analysis at Bielefeld University and a doctoral candidate in the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology. His current research focuses on social inequalities, work, and empirical justice.
Mario Morales
Mario, a Health Behavior Health Promotion PhD student at the University of Arizona (UA), conducts mixed-methods research on dating violence and substance use prevention. He also applies computational techniques to study Latin Urban Music popularity, leveraging his training in anthropology (UDLAP), demography (COLMEX), and political science (UA).
Sourabh Balgi
Sourabh Balgi is a PhD student in Statistics and Machine Learning division at the department of Computer and Information Science, Linkoping University. His research interests lies in causality and counterfactual inference using machine learning/deep learning generative models, with applications related to the Swedish Population Registry and other social and medical sciences applications. He holds a B.E. in Electronic and Communication Engineering and M.Tech. in Artificial Intelligence from Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He has 3 years of work experience as a Software Engineer at Mercedes Benz RD India (Daimler) and 1 year of experience as a Research Associate at the department of Computer Science and Automation, IISc.
Matthias Kuppler
Matthias Kuppler is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Siegen, Germany. His research combines network analysis and agent-based modeling to explain the emergence of status hierarchies in social fields. In his current work, he examines the formation of inequalities in the global literary field.
Anjali Yadav
Anjali is a doctoral student at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Her research focuses on the intersection of social norms, pro-environmental behaviors and public policy. She uses mixed-method analysis to study the coupling between common pool resources and social norms. She is interested in applying and integrating techniques from social network analysis and text analysis to generate new insights into longstanding issues of water pollution in the Ganga river. She received master's in environmental studies from the University of Delhi in 2020.
Emelie Karlsson
Emelie Karlsson is a PhD student in political science at Uppsala University. She is a part of a research project focusing on "AI and political communication", and her dissertation project focuses on coordinated inauthentic behavior and information campaigns on social media platforms and their social and political implications using mixed methods - including experimental and computational approaches.
Nathaniel Darling
Nathaniel Darling is currently completing an MSc in Economic History at LSE, and will start a PhD in October 2023. Before starting this MSc Nathaniel worked as a secondary school teacher in London.
Diletta Goglia
Diletta Goglia is a doctoral student in Network Science at the Information Technology Department of Uppsala University. Her work in the "Uppsala University Information Laboratory research group" (UU-InfoLab) focuses on developing computational methods to model and explain social behavior of people in online communication. Her current project is analyzing users’ roles in conversational data from Online Social Networks, aiming at identifying, modelling and understanding actors’ behavioral patterns in online discussions, by combining structural properties of graphs with social theories. Previously, she collaborated with the “HumMingBird - Horizon 2020 EU” project, working on Machine Learning and Big Data Science to study and predict cross-border human migration using Social Big Data from Facebook. She holds a MSc in Artificial Intelligence and a BSc in Digital Humanities, from University of Pisa. Her education in Computer Science, background in humanities and expertise in sociology delineate the profile of a multidisciplinary researcher.
Asmaa Abdelkhalek
Asmaa Abdelkhalek is a PhD student and a research Assistant at the Department of Political Science Cairo University in Egypt. She is also a researcher atInterRegional for Strategic Analysis - MIR in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Her research interests focus on the integration of quantitative and qualitative research in political science, with a particular focus on the intersection between international relations and public opinion. As part of a research team at Cairo University, she is currently working on a project that examines the impact of misinformation and fake news, with a particular emphasis on the integration of machine learning applications to study these topics.
Sophie Mainz
Sophie is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Government at Uppsala University, Sweden. She researches the consequences of femonationalism and selective preference formation both in digital communication environments and offline. This entails citizens’ responses to political messages that mix liberal and illiberal values, such as gender politics with populist ideas. In her dissertation work, she combines experiments and computational social science methods. As a founder of the PolMethods group at her department and as a teacher, Sophie is keenly interested in the advancement of computational methods both for research and as a teaching subject.IPATC
All Participants
malebo sephodi
malebo sephodi (she/they) is a South African Feminist writer and interdisciplinary scholar. She is a non-resident fellow at IPATC, University of Johannesburg and a doctoral candidate in the Information Systems Department at the University of Cape Town. She is interested in the intersections of society and digital technology.
Odilile Ayodele
Dr Odilile Ayodele is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC). She holds a D.Litt. et Phil in Political Studies at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), and obtained her BA, BA (Hons), an MA in International Relations from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. She completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the South African Research Chair: African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy at UJ. Odilile is currently the convenor of the South African Association of Political Studies (SAAPS) research committee on international relations and diplomacy, an associate editor and book review editor of the Journal of BRICS Studies, as well as the book review editor of the African Journal of Political Science. Her current research projects centre on Global Technopolitics including, the international relations of technology, and digital diplomacy in Africa.
Simona Simona
Dr. Simona Simona is a lecturer in the Department of Social Work and Sociology and Assistant Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zambia. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC), University of Johannesburg. He holds a PhD in Sociology and Quantitative Social Science Methods, and a Master of Research (MRes) in Sociology and Research Methods from the University of Glasgow. His research work generally uses advanced quantitative techniques to examine the influence of individual and structural factors on social and health outcomes. He is also interested in teaching quantitative social science methods and data science, including different software packages for data management, visualization, and statistical modelling.
Tendani Mulanga Chimboza
Dr. Tendani Mulanga Chimboza is a Lecturer at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She also serves as the Scientific Engagement Lead for the Cybersecurity Capacity Centre for Southern Africa (C3SA). Tendani conducts research in Social Informatics and Digital Ethics, specifically research on cyberpsychology, digital parenting, digital activism, and ICT policy. She is passionate about investigating aspects of technology use that unintentionally exclude or marginalize certain groups in society. Tendani holds a Doctorate in Information Systems from UCT and a master’s in arts degree from the University of Western Cape. Before joining UCT, Tendani worked as a Communication Specialist at Saratoga - an IT company based in Cape Town.
Vissého Adjiwanou
Vissého Adjiwanou is a professor of Demography and quantitative and computational methods in the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and adjunct professor at the Department of Demography (Université de Montréal). He directs the Lab on quantitative and computational social science. He is also affiliated with the Centre on Population Dynamics (McGill University). He received an M.A in Statistics from the National School of Statistics and Applied Economics (ENSEA-Cote d’Ivoire), an M.A in Economics of Development at the Centre for Studies and Research on International Development (CERDI- France) and a PhD in Demography from the Université de Montréal (Canada). His research focusses on population issues in sub-Saharan Africa and in Canada, including fertility, family dynamics, gender inequality, reproductive health, and integration of immigrants from SSA in Canada.
Sarah Mulombo Mulaji
Sarah Mulombo Mulaji is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, Department of Information Systems. Sarah is also a Senior Teaching and Research Assistant in the same department since 22020. Sarah's research interests involve information & cybersecurity management and distributed systems, like Blockchain, appplications in organisations and society. Sarah has co-authored some journal articles and conference papers.
Anthony Kaziboni
Dr Anthony Kaziboni is Head of Research at the Institute for the Future of Knowledge. He holds a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He researches hydropolitics, migration and social inequalities. He is the Regional Representative for South Africa for the International Sociological Association's (ISA) Clinical Sociology Research Group. In 2018 he received the prestigious Outstanding Early Career Award in Clinical Sociology by the ISA's Clinical Sociology Research Committee in Toronto, Canada. He has [co]authored publications in accredited journals and books as well as newspaper articles.
Vukosi Marivate
Prof. Vukosi Marivate is the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science. Vukosi works on developing Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of his work over the last few years has been in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Vukosi's work in this area focuses on techniques to improve tools for and availability of data for local languages or low resource languages. Vukosi is a co-founder of Deep Learning Indaba (https://deeplearningindaba.com/). He currently serves as a chief investigator on the Masakhane NLP project (https://www.masakhane.io/) and on the steering committee of the Lacuna Fund (https://lacunafund.org/). As part of his vision for Data Science, Vukosi is interested in Data Science for Social Impact (https://dsfsi.github.io/), using local challenges as a springboard for research. In this area, Vukosi has worked on projects in science, energy, public safety and utilities. Vukosi is a co-founder of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning.
Sisanda Nkoala
Dr Sisanda Nkoala is an award-winning academic interested in South African media and rhetoric. She is employed as a senior lecturer in the Media Department at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and the Language and Transformation coordinator for the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the institution. She is also a leader in the South African journalism sector, serving as a public representative on the South African Press Council, a South African National Editors Forum member, and a member of the appeals tribunal of the Film and Publications Board. Before joining academia, she was a journalist and won an award for her work on missing children and the 2015/2016 #RhodesMustFall protests.
Emmanuel Olamijuwon
Emmanuel Olamijuwon is a Lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, UK. His research interest lies at the intersection of technology, sexuality, & population health in low-and-middle-income countries. His recent projects (SouthScieX, FaMeLynk, SHYad.NET) combine data from traditional data sources (such as the DHS), with digital traces (Facebook and Twitter) and Online surveys to illuminate the complexity of a number of social and health issues such as knowledge inequality, suicide ideation, as well as sexual and reproductive health.
Zintathu Mazamane
Zintathu is an experienced professional with a strong background in research, management consulting, policy and strategy development. Currently, she is in the process of completing a Master of Urban Studies in Urban Management from the University of the Witwatersrand. Due her strong passion for promoting women’s advancement into leadership positions, she has dedicated her master’s research to Examining Tactics that Women in Management Positions Employ to Navigate Institutional Culture while Promoting Development. This research was inspired by the prevalent institutional culture that subjects women to many forms of systemic forms of discrimination, which prevents their ascension into decision making roles and positions of influence. As an aspiring leader and expert in her field, Zintathu has worked as a research lead and development consultant in diverse economic sectors, providing valuable insights to stakeholders such as government, private sector and Non-Government Organisations (NGOs). This informs her well-rounded approach in managing projects, conducting research, and analysing complex data into valuable insights. In 2020, Zintathu started her own consulting firm that provides advisory services to through market research, and she has been operating independently for almost three years now. Her major achievements in entrepreneurship thus far include being accepted into a Business Acceleration Programme in 2023 and breaking out into international markets by landing an American NGO as a client.
Samson Faboye
Samson Faboye is a doctoral candidate at the Urban and Regional Planning Department, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He holds a Bachelor's and Master’s Degrees in Architecture from the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria and a Master of Urban Studies (With a Speciality in urban Politics and Governance) Degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. His ongoing doctoral research explores the future of traditional governance systems in response to expanding urbanisation in North West and KwaZulu Natal Provinces of South Africa. His research interests revolve around Architectural Heritage Conservation, Development and Urban Policy. Samson was one of the participant at the 2022 Summer School in Computational Social Science (SICSS) hosted by the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) and Institute for PanAfrican Thought and Conversations (IPATC). He is also a recipient of the 2022/2023 Adam Smith Fellowship from the Mercatus Center of the George Mason University, USA and an 2022/2023 inaugural Edgeland Institute Fellow on the impact digitalisation on Urban Security.
Nompumelelo Ndawonde
Ms. Nompumelelo Ndawonde is a Researcher at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC). She is currently a PhD student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. She obtained a Masters of Political Science, a Bachelor of Social Science (Honours) in International Relations (cum laude), and a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies (cum laude), all from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa. Ms. Ndawonde was awarded academic exchange scholarships for studies at the University of Calgary in Canada, and the University of Uppsala in Sweden. Her key research interests include regional organisations, trade, and development.
Aubrey Mpungose
Aubrey Mpungose is a PhD student at the University of KwaZulu Natal. He is interested in social/political theory, political participation, neighbourhood contexts and behaviour/outcomes, and the broader field of political economy.
Shaka Bob
Authors Biography Shaka Keny Bob Shaka is an Institute of French Research in South Africa (IFAS-South Africa) 2021, research fellow and is also a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Stellenbosch University. Previously, Shaka has served as a sessional lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Witwatersrand and has also served as a research consultant for the Women in Informal Employment Globalising and Organising (WIEGO) and DataFirst at the University of Cape Town. His research interests include social policy, informal work, gender studies and the ongoing changes to labour markets in the developing South context. Shaka holds a Masterof Arts in Social Policy and Labour Studies which was attained cum laude at Rhodes University in 2018. His doctoral thesis focuses on the ability of informal workers to adapt to COVID-19- related shocks and the case for social protection in the City of Cape Town, South Africa.
Mmamashilo Herminah Mmako
Mmamashilo Herminah Mmako is a Master's candidate at the University of Pretoria. Herminah is an affiliate and researcher at the University of Pretoria's African Center for the Study of the United States (ACSUS-UP). Her research is focused on geopolitics in specific reference to the United States-China geopolitical contest in the Indo-Pacific and its implications for Africa's regional inclusion. Herminah holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Sciences (cum-laude) and Honours in International Relations (cum-laude) from North-West University.
Dieu-Donne Fangnon
I'm a master student in machine learning. I'm working on my computer vision and reinforcement learning research projects. Open to work in PhD projects, or internship.
Kennedy Manduna
Kennedy is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counterstrategies (IRGAC) of the Rosa Luxemburg-Stiftung, hosted by the Wits School of Governance (WSG) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. For the past seven years, I have been a researcher, teaching assistant and lecturer within the WSG and Wits Business School (WBS). He completed his PhD in Political Economy and Public Policy in 2022 at the WSG.
Makhethe Makamase
Makhethe Makamase is a Doctoral candidate in International Relations at the University of Pretoria (UP), an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Political Science (at UP) and a Researcher at the Centre for Mediation in Africa (CMA). She has experience in research and administrative work in roles at the Institute for Global Dialogue (IGD) a Think Tank associated with the University of South Africa (UNISA), the CMA, UP, and transcultural work experiences. She is an alumni of the Managing Global Governance (MGG) Academy (2021) by the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) and the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), a programme aimed at enhancing dialogue and knowledge between the global south and Germany/Europe towards sustainable and effective cooperation.
Matsidiso Bambo
Matsidiso Bambo is a second year MA in Social and Psychological Research student at the University of the Witwatersrand and a member of the Golden Key International Honour Society. She is also an alumna at the University of Johannesburg.
Bimbo Fafowora
Bimbo L. Lolade Fafowora is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa. Her doctoral research focuses on the media representation of women in political leadership positions in Nigeria. Before acquiring her doctoral degree, Bimbo had earned her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Communication and Language Arts from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Her research interests are Media Construction and Representation, Gender equality, Politics, Music, Culture, Fake News, Media Literacy, and Circular Economy.
Takaedza Madzikanda
I am a Sociology PhD candidate at the University of Johannesburg - researching digital networking and transnationalism and how these impact identity negotiation processes. I hold an MA in International Relations (University of Bedfordshire) and an LLB - Gov. & Politics (University of Hertfordshire).
Juliet Nanfuka
Juliet Nanfuka has a background in media and works in the digital rights space on various initiatives aimed at advocating for an internet that is free, fair, and open in Africa. She is interested in the cross paths of social innovation, technology and society.
Pamella Gysman
Pamella Gysman is a Master's graduate in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and feminist writer. Her research is interested in the intersections of identity, culture and performance as forms of citizenship and belonging.
Ayantola Alayande
Ayantola Alayande is a Research Assistant in Digitalisation and Public Sector Productivity at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge. Prior to Cambridge, he worked as a Research Executive (Quants/Client Services) at Kantar, London office. He holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh and the KDI School of Public Policy.
Liliane Manitchoko
Liliane Manitchoko is a demographer and holds a PhD in biostatistics. Having lived and worked in Cameroon as a demographer, Liliane has experience in collecting and analysing demographic and health data, as well as research on the demographic dividend in Africa. As a biostatistician, she has worked on statistical models to take into account temporal variations in drug exposure in order to better assess the risk of adverse effects. To complete her methodological skills, Liliane is currently interested in machine learning methods and pursuing a specialised master's degree in Big Data (management and analysis of massive data) at Télécom Paris.
Tinashe Sithole
Tinashe Sithole (PhD) is a visiting research fellow at the Politics and International Relations department at the University of Johannesburg. His research interests focus on democracy, governance and international political economy- focusing on challenges of development for African states in the global world, elections, human security and peace and conflict. Tinashe is interested in applying computational tools to his field. His main research project aims at studying the impact of social media on democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Daniella Ojekere
I am a data scientist with experience in building predictive Models with extensive knowledge of Python frameworks, libraries, data structures, and data modeling with 5 years of experience as a data scientist and 2 years of machine learning. I currently work with Python, SQl, PowerBi, Microsoft Excel, and AWS, I have been a data scientist and a project administrator for international research grant projects in the United Kingdom, Uganda, Sweden, and Nigeria. I am an ardent reader and love writing and finding new problems to solve. In my free time, I like enjoying nature and am always on the lookout for adventures and contributing to open-source projects.
Rennish Mboya
Rennish Mboya is a doctoral student in Maseno University in Kenya. my research is currently inclined towards importance of innovation and the steps that can be taken by Kenya to achieve the same state as the ASEAN block. currently working as an assistant lecturer in the same university lecturing technology programming units.Istanbul
All Participants
Akın Ünver
Akin Unver is an associate professor of International Relations at Ozyegin University, specializing in conflict research, computational methods and digital crisis communication. He is a fellow of Carnegie Endowment's Digital Democracy Network and serves as a member of TikTok's MENA-T Security Advisory Council. Previously he served as a Research Associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs, Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow at GUARD (Global Urban Analytics for Resilient Defence) at the Alan Turing Institute. He is the author of ‘Defining Turkey’s Kurdish Question: Discourse and Politics Since 1990’ (Routledge Series in Middle Eastern Politics).
Merih Angın
Merih Angın is an Assistant Professor at Koç University's College of Administrative Sciences and Economics, where she lectures at the International Relations Department, and Computational Social Sciences graduate program. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government of the University of Oxford, and a visiting scholar at the Mortara Center for International Studies of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She holds a Ph.D. degree in International Relations/Political Science from the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID), an M.Sc. degree in International Relations from METU, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Bilkent University. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy, international development, international financial institutions, computational social sciences including agent-based modeling, machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence (AI) governance. Dr. Angın’s research on AI usage in social sciences was awarded the EU's Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship, as well as the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey’s International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers. In October 2019, she founded the MA-Computational Social Sciences Lab (MA-CSSL) at Koç University, which is an interdisciplinary research laboratory bringing together researchers from multiple disciplines including economics, sociology, computer science, political science & international relations. Her work has been published in internationally recognized peer-reviewed journals such as Economics & Politics, Sustainability, International Interactions, IEEE Access, and New Perspectives on Turkey, among others.
Onur Varol
Onur Varol is an Assistant Professor at the Sabanci University Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences and Principal Investigator at the VIRAL Lab. His research focuses on developing techniques to analyze online behaviors to improve individual well-being and address societal problems using online data. Prior to joining Sabanci University, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University at the Center for Complex Network Research. He completed his PhD in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA). His thesis focuses on the analysis of manipulation and threats on social media and he was awarded the 2018 University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award. He has developed a system called Botometer to detect social bots on Twitter and his team ranked top 3 worldwide at the 2015 DARPA Bot Detection Challenge. Efforts on studying social bots yield publications on prestigious venues such as International Conference of Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Nature Communications, World Wide Web (WWW) conference, and Communications of the ACM.
Erdem Yörük
Erdem Yörük is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University and an Associate Member in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at University of Oxford. He serves as the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project 'Emerging Welfare' (The New Politics of Welfare: Towards an 'Emerging Markets' Welfare State Regime) and the H2020 project Social Comquant. He is also a member of Young Academy of Europe and an associate editor of European Review. He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University (2012). His work focuses on social welfare and social policy, social movements, political sociology, and computational social sciences. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, FP7 Marie Curie CIG, European Research Council, H2020, and the Science Academy of Turkey. His projects have created two datasets on welfare and protest movements. His articles have appeared in World Development, Governance, Politics & Society, Journal of European Social Policy, New Left Review, Current Sociology, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Behavioral Scientist, International Journal of Communication, Social Policy and Administration, and Social Indicators Research, among others. His book, 'The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey' is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in May 2022.
Başak Taraktaş
Başak Taraktaş is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bogazici University. She received her PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Before coming to Bogazici, She worked as a postdoc at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs for two years and as a research analyst at FutureMap. Her research centers on collective action and opinion dynamics. Much of her work is set in the contexts of regimes, and contentious politics, where she combine computational methods (such as, agent-based models, network analysis, and text analysis) and qualitative research to unpack the effect of ideology and ideational beliefs on cooperation. She is particularly interested in adaptations of complexity theory and dynamical systems in social sciences.Her current project, Dia-Pol, is supported by Marie Curie Individual Fellowship 2020 grant. Dia-Pol studies the conditions under which polarization follows from social media interactions among social movements and their countermovements and the themes on which these interactions foster dialogue.
Yunus Emre Tapan
Yunus Emre Tapan, a graduate of SICSS-Helsinki-18, is a Ph.D. Student in Political Science at Northeastern University. He studied Economics in his B.A. at Bogazici University and Middle East Studies in his M.Sc. at METU. His research sits at the intersection of data science and social sciences. He specializes in social network analysis and computational text analysis to study online extremist communities and non-state actors with a particular focus on how they radicalize. He is a graduate of ICPSR Summer Program in 2020 as one of the recipients of the Scholarship for Political Science Research.
Ahmet Kurnaz
Ahmet is a computer engineer with a PhD in Political Science, specializing in R programming language. His research focuses on polarization and political communication in the digital age, with an emphasis on deep learning applications in social science analysis, digital politics, and elections. In addition, Ahmet has conducted research as a visiting scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Maryland, College Park. His work aims to shed light on the complex relationship between technology and politics and to provide insights that can help to shape policy and decision-making.
Fuat Kina
Fuat Kına is a PhD student at the Sociology Department of Koç University since 2018. Before joining the project, he graduated with B.S. degree in Economics from Boğaziçi University in 2015 and received his master’s degree with quantitative research on the relationship between anti-immigrant attitudes and labor precarity in Europe in 2018 from İstanbul Şehir University. He is currently working on the relationship between social movements, their targets and social assistance programs by utilizing advanced level quantitative techniques on causal inference. Some of his research interests are social policy, social movements, labor studies, Islamist movements, causal inference, systematic review.
Ali Hürriyetoğlu
Dr. Ali Hürriyetoğlu is a postdoctoral research fellow at Koc University in the ERC projects “Emerging Welfare” (EMW) and “Social ComQuant: Excelling in Computational and Quantitative Social Sciences in Turkey”. He is performing research and coordinating the work-package related to automatically collecting a multi-country and multilingual protest events (contentious politics) database from local news sources in EMW. He is responsible from computational social science aspects in the Social ComQuant Project. He teaches text mining and Social Sciences and Computing related courses. Mr. Hürriyetoğlu performed research on extracting actionable information from social media in the scope of his Ph.D. studies. He has been working in industrial, governmental, and academic settings to process news and social media text in various domains throughout his career. His recent research focus is on the robustness and the generalizability of text processing systems across contexts.
Uzay Çetin
Uzay Çetin received his master’s degree in artificial intelligence from Pierre and Marie Curie University and his doctoral degree in complex systems from Bogazici University Computer Engineering Department. He is a faculty member in Galatasaray University Computer Engineering department, and he is co-founder of Summarify. He organizes free machine learning courses to young people in Sarıyer Municipality and he works as a ML consultant with different firms. He also organizes multi-disciplinary workshops on complex systems and data science.
Berfin Baydar
Berfin Baydar is a Ph.D. student at Sabancı University, specializing in Political Science. She will be continuing her doctoral studies at Duke University beginning in Fall 2023. In 2020, she completed her undergraduate studies in Political Science and Public Administration, with a minor degree in International Relations, at Bilkent University. Following that, she successfully obtained her master’s degree in Political Science from Sabancı University in 2022. Her thesis examined the relationship between civil conflict, voter turnout, and the vote shares of insurgent-affiliated and incumbent parties by focusing on the modifying effect of cleavage types. Currently, she is actively engaged in the Istanbul Telephone Directories Project, where she led the creation of a comprehensive dataset from phone directories dating from 1929 to 1955. Before starting her Ph.D. at Sabancı, she served as a research fellow for the World Health Organization. She conducted field research in Shamakhi, Azerbaijan, and contributed to co-authoring a mid-term evaluation report for the PROACT-Care project. Her research interest lies in the intersection of economic institutions, inequality, and minority politics. She examines the impact of economic policies, tax regulations, welfare programs, and public investments on political disparities, with a specific interest in understanding their influence on voting behavior and electoral outcomes.
Lale Akarun
Lale Akarun is a professor of Computer Engineering and the director of the Center for Telecommunications and Informatics (http://tetam.boun.edu.tr/en). She received the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic School of Engineering of NYU, in 1992. She has been a faculty member at Bogazici University, Istanbul since 1993. She has served as Department Head of Computer Engineering (2010-2012) and Vice Rector for Research (2012-2016). As Vice Rector, her responsibilities included Sponsored Research Projects, Technology Transfer, Incubation Centers and Technoparks of the University. Her research areas are in image processing and computer vision, and in particular, processing of faces and gestures. She has supervised 70 graduate theses and published more than 200 scholarly papers in scientific journals and refereed conferences. She has conducted research projects in biometrics, face recognition, hand gesture recognition, human-computer interaction, and sign language recognition.
Selim Balcısoy
Selim Balcısoy earned his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) in 2001. Between 2001 and 2004, he worked as a Senior Research Engineer at Nokia Research Centre in Dallas, USA. Dr. Balcisoy has been awarded with a U.S.A. patent and is author of over 50 scholarly articles. He conducts research on augmented reality, data visualization, and cultural heritage. Dr. Balcisoy is a full-time faculty member at Sabancı University since 2004 and a cofounder of VisioThink, Inc., established in 2006.
Mustafa Erdem Kabadayı
Dr. M. Erdem Kabadayı obtained his BSc. and MSc. degrees in Economics from the Middle East Technical University (1995) and the University of Vienna (1999), respectively. He gained his Ph.D. in History and Culture of the Middle East and Turkology at the University of Munich (2008). He was awarded the associate professorship in Economic History and the History of Economic Thought by the Inter-University Council of Turkey (2011). Dr. Kabadayi was the principal investigator of the first ERC Starting Grant (UrbanOccupationsOETR) in the economic history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey (2016-2022). Recently he also gained an ERC Proof of Concept Grant (GeoAI_LULC_Seg) in the joint fields of data science, population geography, remote sensing, and history (2022-2024). His research has been interdisciplinary. Dr. Kabadayi has published individually and collaboratively in disciplines such as history, digital humanities, data sciences, geographical and earth sciences, and ecology.
Anita Gohdes
Anita Gohdes is Professor of International and Cyber Security at the Hertie School. Her research focuses on contentious politics in the cyber realm, with a current emphasis on large-scale quantitative analyses of state behaviour. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Zurich, and postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center International Security Program. Since 2009, she has worked for the California-based non-profit organisation Human Rights Data Analysis Group. She currently advises the German Federal Foreign Office, and has consulted for the World Bank and the United Nations on security and state fragility. Her doctoral dissertation (University of Mannheim) was awarded the German Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences by the Körber Foundation, and the Walter Isard Dissertation Award by the Peace Science Society.
Christopher Barrie
Christopher Barrie is Lecturer in Computational Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He specializes in the study of protest, conflict, and communication. He is particularly interested in advancing the use of use digital trace, news, and communications data to study populations that have traditionally been 'hard-to-reach' in the empirical social sciences.
Milos Popovic
He is a leading data visualization specialist on Twitter and a Data Analyst at Booking.com in Amsterdam. He uses R to create maps that make sense of big data. His portfolio includes over 300 maps! According to NodeXL, He is among the Top 10 dataviz and R contributor on Twitter.
Ingmar Weber
Ingmar is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor in AI at Saarland University. Within the department of computer science, he is currently building up a new team working on “Societal Computing”. This interdisciplinary area comprises (i) computing of society, i.e. the measurement of different social phenomena, in particular using non-traditional data sources, and (ii) computing for society, i.e. working with partners on implementing solutions to help address societal challenges.
Ollie Ballinger
He is a Lecturer in Geocomputation at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. He did his PhD at the Oxford Department for International Development, where his research focuses on developing computational methods for the study of insurgent recruitment in Turkey. He sometimes builds and writes things for Bellingcat, where he is a Tech Fellow. He is a big fan of satellites and strange datasets.
Serkant Adıgüzel
Serkant Adıgüzel is an assistant professor of political science at Sabancı University and a non-resident research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He is also part of the Machine Learning for Peace project, which aims to identify shifts in civic space in real-time worldwide. He obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in 2022. His research interests lie at the intersection of the political economy of democratic backsliding, digital media, and public services. His research focuses on two mechanisms through which autocrats build and maintain support: first, their attempts to capture the media and the resulting media bias, and second, the strategic deployment of public services. His research has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Politics, New Perspectives on Turkey, and Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy.
Mert Küçük
Mert is a graduate of Computer Science from Bilkent University, which he successfully completed in 2011. His startup was granted acceptance into the prestigious Y Combinator, a renowned startup accelerator program. With a versatile skill set and extensive expertise in the fields of Computer Vision and Entrepreneurship, Mert has held prominent positions as the Head of AI for several forward-thinking startups, where his contributions have significantly influenced their growth and success. Presently, Mert serves as the Head of AI at Oda Studio, where he continues to lead cutting-edge solutions in computer vision, image analysis, and object detection.
Ergin Selim Gonen
Ergin Selim Gönen holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering with a specialization in Control Theory from Bilkent University in 2006. In 2008, he completed an MBA degree at Sabancı University. His professional background encompasses strategy consulting, sales, software development, and entrepreneurship in companies that specialize in computer vision and synthetic image data. Currently, Selim is the founder of Mirage, where he focuses on the generation of synthetic image data using 3D rendering techniques. As the founder of Mirage, Selim is intimately involved in international computer vision projects, current frontiers in synthetic data and most key use cases of 3D rendering in industry applications.
Veniamin Veselovsky
Veniamin Veselovsky is a research scholar at EPFL Data Science Lab working with Prof. Robert West on aligning AI for human needs. His recent work has focused on generating human-like synthetic data and monitoring LLM usage across various industries -like crowd work. In the past, Veniamin worked at the University of Toronto with Prof. Ashton Anderson building embedding techniques for Reddit and predicting affiliation on OpenStreetMap. He has presented this research both to academia at conferences like ICWSM, IC2S2, CSCW, and to industry -Google. In September, he will join the Max Planck Institute in Germany to work alongside Prof. Ingmar Weber.
Dilge Iris Girgin
Dilge Iris Girgin is an upcoming PhD student at the University of Chicago, with a background in International Relations and Sociology. She completed her MPhil in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge and currently serves as a research associate at the CFPPR. Her research interests include the study of transnational repression.
Jawwad Shadman Siddique
Jawwad Shadman Siddique is a software engineer and machine learning researcher with expertise in data cleaning, data mining, knowledge graph, and natural language processing. He is passionate about generating innovative ideas and developing end-to-end products. Jawwad has worked on various projects, including building a recommendation system for flood monitoring in Texas, designing mapping functions to identify water accumulation areas, and developing a web analytic tool for machine learning and energy education. He is currently involved in developing a social network map to identify research interests for novice researchers. Jawwad holds a B.Sc in Civil Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology and an M.Sc in Civil Engineering from Texas Tech University. During his time at Texas Tech University, he worked as a graduate research assistant at the water resources center. Jawwad has gained international exposure through his participation in conferences and projects, which has shaped his global problem-solving mindset. He has received training from esteemed accelerators and incubation programs such as Watson Institute, Startup Istanbul, and UNLEASH. His startup, 'Waste-Bin,' has been recognized by Etohum, a prominent incubator and angel investment hub in Turkey.
İlayda Velioğlu
I am a psychological science master's student and mainly interested in morality. I find using R in my research projects enjoyable and rewarding.
Gün Ünal
Gün Ünal is a Ph.D. student at Ankara University, Department of Political Science. She has an MA degree in International Relations from Hacettepe University, and BA in International Relations from Bilkent University. She previously worked as a Junior Researcher for a think tank and is an alumni of 2019 MENA Workshops held by DGAP German Council for Foreign Relations in Berlin and Rabad. Her research areas cover a broad spectrum of human security studies and qualitative social research, she is interested in pathway analysis.
Yasser Zouzou
Yasser is a Data Science MSc student at Sabanci University and a researcher in Viral lab. He is currently working on social media data analysis, focusing on the upcoming elections in Turkiye. His main contribution in the lab is in detecting anomalies in Twitter followers using unsupervised approaches. His field of interest is detecting, analyzing, and mitigating online misbehavior.
Mustafa Murat Cerit
M. Murat Cerit is a research assistant in marketing at Turkish-German University, Department of Business Administration. He has a bachelor's degree from Istanbul University (2008). After working a couple of years in the industry as international sales and marketing executive, he moved to Germany to study for a master's degree thanks to a scholarship from the Ministry of National Education of the Republic of Turkey and completed the study in Business Administration at the University of Bremen (2017). He is currently a PhD candidate at Istanbul Technical University's Department of Business Administration. He focuses on brand messages published on Twitter and works with certain text analysis methods in order to understand how marketing professionals have changed their marketing communication language during the global pandemic.
Esra Çengel
Esra Çengel is a research assistant and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of International Relations at Middle East Technical University (METU). She obtained a Bachelor's degree in International Relations and a Minor degree in German Language from METU. Esra earned her Master's degree from the Department of European Studies at METU with her thesis entitled 'The Greek Political Elite and the European Identity: Impact of the Debt Crisis' in 2018. Her current doctoral research focuses on the history of American-Turkish relations, examining the influence of people-to-people interactions on the political, economic, and cultural ties between the two countries. Her research interests include foreign policy analysis, nationalism, and gender. Esra is particularly interested in data-driven approaches and quantitative methodology in the field of international relations.
Neslihan Gurler
Neslihan Gurler, graduated from Hacettepe University Department of Sociology and she is a master student in Applied Data Science at TED University. Her main area of interest is an interdisciplinary field where software and sociology are together and combines social science and natural science methodologies. Thanks to the her learning objective, she study with social sciences methodology, especially computational methods, data analysis, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligent (AI). She is one of the founders of a start-up called NOTAR Research and Analytics within the framework of her domain. She is also working with Hacettepe University Demography Institute for the TUBITAK project.
Cihan Hulagu
Cihan graduated from Bogazici University, where he studied Psychological Guidance and Counseling. He has an interest in personality theories and social network analysis. He completed his research project on a bivariate correlational study that explored the relationship between personality types and movie preferences. His most recent research interests focus on social network analysis and the motivations behind social media use. He studies co-following relations on Twitter to understand the motives behind the ways we choose to collect information.
Süleyman Barış Başaran
Suleyman Baris is a second-year master's student in Computational Social Science at Koc University, with a solid background in Political Sciences. His current research focuses on exploring the relationship between urban growth, environmental quality, and overall satisfaction with life. Using advanced techniques such as Geographic Information System (GIS) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), he analyzes vast amounts of data from various sources, including call center data and social media platforms. In those projects, he utilizes innovative methods like time series and geospatial analysis, as well as topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Through his research, Suleyman hopes to contribute to the development of evidence-based policies that can improve the quality of life in urban areas.
İsa Ali Demir
Ali is an M.A. student in the department of International Relations at Koç University. He holds a B.A. degree in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University. His research interest lies in the intersection of computational research methods and affective polarization. Specifically, conceptualizing polarization as a geographically distributed phenomenon, he investigates the geographical drivers of affective polarization in Turkey. Prior to graduate school, he participated in several research projects and worked in policy centers as a research intern. Currently, he works as a research assistant in a Tubitak project where he computes textual analysis on speeches of Turkish political party leaders. He is heavily interested in computational research methods such as geospatial analysis and natural language process.
Ahmet Ergurum
Ahmet Ergurum is a Political Science Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research interests include foreign policy analysis, conflict, civil wars, international security, and emerging technologies. His current research focuses on rebel groups, foreign policy decision-making of MENA leaders, and Blockchain policies of great powers. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from Bilkent University. He completed his Master of Arts degree in International Relations at Bilkent University. He is interested in text analysis, causal inference, quantitative methods, and computational social science.
Benan Kazdağlı
Benan is a PhD student in History at Boğaziçi University. He earned his B.Sc. in Economics from Galatasaray University; and his MA in History from Istanbul 29 May University. His master's thesis was on the 18th-century grain merchants of Istanbul. His Ph.D. research will focus on grain markets of the 18th century with an attempt to go beyond the price fluctuations and study the ways in which the social and physical aspects of the markets affect the practices of exchanges. His interests revolve around the concept of market. To understand it better, he seeks to learn the methods offered by the computational social sciences.
Sudenur Koyuncu
Sudenur is in her last year of International Relations department in English at Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University. During studying, she realized her interest in technology and aimed to use technology in International Relations related fields in her career. She was selected to and completed Data Science for Social Good Bootcamp which was sponsored by CADS@TEDU and Kodluyoruz. She also writes on a variety of topics for the Gelecek Bilimde (the Future is in Science) blog. Her interests are social data science, international organizations, international political economy, international development and energy diplomacy.
Azade Eryiğit
Azade Eryiğit is a PhD candidate in International Relations at Kadir Has University and a Research Assistant at Özyeğin University. She has a broad interest in critical security studies, foreign policy analysis, and social media analysis using NLP methods. She earned her BA degree in Political Sciences and International Relations from Şehir University and began her MA studies there. She completed her MA degree at Marmara University, where she wrote a thesis on the theory of securitization and its application in social media analysis.
Yağmur Çağatay
Yağmur Çağatay is an MA student in the Sociology Department at Boğaziçi University, where she also works as a research assistant. As part of her master’s thesis, she currently works on sexual harassment at universities and disclosures thereof. Her research interests revolve around the sociology of sexuality, social networks, and information diffusion, with a touch of film studies.
Ozancan Ozdemir
Ozancan Ozdemir, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in Statistics from Middle East Technical University (METU) in 2017 and with a master's degree in Statistics in 2020, as a valedictorian in both, is currently pursuing his PhD in the same department. Since 2017, he has been working as a research assistant at the METU Statistics Department and is also a co-founder of the data journalism website VeriPie. His research interests include time series forecasting, deep learning applications, data visualization, text mining, natural language processing, and election forecasting.
Leon Oliver Wolf
Currently, I am pursuing a Master's degree in Social Scientific Data Analysis that focuses on statistical analysis and modeling. Through the graduate school I have gained in-depth knowledge of research puzzles, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and ethical considerations in data analysis. At the University of Maastricht, I completed an interdisciplinary Bachelor's degree in European Studies that placed a strong emphasis on Problem-Based-Learning (PBL) methods. Through this program, I developed a solid academic foundation in political science, among other related fields. I have a keen interest in utilizing data analysis to gain insights into complex socio-economic and socio-political phenomenas and am committed to continuously enhancing my skills and knowledge in this field. I aim to build upon my existing knowledge by conducting theory-led, comparative empirical analyses on politics and policy-making, with a specific focus on promoting the common good.
Hannah Weytjens
Hannah is a PhD candidate in sociology at KU Leuven and ULB, Belgium. She holds a BS and MA in sociology, with a focus on cultural sociology. Her research focuses on how cities (re)create diversity and how this connects to inequities. She is particularly interested in how the aesthetic and cultural aspects of cities contribute to this. Hence, her thesis is about how people form “scenes” (i.e. loose clusters of people with similar lifestyles) based on cultural and aesthetic judgments in the Brussels’ neighborhoods of Matonge and Molenbeek, and how these scenes relate to each other.
Melih Can Yardı
Melih Can Yardı is a second-year MA student in Computational Social Sciences at Koç University and a researcher at the Politus Project. He holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science and International Relations & Philosophy from Boğaziçi University. He specializes in social media, natural language processing, and social network analysis. His current work focuses on stance detection, online communication, political behavior, and public opinion & discourse.
Alper Tunga Şahiner
Alper Tunga Şahiner is currently pursuing his Master's degree in Political Science at Sabancı University and he is a research assistant at Istanbul Gedik University. He holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations and BA in Sociology from Istanbul Sehir University. He enjoys working on various topics ranging from colonization to football transfers, from civil wars to extreme right-wing party votes. Currently, his research is primarily focused on international political economy, offshoring, and economic nationalism.
Serhat Demirkıran
Serhat Demirkıran is a Data Science MSc. student at Sabancı University. He is also a member of Viral Lab led by Professor Onur Varol. He received his bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from İstanbul Technical University. He studied recommender systems for his graduation project and developed a model to predict tweet engagement rates as a problem presented by RecSys Challenge 2020. He is interested in user behavior and political polarization in social media lately.
Gevher Yesevi
Gevher is a data scientist and consultant with expertise in energy systems. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering and is pursuing a Master's degree in AI at Ozyegin University. Gevher has worked on a range of consultancy projects for energy systems and building automated machine-learning modules for time series forecasting. Her research interests include behavior modeling in bilateral negotiations and time series forecasting.
Ayşe Duman
Ayşe Duman is currently a first-year MS student in Industrial Engineering and Operations Management at Koç University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematical Engineering from Yildiz Technical University, which she obtained in 2021. In 2022, she completed a double major in Statistics at the same institution. Her areas of expertise include data analysis, machine learning algorithms, and optimization methods. Her current research focuses on integer programming and mixed integer programming using solvers such as Gurobi, Cplex, and Glpk. Additionally, she has an interest in VRP and TSP problems as well as time series forecasting. Currently, she is continuing her professional career as a Product Specialist at BTS Group in the BTS AI LAB located in ITU Ayazaga Campus, Turkey.
Ali Najafi
Ali Najafi is a Computer Science MSc student at Sabanci University and a researcher in the Virallab. He is currently working on social media data analysis, focusing on the upcoming elections in Turkey. His main contribution to the lab is building Turkish Language Models and applications to detect misinformation on Twitter. He is active in Natural Language Processing and Computational Social science.Korea
All Participants
Lanu Kim
Lanu Kim is an assistant professor in the school of humanities and social sciences and a joint professor in the school of computing at KAIST. After finishing her sociology PhD at the University of Washington, she was a postdoctoral fellow and data science scholar at Stanford University. Her research broadly contributes to the theoretical understanding of academic knowledge creation by mainly examining the impact of academic search engines, gender inequality in higher education, and the social structure of knowledge construction. To investigate, she utilizes new big data sources, innovative analytical strategies, natural language processing, and advanced statistical methods and works with interdisciplinary research teams.
Jaehyuk Park
Jaehyuk Park is an assistant professor at KDI School of Public Policy and Management (KDI School) and a visiting faculty in the Data Science group at IBS. After he finished his Ph.D. in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, he received his postdoctoral training at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and has also served as a research scientist at the Core Data Science team at Facebook (currently, Meta). His research interests lie in the intersection of data science and public policy, with a focus on understanding the impact of technological innovation on public management and the labor market.
Jeon June
June Jeon is an assistant professor of sociology at Chungnam National University (CNU), Republic of Korea. He is a qualitative ethnographer and theorist, specialized in sociology science, technology, and environment. His recent research interests include computational large-scale qualitative analysis on varieties of inequalities in scientific knowledge production. June received Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has published in Social Studies of Science, New Media & Society, Agriculture & Human Values, among other journals.
Eunhye Ann
Eunhye Ann is an Assistant Professor at Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also an affiliated researcher at the Center for Innovation in Child Maltreatment Policy, Research and Training and Children's Data Network. She leverages data to improve the outcomes of children and families who come to the attention of the system, advancing broader social goals of equity and justice. Her research agenda includes informing child welfare policy and practice through rigorous examination of racial and socioeconomic disparities, developing predictive models to support frontline workers' decision-making, and understanding the ethics and fairness of machine learning applied to child welfare.
Kaiping Chen
Dr. Kaiping Chen (PhD, Stanford University) is currently an Assistant Professor in Computational Communication from the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Chen is also faculty affiliate at Department of Political Science, the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. Dr. Chen's research use data science and machine learning methods as well as interviews to study to what extent digital media and technologies hold politicians accountable for public well-being and how deliberative designs can improve the quality of public discourse and mitigate misinformation. Dr. Chen's work is interdisciplinary and draw from theories in communication, political science, and computer sciences. Chen's works in utilizing big data tools and community engagement methods have been supported by the US National Science Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and American Family Insurance. Her works were published in flagship journals across disciplines, including the American Political Science Review, Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, Public Opinion Quarterly, Public Understanding of Science, Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, International Public Management Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), among other peer-review journals. Dr. Chen is also a civic engagement practitioner, with her continued passion to help local governments and communities in US and China implement and analyze innovative practices of engaging citizens throughout policymaking.
TaeYoung Kang
TaeYoung Kang is a founder of Underscore, data analyst, and motion-graphic content creator. He finished his M.S. in Management Engineering at KAIST, and also majored in Sociology and Political Science during undergraduate years. He is interested in the fields of Computational Social Science including Online Political Behavior, Media Consumption, and Applied NLP.
Juho Kim
Juho Kim is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at KAIST, affiliate faculty in the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI at KAIST, and a director of KIXLAB (the KAIST Interaction Lab). His research in human-computer interaction and human-AI interaction focuses on building interactive and intelligent systems that support interaction at scale, aiming to improve the ways people learn, collaborate, discuss, make decisions, and take action online. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT. He is a recipient of a KIISE/IEEE-CS Young Computer Researcher Award, KAIST's Songam Distinguished Research Award, Grand Prize in Creative Teaching, Q-Day Creative Education Award, and Excellence in Teaching Award, as well as 14 paper awards.
Byungkyu Lee
Byungkyu (BK) Lee is an Assistant Professor of sociology at Indiana University. He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology at Columbia University with the Robert Merton Award for Best Dissertation. He has been using causal inference, network analysis, and machine learning methods to study social divisions, political polarization, and social determinants of health. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Facebook/Meta, and American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. He has published in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Proceedings of National Academy of Science, JAMA Network Open and several other outlets.
Dongoh Park
Dongoh is a Senior Policy Advisor at Google's Trust and Safety Team, where he is responsible for creating and overseeing policies for Chrome Browser and the web ecosystem to protect user safety and privacy. Prior to joining Google six years ago, Dongoh worked as a policy researcher at the Science and Technology Policy Institute in Korea and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information. He also served as an information and communication officer in the Republic of Korea Navy. Dongoh holds a Ph.D. in Social Informatics from Indiana University, Bloomington and currently lives in the Los Angeles area with his family.
Minsu Park
Minsu Park is an Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi. He develops and applies quantitative and computational methods to study the consumption and production of creative work. His current projects focus on how cultural artifacts/interests flow worldwide and how social traces, such as ratings, reviews, and reviewer identities, shape audiences' perceptions and engagements online. His research inhabits an interdisciplinary nexus between data science and social science, simultaneously drawing on and contributing to both, and has been published in top-tier venues in both computer and information science conferences (e.g., ISMIR, ICWSM) and interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Science Advances, Nature Human Behaviour). He received his doctorate in Information Science at Cornell University, where he was a member of the Social Dynamics Lab. He is also affiliated with the Center for Data Science at New York University.
Allen Kim
Allen Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Columbia University. While he specializes in American politics, his research interests more broadly concern public opinion about environmental policies and the political psychology behind perceptions of threats. He strives to apply quantitative methods and text analysis to better understand under what conditions individuals are more willing to endorse costly environmental legislation and take certain policy issues more seriously. He received a BA in political science with a minor in public policy from UC Berkeley.
Anthony T. Nguyen
Anthony is currently in his first year as a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Davis, specializing in Comparative Politics and American Politics. His primary research focus is on the study of queer politics within advanced industrial democracies, with special emphasis on the East Asia region. Specifically, he seeks to understand the divergent outcomes among these nations in terms of their protection of LGBTQ+ rights.
Ayushi Das
I am a Ph.D. student in Biostatistics and Demography at the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India. My research focuses on utilizing machine learning methods to explore sociodemographic risk factors associated with geriatric diseases. I have a keen interest in integrating computational methods and big data approaches to advance demographic research.
Bumju Jung
Bumju Jung (he/him) is an incoming PhD Student at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Bumju explores the social influences of political messages generated by autonomous machines, such as social bots, and how they reshape both on- and offline public spheres. In essence, he seeks to answer, “How are machines and advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence, intervening in public opinion, and what is the meaning of authentic communication on social media then?”
Dahyeon Jeong
DaHyeon Jeong is a Master's student in International Relations at Seoul National University. She studies foreign policy decision-making in the context of crisis bargaining, wartime negotiation, and political rhetoric. Specifically, she is interested in examining how states signal their foreign policy intention during conflict and how political leaders back up these policies using various political tools. With methodological training in quantitative methods and computational social science, she currently aims to explore the effect of populist rhetoric on public beliefs and foreign policy preferences. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations at Chung-Ang University.
Dahyun Ryu
My research interests in computational social science developed from previous experiences of studying sociology, working at research institutes and basic usage of publicly open structured datasets. I am interested in 1) navigating deeper into analyzing structured datasets, beyond cross-sectional regression analysis; 2) exploring beyond structured datasets – broadening to unstructured datasets; 3) recognizing the current limits of dataset and increasing diversity; 4) Being interactive, close to the actual world.
Donggyu Kim
Donggyu Kim is a Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He received his B.S. in Advertising from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and M.A. in Advertising from University of Texas at Austin. Kim's research focuses on the psychological underpinnings of technology adoption in marketing and organizational contexts. He is interested in understanding how credibility and trust shape behavior, how people’s heuristics influence attitudes, and how AI/Computer-mediated communication is changing the interaction with one another.
Donghyun Kim
Donghyun Kim is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of Iowa. He studies sociological social psychology, group processes, and cognitive sociology. His current project is to reconcile the contradictory effects of cross-ethnic contact on health and well-being. He obtained M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Chung-Ang University, and M.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Riverside.
Dongwook Kim
PhD student in Social Work and social justice researcher with experience of working as a project manager and field researcher over ten years in community organizing and development. Interested in mixed and indigenous methods, as well as harnessing data-analytic tools in evidence-based research and impact communication.
Hyo Joo L
Hyo Joo is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Cornell University. Her broad research interests include family demography, social stratification, and gender inequality in the labor market. Her current research focuses on the changing patterns of parenting and their implications for social inequality, and she is interested in applying computational methods to study the implications of demographic changes on social inequality.
Ji Hae Choi
Ji Hae Choi is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Management and Organizations (MORS), Northwestern University. Her main research interest includes board network, cultural evolution and standardization. She is interested in understanding how culture is spread, reconfigured, and could be facilitated with interventions. Her current project examines how cultures spread and become entrenched through board networks and how this leads to cross-industry imbalances. She is also investigating new ways to structure culture in order to make the flow of culture visible.
Sanghyun Park
Sanghyun Park is a PhD student in Political Science at Yonsei University. He is also a researcher at the Center for Employment Policy Evaluation & Monitoring, KEIS. He is interested in computational science, particularly in using computational methods to analyze the behavior of political parties, voters, and candidates and their interactions during election processes. He is also interested in research related to the labor market(e.g. job policy, platform labor, etc) and inequality of gender and generations.
Seung Hyun Kim
Seung Hyun has accumulated experiences in managing policy consultation programs at Korea Development Institute (KDI) since 2013, working with various partner governments, international organizations and MDBs. He has worked with various organization in different regions of the world, including Latin America, Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia, and has served as a team leader for forming global partnerships. Building upon his experiences, he aspires to enhance cooperation between technology, policy, and international development. He studied political science and international studies during his undergraduate program at Yonsei University and obtained his master's degree in Public Policy at KDI School of Public Policy and Management.
Sola Kim
Sola Kim, a PhD student in Sustainability at Arizona State University, focuses her research on the Social-Ecological System and the Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework. Her primary objective is to examine how governance can achieve resilience and robustness in the face of climate change. Specifically, her research delves into the environmental decision-making processes, with a particular emphasis on the perspectives and roles of judicial decision-makers, especially justices.
Soo Min Song
Soo Min Song is currently pursuing a master's double major in Sociology and Applied Data Science at Korea University. Her research interest lies in social network analysis, health discourse, and cultural sociology. Her research focuses on the intersection between digital space and the lived experience as social contexts. She believes that harnessing the power of big data and employing machine learning methods can enhance the understanding of the multifaceted realities of society, including issues related to minorities, prejudice, and inequality. She is particularly interested in the process of transforming health-related discussions in the online sphere into influential political subjects.
Wooyong Jung
Wooyong Jung is a Ph.D. student in Informatics at the Pennsylvania State University. Wooyong is interested in applying computational methods to public policy to address complicated social issues. He is currently working on expanding the probabilistic machine learning approach to predicting eviction hot spots and urban land use. His past research includes investigating user behavior in cyberspace and their political orientation.
Yoonjae Shin
Yoonjae Shin is an incoming PhD student in organizational behavior at Harvard. His current research examines the impact of competitive pressure on workplace safety and the effect of shareholder activism on workplace diversity. More broadly, he is interested in labor market, diversity, and innovation. He focuses on how structural and cultural changes often lead to an inequality in labor market and in science. He plans to employ natural language processing and network analysis to explore the change in the labor market and the direction of innovation.
Young Seok Kim
Young Seok Kim is an upcoming Ph.D. student at department of Government (Political Science), UT Austin. His primary research interests revolve around elections and voting behavior, with a focus on both the Korean and American contexts. Additionally, he also focuses on the role of Big Tech as political actors. His previous research was primarily relied on quantitative analysis using survey data. He is trying to expand his specialities by constructing dataset using big data and conducting experiments. He holds his BA and MA from Yonsei University.
Junsang Im
Junsang Im is a Master's Student in Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences at KAIST. He has an interest in various topics surrounding society and technology, especially how people understand the digital environment and solve their problems by themselves on it. Moreover, he wants to explore the possibility of individuals and their groups voluntarily recognizing problems and forming discourses in a digital environment.
Suhyoung Choi
Suhyoung Choi is a Master’s student in Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences at KAIST. Her research interests center on bias, inequality and discrimination represented on technology with computational methods. She is currently studying Data Science, and the application of those methods solving various social problems.
Woori Jang
Woori Jang is a master's student at the Graduate School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences, KAIST. She is deeply passionate about unraveling the complex human narratives that influence and reshape systems, often referred to as "culture." Her aspiration is to conduct computational research on the dynamics within diverse social groups, with a focus on making the findings accessible to non-academic audiences who may not be familiar with scholarly paper formats.Montréal
All Participants
Vissého Adjiwanou
Vissého Adjiwanou is a professor of Demography and quantitative and computational methods in the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and adjunct professor at the Department of Demography (Université de Montréal). He directs the Lab on quantitative and computational social science. He is also affiliated with the Centre on Population Dynamics (McGill University). He received an M.A in Statistics from the National School of Statistics and Applied Economics (ENSEA-Cote d’Ivoire), an M.A in Economics of Development at the Centre for Studies and Research on International Development (CERDI- France) and a PhD in Demography from the Université de Montréal (Canada). His research focusses on population issues in sub-Saharan Africa and in Canada, including fertility, family dynamics, gender inequality, reproductive health, and integration of immigrants from SSA in Canada.
Xavier St-Denis
Xavier St-Denis est professeur adjoint en études des populations à l'Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), Centre UCS. Ses recherches portent sur la mobilité sociale, les inégalités socioéconomiques, les trajectoires professionnelles et éducatives, l'économie politique comparée, les statistiques sociales et les méthodes quantitatives. Avant de joindre l'INRS, il a effectué un stage postdoctoral à l'Université de Toronto et a travaillé comme chercheur à Statistique Canada
Evelyne Brie
Evelyne Brie est professeure adjointe en science politique à l Université Western. Elle détient un doctorat en science politique de l Université de Pennsylvanie. Ses recherches portent sur l opinion publique, le comportement électoral et l économie politique, principalement en Allemagne et au Canada. Elle est chercheure affiliée au CAPFC (Centre d analyse politique - Constitution Fédéralisme) et à la CLESSN (Chaire de leadership en enseignement des sciences sociales numériques). Elle a récemment publié l ouvrage « Un pays divisé : identité, fédéralisme et régionalisme au Canada » aux Presses de l Université Laval (à paraître aux Presses de l Université de Toronto). Elle a précédemment travaillé en tant qu analyste de données au City Lab Berlin et à Politics for Tomorrow.
Alex Luscombe
Alex Luscombe is a data scientist working full time for several Canadian government institutions and a PhD Candidate in criminology at the University of Toronto. His dissertation research leverages advances in natural language processing, machine learning, and high-performance computing to conduct the first ever big data study of police criminal investigations in Canada. As a data scientist and strategic advisor, he has worked on projects for many different public and private sector agencies, from police agencies to human rights commissions, as well as international organizations like the OECD. His work has been profiled in national and international news outlets, including Nature, The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, The Washington Post, and BBC News.
Hervé Mensanh
Hervé Mensah est un professionnel chevronné d’analytique de données. Il a obtenu un baccalauréat en mathématiques et en statistiques, puis une maîtrise en science des données en 2014. Hervé travaille actuellement chez Autodesk en tant que Senior Manager en Analytique dans l'équipe Genuine. Il a travaillé précédemment à la Banque Nationale en tant que scientifique de données sénior, chez Deloitte en tant que manager en analytique avancée dans le département de service financier et chez La Presse en tant que Directeur de l'intégration et de la science de données. Grâce à son expérience et sa passion dans les statistiques, apprentissage machine et science des données, Hervé continue d’aider les organisations à maximiser l'utilisation de leurs données.
Matthew Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he serves as the Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He is also affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers including the Office of Population Research and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.
Isis Urgell
Isis Urgell is a PhD candidate at Monash University, Australia, in Philosophy of Science and Epistemology. She obtained a BA-MA in Philosophy with an orientation in Formal Logic from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her current research topic is the influence of political polarization on the evaluation of scientific content in social media. From a methodological point of view her research employs social network analysis and content analysis to understand large patterns of speech and online behaviour related to anti-science attitudes, misinformation spread and political polarization. She is also interested in how political and moral values shape science perception in social media environments. Other interests include corpus analysis and community detection methodologies.
Mankponse Augustin
Mankponse Augustin Gnanguenon est un assistant de recherche au sein de l'institut des sciences de l'éducation. Statisticien et Data scientiste et chercheur associé à la boutique des sciences de Parakou, il s’intéresse à l’usage des statistiques et de l’intelligence artificielle pour répondre aux problématiques en science sociale. Il a contribué à divers projet internationaux dont le projet TranSco-AUF, Yanayi, Ben-Soha. Il a eu à coécrire plusieurs articles qui s’inscrivent dans divers domaines des sciences sociales, dont les sciences de l’éducation et les statistiques appliquées..
Kongo Amenan Rachel
Kongo Amenan Rachel est doctorante en Sociologie de l’éducation à l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Elle est affiliée au Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST). Ses recherches portent sur les parcours scolaires des étudiant.e.s en période de crise en mobilisant des analyses quantitatives et qualitatives.
Carlos Castiblanco
Carlos Castiblanco is an Economics graduate student at Université de Montréal, nearing the completion of his master's program. Having acquired a BSc in Economics from the National University of Colombia, Carlos has a strong foundation in statistical analysis and econometrics, with a particular emphasis on data analysis. Since relocating to Canada in 2019, Carlos has gained substantial industry experience in trade analysis, as well as accounting and payroll processing. His practical experience complements his academic pursuits, as evidenced by his master's project, which seeks to quantify the impact of a Colombian government program on the education performance of rural communities. His professional and academic interests extend beyond traditional economic boundaries, covering policy and causality analysis to experimental economics.
Julie Duford
Julie Duford est candidate au doctorat en Sexologie à l’Université du Québec à Montréal sous la supervision de Martin Blais, professeur au département de Sexologie et titulaire de la Chaire de recherche sur la diversité sexuelle et la pluralité des genres. Elle a une maîtrise en anthropologie médicale de l’Université de Montréal. Elle est aussi auxiliaire de recherche à l’Institut universitaire Jeunes en difficulté. Ses intérêts de recherche portent sur les jeunes LGBTQ2+ et les facteurs de risque et de protection dans les parcours d’itinérance.
Leonard Castelli
Leonard Castelli is a graduate student in Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany). He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Goethe University Frankfurt and has spent part of his studies at Université de Liège (Belgium) and EHESS (Paris, France). His research mainly revolves around populism in Europe, more specifically the link between (right-wing) populism and so-called anti-genderism of political parties in Europe. Leonard employs quantitative methods of statistical analysis as well as quantitative text analysis. He is currently a student research assistant at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Elnathan Tiokou
Elnathan Tiokou est étudiant en Doctorat a Polytechnique Montréal et chercheur en Intelligence Artificielle de pointe a MILA AI Institute. Il est dévoué et déterminé à changer la narration de l'Afrique et à contribuer à construire une Afrique meilleure avec des systèmes d'intelligence artificielle éthiques et responsables. Outre l'intelligence artificielle, il est le fondateur de la jeune entreprise technologique africaine CHRONEXIS. Dans ses temps libres, il crée du contenu sur les réseaux sociaux pour inspirer les gens avec ses histoires, ses expériences et ses réalisations. Sa mission est de faire croire aux jeunes qu'ils peuvent atteindre la grandeur dans leur vie et cela avec rien de moins qu'une faim profonde. Il est ouvert aux opportunités qui pourraient inclure : des partenariats, des bourses, des mentorats et bien d'autres.
Shamsi Soltani
Shamsi Soltani (she/her) earned an MPH in Epidemiology at Tulane University and a BS in Neuroscience with French minor at UCLA. She is now a PhD student in Epidemiology at Stanford University studying suicide prevention. She draws on deep applied public health experience, including over six years as a senior epidemiologist for the San Francisco Department of Public Health. She excels at leveraging data to inform education, research, and policy– once spurring the CDC to adopt ICD-10-CM medical codes to identify e-scooter related injury. Shamsi is interested in the interplay of technology, bias, and health disparity, particularly with respect to big data. Born and raised in San Francisco, Shamsi is a child of immigrants. She is fond of hiking year round, reading reams of fiction, and sweating through rhythm & motion dance classes. She is currently training for a 545 mile (877 km) bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Shamsi delights in food shared with friends and has yet to meet a hot spring she doesn't like.
Firdaous Sbaï
Firdaous Sbaï is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Toronto. She completed her MA in sociology at McGill University. Her work is broadly concerned with state and public responses to social problems. One line of projects examines disparities in criminalization and incarceration. Another strand of research is centered on social movement framing and organizing, and seeks to understand how different mobilizing strategies resonate across different contexts. Her work generally focuses on racial inequalities and forms of violence.
Mayra Juruá
Mayra Juruá have been a science policy professional for last 15 years and now she is also a PHD candidate on both science& technology studies (sts) at Université du Québec à Montréal and Education at University of Campinas (Brazil). She is interested in social sciences and humanities dynamics, with a particularly focus on research internationalization. Mayra has many publications in portuguese, english, and french concerning science policy, sustainable development and the role of humanities and social science.Munich
All Participants
Carsten Schwemmer
Carsten Schwemmer is a Professor of Sociology and Computational Social Sciences at the University of Munich. His work focuses on applying computational methods to interdisciplinary research in areas such as ethnic minority & gender studies, digital media, political sociology, and sociotechnical systems. He is particularly interested in methods related to natural language processing, image recognition, data mining, and network analysis.
Mario Haim
Since 2022, Mario Haim is a Professor and Chair of Communication Studies, especially Computational Communication Research, at LMU Munich. In both his research and teaching, He focusses mainly on topics of algorithmic influence. Employing methods common to Computational Communication Science, such topics include political communication, computational journalism, health communication, and algorithmic curation in media environments as well as general computational methods. After studying in Augsburg, Munich, and Helsinki, he gained his PhD at LMU Munich. Subsequently, Mario Haim was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and an Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessor) at the University of Leipzig, Germany.
Alexander Wuttke
Alexander Wuttke is the Juniorprofessor of Digitalization and Political Behavior at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His research crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore democratic backsliding from the perspective of ordinary citizens. He is an advocate of Open Science practices and currently serves as the Journal of Politics’ Special Editor for Registered Reports.
Raphael H. Heiberger
Raphael H. Heiberger is Tenure-Track Professor at the Institute for Social Sciences of the University of Stuttgart. He is head of the Computational Social Science lab. He received his PhD from the University of Bamberg (Germany, summa cum laude) and was visiting scholar at UCLA and a Fulbright-Fellow at UC Berkeley. He is a permanent member of the McFarland Lab at Stanford. Only recently, he was honored to become a Humboldt Fellow. His research is funded by the DFG Excellence Initiative, EU's Horizon programm, the BMBF, or the MKW in Baden-Württemberg. Besides various aspects of Social Network Analysis (dynamics, statistical modelling, theory), his research interests focus on applying Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to social phenomena (e.g. career trajectories, markets and innovation, or political communication).
Ágnes Horvárt
Ágnes Horvát is an Assistant Professor in Communication and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University, where she directs the Technology and Social Behavior PhD program. Her research lies at the intersection of computational social science, social computing, and communication. Using interdisciplinary approaches from network and data science, her research group, the Lab on Innovation, Networks, and Knowledge (LINK), investigates how networks induce biased information production, sharing, and processing on digital platforms. For example, they study the impact of networks and diversity on scholarly communication, identify expressions of collective intelligence and opportunities for innovation in crowdsourcing communities, and develop tools to support creativity and predict success in culture industries. Professor Horvát received her PhD in Physics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Andreas Jungherr
Andreas Jungherr holds the Chair for Governance of Complex and Innovative Technological Systems at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Bamberg. He studies the impact of digital media and artificial intelligence on politics and society. He has worked on the uses of digital media and technology by publics, political actors, and organizations in international comparison. He also addresses challenges for scientific research in realizing the potential of digital methods and computational social science while addressing methodological challenges in its integration into the social sciences. He is author of the books 'Digital Transformations of the Public Arena' (with Ralph Schroeder, 2022) and 'Retooling Politics: How Digital Media are Shaping Democracy' (with Gonzalo Rivero & Daniel Gayo-Avello, 2020).
Frauke Kreuter
Frauke Kreuter holds the Chair of Statistics and Data Science at LMU Munich, Germany and at the University of Maryland, USA, she is Co-director of the Social Data Science Center (SoDa) and faculty member in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM). She is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, and received the Warren Mitofsky Innovators Award of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 2020. In addition to her academic work, Professor Kreuter is the Founder of the International Program for Survey and Data Science (IPSDS), o-Founder of the Coleridge Initiative, and Co-Founder of the German language podcast Dig Deep.
Jürgen Pfeffer
Jürgen Pfeffer is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Technical University of Munich. His research focuses on the analysis of large and dynamic socio-technical systems as well as the methodological, algorithmic and theoretical challenges that arise from these analyses. Pfeffer's research falls at the intersection of social and computer sciences.
Stefanie Walter
Stefanie Walter is Emmy Noether Fellow at the Department of Governance, Technical University of Munich, where she directs the research group ‘The media portrayal of majority and minority groups’. Her methodological focus is on quantitative methods and computational social science with a special interest in automated text and image analysis. Stefanie’s substantive research interests are in the area of political, climate and science communication. Together with her team she uses large scale text and image data to explore how the news media report on social groups based on nationality, gender, disability, religion, and sexual orientation, as well as the visual representation of climate change on social media. Stefanie holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Mannheim and has previously worked as researcher at the University of Bremen's the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, the Institute of Journalism and Communication at the University of Hamburg, and the Mannheim Center for European Social Research.
Franziska Weeber
Franziska Weeber is a co-founder at textada, a machine learning-powered text annotation tool. Her work focuses on natural language processing and deep learning in low-resource social science applications. After her M.Sc. degree in Social and Economic Data Science, she held an Exist business start-up grant and was a research assistant at the University of Konstanz and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.
Valerie Hase
Valerie Hase is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Media and Communication at LMU Munich. After studying at WWU Münster and the London School of Political Science and Economy, she obtained a PhD from the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on digital journalism, cross-platform perspectives, crisis communication, and computational social science, especially text-as-data and digital traces.Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg
(MPhil Oxford, PhD European University Institute) is a researcher at the Department of Computational Social Science at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. He previously worked as a postdoc in political communication at the University of Amsterdam. He is interested in how people seek out and process (mis)information, the effects of online behaviour on political attitudes, and psychological and behavioural asymmetries between ideological groups. Methodologically, he is interested in improving survey experiments and survey measurement, causal inference, and the use of digital trace data. He is the data editor at the journal Political Communication.Jan Zilinsky
Jan Zilinsky is a postdoctoral research fellow and computational social scientist at the Technical University of Munich. He studies how citizens receive, organize and process economic and political information via digital media. He received his PhD from New York University's Department of Politics, and works with NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP).
Renáta Topinková
Renáta Topinková is a postdoc in Computational Social Sciences at LMU Munich. Her dissertation examined homophily patterns in online dating. She is interested in effective data visualization, text analysis, experiments, and social network analysis.
Maria Camila Atehortúa
Since March 2023, I am a research assistant at the Chair of Empirical Political Research and Policy Analysis. My academic work focuses on the area of defense, where I examine conventional armament transfers. Before assisting the Chair with research, I tutored Master students on the application of empirical political research methods, and instructed bachelor students about research designs in political science. I obtained my M.A. in PolSci at the LMU and my B.A. at the University of Mannheim.
Paul Binder
Since 2018, I am a student at LMU Munich, where I received my B. A. in Political Science and Economics in 2021 and I am currently enrolled in the Political Science Master’s degree. Additionally, I work as Research Assistant at the chair for Empirical Political Research and Policy Analysis. Here, I am involved in research projects focusing primarily on third-party interventions in civil wars as well as the armaments of warring parties and their effects on civil war intensity and duration.
Maximilian Haag
Max is a doctoral researcher in the EUPLEX project and a doctoral candidate at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of Political Science at LMU Munich. His research interests include legislative politics and decision-making in the EU. Additionally, Max is interested in automated data collection and exploring the possibilities of programming for producing transparent, reproducible and interactive research.
Fabian Heindl
Fabian Heindl is a research associate and doctoral student in the field of Citizenship Education at LMU Munich. He currently works in several different project groups focusing on the development of digital learning interventions to promote skills and knowledge on historical and political topics. His research interests include anti-racism education, Holocaust education, and the use of AI-based learning tools to enhance educational outcomes.
Philipp Hoffmann
I am a research associate at the Chair of Political Sociology at the Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg. After completing my bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of Mannheim, I moved to the Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg to successfully complete my master’s degree in political science and to study sociology. My research interests are located in the areas of quantitative methods with a particular focus on political behaviour, but also migration policy and immigration. I am doing my doctoral thesis on the political behaviour of the first and second generation of migrants.
Tilman Kerl
Tilman is currently in his second year of his Data Science Master's program at TU Wien and works part-time as a software engineer. He has worked on diverse projects in software engineering, data science and management consulting involving data management, -strategy, -engineering, ML, and NLP. In his free time, he volunteers for CorrelAid, attends concerts or goes bouldering. Particular research interests include bias detections in and XAI of LLMs.
Johanna Klapproth
Johanna Klapproth studied communication science and is a PhD candidate and research associate in the interdisciplinary project 'HybriD – Real-Time Detection of Hybrid Disinformation Campaigns in Online Media' at the University of Münster. Her research focuses on identifying disinformation features and developing intervention strategies to curb the spread of disinformation campaigns, empower individuals in dealing with information and strengthen democratic resilience.
Louise Koch
Luise Koch is a PhD candidate at the Professorship for Global Health at the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology. Luise's research focuses on the intersections between Gender Studies, Social Media Studies, Behavioraland Development Economics. In her dissertation she employs primary data and computational - and mixed methods to investigate the interrelations between online misogyny towards politically active women and response and prevention methods in Brazil, India and Germany.
Julian Kohne
At GESIS, I’m part of the Designed Digital Data team, focusing on providing an easy to use, transparent and secure infrastructure for collecting mobile survey and smartphone usage data for social science research. As a PhD student at Ulm University, I am part of the molecular psychology lab and investigate how interpersonal relationships can be quantified using chat logs, specifically donated WhatsApp chat logs. I am developing interactive methods for transparent data donation methods, and investigate how social relationships are expressed through different communication patterns.
Johanna Mehltretter
Johanna is a PhD candidate and research associate at the Chair for Social Data Science and Methodology of the University of Mannheim. Since 2021, she works in a project on new data sources in migration and integration research. In her dissertation, she researches the challenges of using Google Trends data in the social sciences. Johanna holds a master’s degree in Sociology from the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg and a master’s degree in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento.
Simon Möller
Simon Möller received his Master's degree in Sociology and Economics from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in 2016. After a 2-year employment as project supervisor in environmental and energy management consulting, he has since 2018 been working as a PhD student and research assistant at the Institute for Sociology at the LMU Munich. There he is involved in the research project 'EffKom - energy-efficient residential comfort: user-oriented development of an automated system for the control of space heating'. Working in close cooperation with engineers and computer scientists he is particularly interested in user-oriented technology development and in in-depth data analysis to investigate human-technology interactions and their effects on energy consumption.
Nadja Ozornina
Nadja Ozornina is a master's student at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research interests include political communication, topic modeling, and the application of big data in communication research. In October 2023, she will join the team of the research project on the impact of humor in communication on political decision-making in the context of climate change (KLIMA-MEMES) at the Department of Media and Communication of LMU.
Dylan Paltra
My name is Dylan Paltra and I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Mannheim in 2021. At the moment, I am finishing up my Master’s at the University of Zurich. My thesis investigates how citizens perceive their own online news media consumption in comparison to the actual media bias they encounter online. My general research interests revolve around the online political behavior of both citizens and elites. To gain a better understanding of this subject, I employ computational methods like machine learning and deep learning.
Alexander Sobieska
Alexander Sobieska is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine at TU Munich, where he specializes in the ethics of AI and neuroscience, drawing upon his background in psychology, philosophy, and political science. His research interests include neuroethics, online radicalization, online political communication, and ethics discourse analysis.
Lea Stallbaum
Lea Stallbaum is a doctoral researcher at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in the DFG-funded project 'Conceptions of Democracy among Political Elites and Citizens'. Her research interests include regional differences in attitudes towards democracy, and the measurement of conceptions of democracy.
Kateřina Turková
Kateřina Turková is a researcher and associate lecturer at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism of Charles University, Czech Republic. She obtained her PhD and Master’s degree in media studies from the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University and her Master’s degree in economics and economic administration from the University of Economics in Prague. In her academic research, she focuses on issues associated with social media, sports, and quantitative research.
Jonas Volle
Jonas Volle is a research assistant and doctoral student at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and works in the DFG project 'Networks, Paradigms and Careers in the Academic Field: Sociology in Germany and the United States' together with Prof. Richard Münch and Prof. Andreas Schmitz. His research interests lie in combining sociological perspectives and methodologies with computational social science approaches. In particular, he is interested in methods such as text mining, network analysis or machine learning in the field of sociology of science and their combination with relational theory and network theory.
Phelia Weiss
Phelia is a PhD student at the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research focuses on the relationship between misogyny and far-right extremism in online environments. She is particularly interested in media effects and radicalization dynamics within online communities.
Bernd Wurpts
After graduate studies at the University of Washington, University of Leipzig, and University of Arizona, I started a Postdoc at the University of Lucerne in 2018. My qualification is mostly in sociology with emphasis on quantitative analyses of qualitative data. I consider myself a relational (network) thinker with a strong background in theory combined with expertise in computational social sciences, including fluency in R statistical programming language and environment. My work focuses on the intersections of economies and societies in various contexts and historical periods. One research focus is on the (network) foundations of economic, political and religious institutions in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. My latest work focuses on the contemporary global economy and social and political cohesion among corporate elites.
Zhe Xu
Zhe Xu is a doctoral candidate pursuing research in computational journalism and humanitarian communication at the University of Cologne. His work focuses on applying interdisciplinary approaches and computational methods, such as Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, to explore the impact of digital media, datafication, and artificial intelligence on political and public engagement related to global humanitarian issues.
Birgit Zeyer-Gliozzo
Birgit Zeyer-Gliozzo is a postdoctoral researcher at the chair of Social Structure and Sociology of Aging Societies at TU Dortmund University. She is currently working with an interdisciplinary team on the development and application of innovative methods from data science for social science research questions as part of the project From Prediction to Agile Interventions in the Social Science (FAIR). Her research interests include topics such as work and labor markets, education and training, health, social inequalities, and technological change.
Johanna zum Felde
Johanna zum Felde is a Research and Teaching Associate in the division of International Communication at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. In her PhD research she examines how political communication can aid or prevent democracy in a changing French public sphere with qualitative research methods, text classification and machine learning. Previously she has been advocating the publication and use of open data with the Open Knowledge Foundation in Berlin.NDSU
All Participants
Shuning Lu, Ph.D.
Shuning Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, North Dakota State University. Her research interests revolve around news use and effects, political communication, and digital journalism. Her recent projects explore social media news engagement, online incivility, and civic engagement with both observational and experimental data.
Zoltan P. Majdik, Ph.D.
Zoltan P. Majdik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, North Dakota State University. His research interest lies in the field of rhetoric, with a focus on computational approaches to rhetorical texts. His recent projects explore how complex matters such as climate change are framed in policy discourse, and on how to build machine learning models for classifying complex rhetorical language-structures.
Leslie A. Laam, Ph.D.
Leslie A. Laam is an Assistant Scientist-Manager with the Center for Bio-behavioral Research at Sanford Research in Fargo, ND. Prior to her role in research, Leslie spent 15 years working in applied analytics in clinical settings that ranged from evaluation of improvement initiatives to advanced analytics of business operations related to patient care and safety. Her current research interests are in utilizing statistical methods that clearly bridge healthcare practice and research.
Khang Hoang, Ph.D.
Khang Hoang is the Interim Executive Director and a Research Facilitator in the NDSU Center for Computationally Assisted Science and Technology (CCAST), and an adjunct faculty in the NDSU Department of Physics. His research involves physics, chemistry, and materials science. As a research facilitator, he advises other researchers on the application of high-performance computing in various research fields.
Dane Mataic, Ph.D.
Dane Mataic’s research explores the intersection of mobilization, international conflict, and social inequalities. Broadly, he applies organizational and community theories to address topics as wide ranging as the spread of governmental policies that regulate religious organizations, the mobilization of religious members by American churches, and the spread of religious bias and advocacy.
Dan Pemstein, Ph.D.
Dan Pemstein is a Professor of Political Science & Public Policy at North Dakota State University. He is a comparative political economist and methodologist who studies challenges that digital networks pose to democracy and develops tools to better measure qualities of democratic institutions. He is co-director of the Digital Society Project, co-developer of the Unified Democracy Scores, co-author of the Scythe Statistical Library, and serves as project manager for measurement methods, and steering committee member, for the Varieties of Democracy project.
Yini Zhang, Ph.D.
Yini Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She uses computational methods and big data to study social media and political communication. Her current research program centers around three questions: 1) within social media, how people express themselves and interact with each other, 2) as an ecosystem, how social media platforms relate to one another in terms of the flow of information, and 3) beyond social media, what can influence and be influenced by communication and interaction on social media.
Alvin Zhou, Ph.D.
Alvin Zhou is an Assistant Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. His research centers around computational social science and strategic communication (advertising, public relations, audience analytics, and organizations), and advocates the diversity of data sources, substantive foci, and methodological toolkits in computational work.
Lee-Anne Andre
Lee-Anne Andre is a current masters student in her hometown at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte studying sociology. Her goal is to work in public policy or non-profit research. Outside of school she loves video games, baking, and hanging out with her cats.
Dan Card, Ph.D.
Dan Card is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where he teaches courses in technical communication and rhetoric. Broadly speaking, his research explores the complex relationship between communication, technology, and the production and circulation of information and arguments in digital environments.
Yuan Cheng, Ph.D.
Yuan (Daniel) Cheng is an assistant professor in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Daniel's research agenda is focused on a range of theoretical and managerial questions lying at the nexus of governance, government-nonprofit relationships, co-production, and the distributional and performance implications of cross-sector collaboration.
Nick Dusek
Nick Dusek is a Research Computing Facilitator at North Dakota State University's Center for Computationally Assisted Science and Technology, where he assists faculty, staff, and students in leveraging high-performance and advanced computing resources for research and teaching.
Ke (Kay) Fang
Ke (Kay) Fang is a master's candidate at New York University. With a strong interest in the complex social dynamics of political polarization and social norm shift, he combines social psychology with computational techniques such as NLP, network science, and computational cognition to investigate the underlying mechanisms driving these phenomena.
Matthew Goldsmith
Matthew Goldsmith recently completed his first year as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at North Dakota State University. His research interests include political messaging and news coverage on social media.
Adamu Timothy Jaafaru
Pursuing a DBA at Metro State University, Tim leverages his MIS Master's and over 20-year banking sector experience in corporate financial systems. He also shares his expertise as an adjunct professor at Minnesota State Community College.
Haley Netherton-Morrison
Haley Netherton-Morrison is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at Boise State University. Her research interests focus on the application of social science theory to natural resource issues and the promotion of sustainable working landscapes. Currently, she seeks to understand public perceptions to inform decision-making in changing landscapes.
Nathaniel Pagel
Nathaniel Pagel is a doctoral student in experimental/general psychology at the University of North Dakota. He teaches abnormal psychology and enjoy hiking. Currently, he is interested in combining IOT with non-invasive neuromodulation techniques to address mental health concerns and improve continuity of mental health care.
Yan Qu, Ph.D.
Yan Qu is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland College Park. His research takes a social network perspective to examine public relations issues, with a focus on personal social networks and public engagement. Yan formerly worked as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Minnesota.
Zakia Sabnam
Zakia Sabnam is a master’s student in the Communication department at North Dakota State University. She is an enthusiast of all things related to cyberspace and AI. With a deep curiosity for the online world, Zakia's research interests revolve around exploring the fascinating and dynamic subcultures that exist within cyberspace.
Brule Woods
Brule Woods recently graduated from North Dakota State University with a Masters in Communication, and is now an incoming Ph.D. student of Mass Communication at University of Wisconsin, Madison. His main line of inquiry is on the priming effects of memes on people's perceptions and actions regarding political issues, and has a strong interest in the effects of social media use.NYU Shanghai
All Participants
Xiaogang Wu
Xiaogang Wu is Yufeng Global Professor of Social Science, the founding Director of the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai, and Professor of Sociology at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA and has taught in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for 17 years before he joined NYU Shanghai in 2020. One of the CASER's focal areas of research is computational social science. His own research interests include social stratification and mobility, education, urban sociology, survey and quantitative methods.
Yongjun Zhang
Yongjun Zhang is an Assistant Professor of sociology and institute for advanced computational science at Stony Brook University. Dr. Zhang's work combines statistical, network, and computational methods with big data to study social, political, and organizational behavior in the US and the globe. His current projects focus mainly on understanding human mobility, segregation, and polarization using near-population voter and consumer records, social media texts and images, and large-scale GPS data. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Arizona.
Yongen Shi
Yongren Shi is an Assistant Professor of sociology at the University of Iowa. The foundation of his research is the sociological study of human behavior and group dynamics with an focus on social and cultural processes of polarization. He extensively uses large-scale digital trace data and a range of computational methods, including network analyses, computational textual analyses, agent-based models, machine learning, and online experiments. He was a post-doctoral research associate at the Yale Institute for Network Science after receiving my Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University.
Bart Bonikowski
Bart Bonikowski is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Politics at New York University and a Faculty Affiliate at NYU’s Center for Data Science. Relying on survey methods, computational text analysis, and experimental research, his work applies insights from cultural sociology to the study of politics in the United States and Europe, with a particular focus on nationalism, populism, and the rise of the radical right.
Nicholas Christakis
Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist and physician at Yale University who conducts research in the fields of network science, biosocial science, and behavior genetics. His current work focuses on how human biology and health affect, and are affected by, social interactions and social networks. He directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, appointed in the Departments of Sociology; Medicine; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Biomedical Engineering; and the School of Management.
Esteban Moro
Esteban Moro is a Reseach Scientist in Connection Science, an associate professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain, and a member of the Joint Institute UC3M Santander on Financial Big Data. He researches the intersection of big data and computational social science with special attention to human dynamics, collective intelligence, social networks, and urban mobility in problems like viral marketing, natural disaster management, and economic segregation in cities. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
Laura Nelson
Laura Nelson is an Assistant Professor at University of British Columbia who uses computational methods – principally text analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, and network analysis techniques – to study social movements, culture, gender, and organizations and institutions. She has developed and taught courses introducing social science and humanities students to computational methods and the scripting languages Python and R, data science courses, and graduate-level sociological theory. She is currently a co-PI on a million-dollar grant through the National Science Foundation to study the spread of gender-equity ideas related to STEM fields through higher education networks, primarily in the United States.
Minsu Park
Minsu Park is an Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and an Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Data Science at New York University (NYU). He works in computational social science with a specialization in the consumption of culture, production of creative work, and social networks. His current research focuses on how informational and normative cues interact with an individual's preference to make a certain decision and how cultural preferences change over time—individually and globally. His research inhabits an interdisciplinary nexus between data science and social science, simultaneously drawing on and contributing to both. His work has been published in top-tier computer and information science conferences (e.g., ICWSM) and interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Nature Human Behaviour).
Han Zhang
Han Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). His research spans computational social science, social movements, social networks, and quantitative methods. His current projects focus on protests in China and global surveillance and its social impact.
Hong Chen
Hong Chen is a PhD student at the School of Information at University of Michigan. He studies science of science and innovation and he is currently working on how scientists cite, collaborate, and navigate publishing landscape. He is also interested in science communication, information diffusion and large language models.
Jia Chen
Dr. Jia Chen got her PhD degree from University of Hong Kong. She is currently an Associate Professor at Department of Social Work, Shanghai University. Her study interest includes intergenerational relationship, family care and medical and family social work.
Xi Cheng
Xi Cheng is a sociology Ph.D. student at Northwestern University. She earned her master’s degree in computational social science from the University of Chicago and holds dual bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri and Beijing Jiaotong University. Cheng’s research lies in the intersection of computational methods, culture, education, social theories, stratification and social mobility, and urban sociology.
Esol Cho
Esol Cho is a lecturer in the Department of International Studies at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She received her PhD in Political Science at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2022. Her research concerns the influence of domestic political and economic considerations on foreign aid choices using computational methods.
Lin Qi
Lin Qi is a Ph.D. student in the Crawford School of Public Policy at Australian National University. His research interests broadly center around financial contagion, financial liquidity, commodity market, and financial literacy. He earned B.A. in international economics and trade from Nankai University and M.S. in financial and econometrics from Queen Mary, University of London.
Marco Laghi
Marco Laghi is a PhD student at the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai and the Department of Sociology at NYU. His research involves education, population health and development, and stratification.
Lizhen Liang
Lizhen Liang is a doctoral student at Syracuse University, School of Information Studies. His research interest includes computational social science, science of science, natural language processing, and ethics in AI.
Yang Lu
Yang Lu is a Data Analyst - Social Science Research at Brandeis University and for the diversitydatakids.org project. Utilizing a wide range of computational tools, Yang works on the indicator development and pipeline maintenance of Child Opportunity Index, a metric that maps the quality of resources for children, and sparks conversations about unequal access to opportunity and to spur actions to increase equity. Yang earned his Master's in Education Policy and Analysis from Harvard University and Bachelor's in Economics and Urban Studies from McGill University. Before graduate school, he was a Dean’s Fellow of New Students and Diversity at the Office of Student Life of NYU Shanghai.
Zheng Ma
Zheng Ma is a PhD student in Social Policy and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison and a Master's degree at the University of Chicago, where he focused on Political Economy, Macroeconomics, and computational tools.
Lingbo Tong
Lingbo Tong is a Ph.D. student in the joint program of Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Notre Dame. Her research centers on building interpretable, human-centered AI in the areas of psychology and education. She is currently working on developing language models that offer mental health support to the public. She is also interested in enhancing structural equation models with deep learning techniques. Previously, she received her bachelor's degree in Computer Science at Sichuan University.
Qi Wang
Qi is a Research Assistant Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She obtained a PhD degree from the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests span spirituality and religious studies, mindfulness, and psychological well-being. She uses topic modeling and textual analysis to examine participants' daily mystical experiences and the higher level of human consciousness.
Hao Wang
Hao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He passed his oral defense on May 31, 2023 and will be joining the City University of Hong Kong as a postdoctoral researcher, starting in August 2023. His research interests encompass contentious politics, digital petition channels, elite politics, computational social science, and survival analysis.
Huan Wang
Huan Wang is a PhD student in Psychology at Stanford University. He is broadly interested in cultural variations of emotion and decision making, and their underlying neural mechanisms. His recently work examines neural predictors of interpersonal trust and how they vary across cultural context. Prior to Stanford, he worked at UCLA and UC Davis. He received his bachelor degree at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
Junliang Xu
Junliang Xu is a master student in East Asian Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on political sociology, conflict, and mixed methods. He is currently working on the mobilization process of the Cultural Revolution. Previously, he studied institutional changes under drastic rebellion in the late Qing Dynasty using longitudinal models. He holds BFA and LLB from Tsinghua University.
Wei Yang
Wei is a master student in Information Science at Cornell University, her research interest includes demography, spatial inequality and urban data science. She earned bachelor’s degrees in HCI and Sociology from University of Washington.
Shuangshuang Yang
Shuangshuang Yang is a PhD student in Sociology at Boston College. Her main research interests include gender, family, the life course, and health. Her current project focuses on the spillover effects of sibling disability. She is also interested in applying text and image analysis to explore online dating patterns.
Xiaohan Yin
Xiaohan is now a PhD student at the University of Hong Kong. She also got her LLM degree at HKU with full scholarship after finishing LLB from China University of Political Science and Law. Her research interests lie in the law and technology, legal professions and empirical studies of law.
Enshuai Yu
Enshuai Yu is a Ph.D. student in accounting at Carroll School of Management, Boston College. He earned a master’s degree in finance from Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2021, and bachelor’s degrees in accounting and psychology (dual degree) from Peking University in 2019. His research interests lie in the intersection of archival financial accounting and taxation, covering topics like regulation and enforcement, tax, corporate governance, and information disclosure.
Nuo Yuan
Nuo Yuan's research interest spans both the methodological and substantive aspects of computational social science. Methodologically, he is interested in topics such as sequential experimental design and causal inference in networks. Substantively, he has been working on projects related to sustainability and inclusivity at the corporate and supply chain levels.
Yiwen Zeng
Yiwen Zeng is an incoming PhD student in Sociology at the University of Arizona. Prior to that, she completed her master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and bachelor’s degree at Peking University. Basically, Yiwen’s research interest lies in understanding the social and organizational process of evaluation, especially in the labor market, and the sociological foundation of workplace inequality. Particularly, she is interested in investigating to what extent the ideal of meritocracy can be fulfilled in evaluation, and whether and how non-meritocratic elements could be blended in given specific institutional settings. Methodologically, she intends to deploy experimental study, audit study and text analysis to examine the questions above.
Mengqi Zhan
Mengqi Zhan is an Assistant Professor of Communication at University of Texas at Arlington. She received her PhD from the Department of Communication at University of Maryland College Park. As an organizational communication researcher, she primarily studies the communicative processes that occur within and around organizations, including employee communication and corporate communication on social media. She is currently developing a new research stream that examines employee communication on anonymous social media platforms.
Shiyi Zhang
Shiyi Zhang is a PhD student in Media and Communication at University of Leicester. He is broadly interested in health communication, misinformation, social media and computational social science. His current PhD project analyses factors associated with individuals' acceptance of mental health misinformation on social media.
Haowen Zheng
Haowen Zheng is a PhD student in sociology at Cornell University. Using quantitative and computational methods, her research projects center around social stratification and mobility, demography, spatial inequality, and gender inequality in the labor market.
Yichun Zhou
Yichun Zhou is a doctoral student in Urban Systems at New York University and the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Urban Design and Urban Science (LOUD). His research interests include urban data science, social sensing, and green infrastructure. He applies novel research methods to explore the social inequality, and potential recategorizing of urban parks.
Zhi Li
Zhi Li is a PhD student in the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai and in the Department of Sociology at New York University. His research focuses on social inequality, networks and organizations, life course, and computational social science. He tries to analyze how social networks and organizations can shape social inequality across people’s life course and during social changes. His work has appeared in International Journal for Equity in Health, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, and Social Indicators Research.
Conor McCutcheon
Conor McCutcheon is a PhD student at the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai and the Department of Sociology at NYU. His research interests include social stratification, educational inequality, and social networks. His work focuses on the impact rapid economic development can have on social structure, particularly elite formation.NYU Silver
All Participants
Marya Gwadz
Marya Gwadz is Associate Dean for Research, Professor, Director of the Intervention Innovations Team Lab (IIT-Lab), and Interim Director of the C+M Silver Center at NYU Silver. She also serves as an Associate Director in the Transdisciplinary Research Methods Core in the NIDA-funded Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR) at NYU School of Global Public Health. The main focus of Dr. Gwadz's research is the development and evaluation of potent, innovative, and culturally salient social/behavioral interventions to address racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender inequity in health. Dr. Gwadz is an expert on the multiphase optimization strategy (MOST), a framework for developing efficient and cost-effective interventions with no inactive, poorly performing, or counter-productive elements. She is also an expert on adaptive trial designs, including sequential multiple assignment randomized trials (SMART).
Amanda Ritchie
Amanda Ritchie is a Director of Operations of the NYU Silver School of Social Work’s Constance and Martin Silver Center on Data Science and Social Equity (C+M Silver Center). In this role, Amanda provides strategic operational oversight to the C+M Silver Center that supports NYU Silver scholars conducting work in data science for social equity impact and in studies harnessing big data.
Nari Yoo
Nari Yoo is a PhD student in the Silver School of Social Work at New York University. Her interests include mental health in immigrant/refugee communities, minority mental health, mental health disparities, and advocacy. She is also interested in using text as data and electronic health records in social work research, with a focus on mental health and mental health services.
Minerva Tantoco
Minerva Tantoco is an Innovator, investor, startup founder, author, advisor, and speaker on Ethical AI, cybersecurity, fintech and healthtech. Tantoco served as New York City’s first-ever Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Based on her efforts, New York City was named "2016 Best Smart City" and helped launch initiatives such as LinkNYC, CSforAll, and Internet of Things Guidelines, as well as promoting an inclusive, equitable tech ecosystem. Ms. Tantoco also served as Senior Product Manager at Palm, Chief Technology Officer at Merrill Lynch and UBS, and holds four US patents on intelligent workflow. Tantoco serves as a Trustee of the New York Hall of Science (nysci.org), Board of Directors, Vyv, Board Advisor to One Creation Embedded Privacy and Socure, and is currently Chief AI Officer at NYU McSilver Institute.
Jennifer Hill
Jennifer Hill is a Professor of Applied Statistics and Data Science at New York University. She is the Co-Director of the Center for Practice and Research at the Inersection of Information, Society and Methodology (PRIISM), and Co-Director of the Masters of Science Program in Applied Statistics for Social Science Research (A3SR). Dr. Hill develops and evaluates methods to help answer the types of causal questions that are vital to policy research and scientific development.
Constantine E. Kontokosta
Constantine E. Kontokosta, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning and Director of the Civic Analytics program at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. He also directs the Urban Intelligence Lab and holds cross-appointments at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering (CUE). He is affiliated faculty at the Wagner School of Public Service. Previously, he served as the inaugural Deputy Director of CUSP and Assistant Professor of Urban Informatics at CUSP and CUE, where he was part of the Center’s founding leadership team and designed, launched, and directed one of the first graduate programs in urban informatics.
Rumi Chunara
Rumi Chunara, PhD is an Associate Professor at NYU, where she directs the Center for Health Data Science. She is jointly appointed at the School of Global Public Health (in Biostatistics) and the Tandon School of Engineering (in Computer Science). Dr. Chunara's research focuses on developing computational and statistical approaches for acquiring, integrating and using data to improve population and public health. With her focus on public health, Dr. Chunara’s work covers individual, collective, environmental, and organizational factors that impact human populations. Her interdisciplinary approach incorporates data from social media, mobile phones, and other sources to address public health challenges and advance computer science.
Ravi Shroff
Ravi Shroff, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities (ASH) at New York University's Steinhardt School, with an affiliated appointment at New York University's Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP). He is an affiliated researcher at the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, and a member of the Machine Learning for Good Lab at NYU. His interests are broadly related to computational social science, and in particular the development and application of statistical methods to measure and improve the equity and efficiency of decision-making.
Sadiq Patel
Sadiq Patel, PhD is a data scientist and health technologist with experience in health AI, health data, and health economics. He currently works at Waymark, a health technology startup, where he leads a team that designs, builds, and deploys AI-informed data science products to improve care delivery for people receiving Medicaid. Sadiq has held research fellowships at Harvard Medical School and Microsoft AI for Good, worked as a senior product manager and team lead at Accenture, and taught through Teach for America. He holds a PhD and MS in Social Policy and Biostatistics from The University of Chicago and an MSW from the University of Michigan. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching graduate level machine learning courses.
Alicia Boyd
Alicia Boyd, PhD is a Postdoctoral Researcher at NYU PRIISM Center and a Quantitative Reflexive Intersectional Researcher. She is an expert in developing workflows, locating data from the margins, and bringing it into central focus while navigating data-centric processes. In addition, she brings an encyclopedic knowledge about the history, theoretical frameworks, and reflexive-intersectional methodological applications and the opportunities and challenges of applying it within quantitative domains.
Patrick Y. Wu
Patrick Y. Wu, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics. Dr. Wu develops text-as-data/NLP and machine learning methods for computational social science questions. His current research focuses on measurement using text and social media. He received his PhD in Political Science and Scientific Computing and MA in Statistics at the University of Michigan.
Nicholas Wolf
Nicholas Wolf, PhD is a research data management librarian in NYU Data Services and affiliated faculty of Glucksman Ireland House. He has a PhD in history with research specialties in Irish and British history, digital history, and historical research data.
Michelle Thompson Gumbs
Michelle Thompson Gumbs is a Senior Geographic Information Systems Specialist at NYU Data Services. She has an academic background in Criminal Justice, Geospatial Intelligence Analytics, and Psychology.
Megan A. Brown
Megan A. Brown is a research scientist/data engineer for the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics. Megan's research is centered on the online information ecosystem. As a research engineer, Brown collects and maintains large-scale collections of social media and digital trace data for the purposes of social science research. In her research endeavors, she studies cross-platform media manipulation, political bias in algorithmic systems, and the effect of platform governance and moderation policies on the spread of political content.
Vicky Rampin
Vicky Rampin is the Librarian for Research Data Management and Reproducibility and the subject specialist for data science and computer science at New York University. Vicky supports researchers of all levels and disciplines in creating well-managed, reproducible scholarship through instruction, consultation, outreach, and infrastructure building. Her research centers on data and software preservation in service of long-term reproducibility, as well as how best to individualize reproducibility best practices. They loves all things open and contributes to a number of open projects as a part of her job at NYU and in her spare time.
Nathan Storey
Nathan Storey is the Director of the Street Homeless Solutions Lab at the NYC Department of Homeless Services. His work includes software design, database management, and data science. Nathan has a Masters in Urban Planning from Hunter College, where he focused on GIS, civic engagement, and civic technology.
Zezhen (Michael) Wu
Zezhen (Michael Wu) is a doctoral student in Psychology and Social Intervention at New York University. He studies how theory-driven psychological interventions buffer students against various situational and environmental threats, stigma, and discrimination. Prior to NYU, he earned an EdM in Arts in Education from Harvard University and an Mphil in Evidence-based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation from the University of Oxford.
Jemel Aguilar
Jemel Aguilar is Associate Professor at Fordham University and teaches social work practice. He authored the forthcoming books “Practicing human behavior in the social environment with people and populations” and “Social Work Practices, Perspectives, and Opportunities in the Global World.” Jemel taught himself data science, python and R programming.
Hamid Akbary
Hamid Akbary is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. He was previously a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary (2016-2022) and a Fulbright Fellow at Lehigh University (2013-2015). One of his postdoctoral research projects uses over two decades of textual data from Canada's House of Commons debates to examine the types of sentiments expressed by members of the parliament about immigrants in general and Muslim minorities in particular. In addition to his academic affiliation, he works as a data analyst for Statistics Canada, Government of Canada.
Brianna Amos
Brianna is currently pursuing a PhD in social work at the NYU Silver School of Social Work. Her research interests are rooted in understanding mental health disparities in Black communities. She is specifically interested in factors influencing Black Americans’ decisions to engage with formal mental health services, such as cultural stigma.
Leeam Azoulay
Leeam Azoulay is a doctoral student at the Rutgers School for Communication and Information. Prior to starting her PhD, she worked for human rights and humanitarian organizations internationally, mostly in advocacy roles. Her research interests focus on how tech impacts human rights and political expression in the global south, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. This includes a range of issues including disinformation, censorship, surveillance, and content moderation by social media platforms.
Daniel Baslock
Daniel Baslock is a social worker and a PhD candidate at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work. He researches mental health and substance use treatment organizations, drawing on implementation science frameworks to understand how payment strategies and social policies impact adoption of evidence-based practices.
Yuanyuan Hu
Yuanyuan Hu is a PhD Candidate at NYU Silver School of Social Work and a licensed clinical social worker in New York State. Her research focuses the implementation of strategies to integrate mental health services and non-mental health settings for underserved older adults, especially older Asian immigrants.
Khadija Israel
Khadija is currently a doctoral student at Silver School of Social work at NYU, whose research interests include developing evidence-based non-pharmacologic treatment intervention in conjunction with intensive case management services and harm reduction to address SUD in high risk patients with co-occurring disorders within inpatient settings.
Tina Kilaberia
Tina Kilaberia is an Assistant Professor at NYU Silver School of Social Work. Her research focuses on social isolation among older adults and their caregivers, age-friendly congregate settings, and elder mistreatment.
Abraham Liddell
Abraham Liddell is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. His research leverages social network analysis and machine learning to study social change over time.
Hao Lin
Hao Lin is a doctoral student in the Stony Brook Sociology department, where she is also affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. Her current research examines public sentiment during the Covid-19 pandemic on social media using computational methods. She is also interested in AI ethics, particularly health data and AI in health care. She holds a B.A. from the Central University of Finance and Economics, China, and an MSc in sociology from Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
Michelle Marji
Michelle is a PhD student in Social Psychology in the Niedenthal Emotions Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research investigates large-group movement through space, interpersonal synchrony, belonging, trust, and human robot interaction. Her goal is to examine issues of equity and social justice, and engage in community-centered collaborative research. Outside of the lab, Michelle is a dance artist and rock climber.
Samuel Mendez
Samuel Mendez is a PhD candidate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Their dissertation is focused on expanding the scope of health literacy research through connections to natural language processing methods and media studies theory. Samuel draws on their background in media studies and animation to rethink health communication, with the goal of contributing to a more equitable future.
Rohini Pahwa
Rohini Pahwa is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Ph.D. Program at NYU Silver School of Social Work. As a mental health researcher, Rohini examines the process of community integration and the influences of individual and systemic factors on social networks, community integration and mental health outcomes for individuals with severe mental illnesses through qualitative, quantitative, and social network methodologies.
Michael Park
Michael Park is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work at Rutgers University. His research focuses on understanding how racial discrimination and its related stressors (e.g., racial stereotypes) contribute to disparities in mental health and mental health service utilization among Asian American immigrant youth.
Krushika Patankar
Krushika is a doctoral student at NYU Silver and graduate research assistant at the NYU Center on Violence and Recovery. Her research is informed by clinical practice in restorative work and lived experiences in a services devoid context, wrapping around intimate partner violence (IPV) service delivery to underserved populations, intersections with child protective services, and intervention and implementation science.
Juan Rios
Dr. Juan Rios is a social work professor, licensed Clinical Social Worker and researcher passionate about democratizing Foresight training, Afro-Futures, and Design Justice. By envisioning equitable futures through creativity and critical thinking, Dr. Rios empowers marginalized voices to shape compassionate, human centered transformative possibilities centered around love.
Aaron Rodwin
Aaron Rodwin is a PhD Candidate at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work. Aaron’s research interests focus on mental health services and interventions for marginalized young adults experiencing serious mental illnesses. Aaron’s has a particular interest in music-based interventions as a youth-oriented tool to improve engagement and recovery.
Haniya Rumaney
Haniya Rumaney is a PhD student in Basic and Applied Social Psychology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. In the past, she has employed survey experiments and other methodology to study the antecedents and consequences of religious identity and discrimination from the target’s perspective. She is hoping to leverage computational social sciences to study these phenomena from the perspective of stigma perpetrators in India and the US.
Olivia Weng
Olivia Weng is a PhD student in Public Health Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on health education and health communication on chronic disease prevention. Currently, Olivia is interested in studying data from various social media platforms. Before her PhD study, Olivia worked in a local health department dealing with cancer prevention and control.
Yuanyuan Yang
Yuanyuan Yang is a doctoral student and research associate at the Brown School of Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on the impact of asset-based poverty policy on child mental well-being. She received her B.M. from Beijing Normal University and her MPA in public policy from New York University. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a research assistant at the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at New York University and China Center for Social Policy at Columbia University.
Meng-Hsuan Yu
Meng-Hsuan Yu is a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. Her research explores how to identify child maltreatment and improve child protective services using big data analytics. Before her Ph.D. study, she worked as a research associate at the National Taiwan University and at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taiwan. Leveraging child welfare administrative data, she utilized tree decision models and topic modeling to refine the child maltreatment screening system to identify children at risk. She is now working on a project using Maryland Child Welfare administrative data to explore the kinship foster care services in Maryland.ODISSEI
All Participants
Tom Emery
Dr. Tom Emery is the Deputy Director of ODISSEI, where he is responsible for the strategic development of the infrastructure and international collaborations. Emery is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Sociology of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Before that, he was the Deputy Director of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague. Emery gained a PhD in Social Policy from the University of Edinburgh in 2014 and his thesis examined the interaction between financial support between elderly parents and their adult children in a number of European countries. His research also covers questions of comparative survey methodology and policy measurements in multilevel contexts.
Paulina Pankowska
Dr. Paulina Pankowska is an assistant professor at the Sociology department of Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the topics of data and methods quality. She is currently working on a project investigating the quality of non-traditional data sources and on a project related to climate change sociology. She is also the task leader of the ODISSEI benchmarking task, which aims to organize an algorithm benchmark for the social sciences. The overarching goal of this project is to guide social science research towards a culture wherein different methods and techniques that are used to solve a specific problem are compared and evaluated objectively.
Javier Garcia-Bernardo
Dr. Javier Garcia-Bernardo is an assistant professor at Utrecht University in the Social Data Science (SoDa) team. Before that, he was a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam and at Charles University (CORPTAX), and a data scientist at the Tax Justice Network. In his research he applies computational models to understand social and economical systems. He completed his PhD in Political Economy at the CORPNET group (University of Amsterdam), and his MSc in Computer Science at the University of Vermont.
Erik-Jan van Kesteren
Dr. Erik-Jan van Kesteren is assistant professor of data science at Utrecht University, and the team lead for the ODISSEI Social Data Science team ([https://odissei-soda.nl/](https://odissei-soda.nl/)). His background is in social sciences and statistics, with a focus on computation; he has worked on a wide range of topics, such as structural equation modeling, high-performance computing, and Bayesian statistics. Erik-Jan is a strong proponent of open science, which he puts in practice in his projects with the SoDa team. There, he consults and works with many different researchers, on topics such as inequality, citizen science, agent-based modelling, and synthetic data.
Gert Stulp
Gert Stulp is an associate professor at the department of Sociology at the University of Groningen. He studies causes of the variation in the number of children people have and would like to have, and employs diverse methods in his research including personal network data collection, simulation studies, and machine learning. He is also interested in how methods from data science methods can improve the social sciences.
Elizaveta Sivak
Elizaveta Sivak is a sociologist and a computational social scientist. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, where she studies the predictability of fertility outcomes. Before that, she was the head of the Center for Modern Childhood Research at HSE University. Her research interests involve the predictability of life outcomes, predictions in social science in general, and using machine learning methods and digital traces data to study parenting and childhood.
Lucas Spierenburg
Lucas Spierenburg is a PhD candidate at the TU Delft assessing the impact of urban policies on residential segregation patterns. In his current research, he uses unsupervised learning to delineate demographically homogeneous regions from spatial data and assesses how these regions relate to local urban development.
Tony Wei-Tse Hung
Currently a PhD student at Maastricht University, exploring the various possibilities between climate resilience and data science. He received his master's degree in Environmental Economics and Climate Change from the London School of Economics as well as a European Master's degree in Official Statistics from the University of Economics, Prague.
Hanna Schleihauf
Hanna Schleihauf is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University. She studies how people across the world transmit behaviors and beliefs between one another and hopes to investigate the influences of direct and indirect exchange on the spread of knowledge and beliefs within the online environment in the future. She also runs non-invasive cognitive studies with chimpanzees in Uganda and Kenya to unravel what makes human cognition unique.
Lotte Schrijver
Lotte Schrijver is a PhD Candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Wageningen University. She studies misinformation during the Covid pandemic. Her current research focuses on training a machine learning model to detect misinformation about Covid on Twitter. Her interests include political communication and science communication, and computational social science.
Vardan Barsegyan
Vardan is a scientific researcher at the Research and Documentation Centre (WODC) - the knowledge centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security (The Hague, the Netherlands). In 2019-2023, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the department of sociology at Utrecht University (Utrecht, the Netherlands). He obtained his PhD degree in political science in Moscow in 2016. His research interests are political and social inequality, asylum and migration studies, and criminal behavior.
Žiga Puklavec
Žiga is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Psychology at Tilburg University. He is interested in the psychology of taxation, mainly evolving around morality, social norms, emotions, and attitudes towards paying taxes. His research methods include laboratory experiments (emotion induction, electrodermal activity, eye-tracking), analysing large archival data, and natural language processing.
Marie Labussière
Marie Labussière is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Her current work is part of the CAREER ERC-project, which focuses on the employment trajectories of workers in the context of changing labour markets. Using job advertisement data and machine learning techniques, she explores new ways to map the skill content of the labor market.
Xiao Xu
Xu Xiao is a PhD candidate at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI). His research focuses on the application of computational methods in demography. Before working at NIDI, Xiao completed a joint research master in Computational Linguistics at the University of Groningen and the University of the Basque Country.
Alon Pertzikovitz
Alon Pertzikovitz is a PhD candidate at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute and the University of Groningen. He holds a Master’s degree in Demography from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a European Research Certificate of Demography from the European Doctoral School of Demography. Alon’s PhD dissertation explores patterns and processes of childhood migration and focuses on the nexus between migration in childhood and later life demographic outcomes.
Samuel Plach
Samuel Plach is a doctoral student in Social and Political Science at Bocconi University, Milan, and works at the Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. He holds a BSc in Economics and Business Science from University of Konstanz and a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. His research, published in leading journals including Science, PNAS, and PDR, focuses on Social and Institutional Demography, Social Network Analysis, and Social Mobility.
Dianna Amasino
Dianna has a PhD from Duke University in cognitive neuroscience and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the economics department. She measures attention (using eye-tracking or mouselab) to better understand the process by which people make decisions with social and ethical implications.
Huyen Nguyen
Huyen Nguyen is an interdisciplinary researcher with research interests in natural language processing, applied econometrics, and the economics of discrimination. Her research combines NLP tools, survey experiments, and micro-econometric techniques to understand differences in self-presentation strategies in competitions and recruitment contexts; and their impacts on evaluations across genders and ethnicities.
Tomas Turner-Zwinkels
Tomas Turner-Zwinkels is a socially engaged quantitatively minded political sociologist that loves bad ideas. Keen on exploring and teaching how to tackle policy issues with theoretical scrutiny, exciting data and rigorous quantitative methodology. Graduated with the highest honours (summa cum laude) from his research master at the ICS in Groningen. Wrote his PhD, titled 'A New Macro-Micro Approach to the Study of Political Careers: Theoretical, Methodological and Empirical Challenges and Solutions' at the University of Groningen. After working at the University of Basel (Switserland) on a large comparative research project on political careers, he recently started as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Tilburg. He is a member of the Dutch National Think Tank.
Emily Cantrell
Emily Cantrell is a doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. Her current research examines what types of life experiences are most predictable using machine learning algorithms with social survey data. Upcoming work will examine how data distribution shifts impact predictive algorithms in child protective services.
Francesco Marolla
Francesco Marolla is a Joint PhD researcher for the University of Trento (Italy) and Tilburg University (The Netherlands). In his PhD Thesis, he works on European surveys (e.g., EVS, ESS, EES), particularly focusing on citizens' support for populist parties and populist attitudes. He aims to find individual and contextual factors that explain support for populism across European countries. The focus is on voters' grievances, institutional factors and party competition. Other research interests are on Voting behaviour, Electoral biases, Digital Democracy, and COVID-19 rule compliance.
Laura Jansen
Laura Jansen is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Groningen. Her research lies within the field of health and labour economics. She is currently investigating employer incentives' effects in the Dutch sick leave and disability insurance system. Besides, she has a great interest in computational economics and is planning to create a structural model of the Dutch disability insurance system.
Santiago Gómez-Echeverry
Santiago is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His current research focuses on modeling and assessing the quality of non-probabilistic and Big Data sources. He has a strong passion for applied statistics, particularly Survey Statistics, Public Policy Evaluation, Bayesian Statistics, and Psychometrics.
Ely Strömberg
Ely Strömberg is a PhD candidate at the department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, and the ICS. Their PhD project investigates cumulative and structural forms of discrimination. Their research interest include discrimination, labour market relations, intergenerational inequality, research robustness, and Critical theory.
Maud Hofland
I am an early-career researcher affiliated with the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. In collaboration with colleagues, I investigate various aspects of he Dutch healthcare system, particularly in relation to income. Additionally, my academic interests lie in the fields of socio-medical sciences and social inequality.Paris
All Participants
Etienne Ollion
Étienne Ollion is a CNRS research fellow and Professor of Sociology at École Polytechnique. His research focuses on politics, and he integrates digital data to more classic data sources and methods.
Julien Boelaert
Julien Boelaert is an Assistant professor in Political Science at Lille University/CERAPS (currently on sabbatical). He has been experimenting with, and thinking about, machine learning for social sciences since 2010 and is currently working on mass-media content analysis with a text-as-data approach.
Felix Lennert
Felix Lennert is a PhD candidate in Sociology at École Polytechnique under the supervision of Étienne Ollion. He holds an M.Sc. in Computational Social Science from Linköping Universitet. His research interest centers around political polarization and its underlying processes which he studies using large-scale social media data and a diverse set of computational methods.
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.
Marie Bergström
Marie Bergström is a Permanent Researcher at the French National Institute for Demography. Her work deals with online dating which she investigates using digital data.
Antonio Casilli
Antonio Casilli is full professor of sociology at Telecom Paris and a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Institute on Innovation (i3), an institute of the French CNRS. His research focuses on social networks, digital platforms, digital labor and privacy.
Laura K. Nelson
Laura Nelson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. In her research, she uses computational methods to study social movements, culture, gender, institutions, and the history of feminism.
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego. His research concerns markets and their location in contemporary societies with an emphasis on finance, knowledge, and organizations.
Thierry Poibeau
Thierry Poibeau is CNRS Director of Research and adjunct head of the LATTICE laboratory. He mainly works on NLP, especially on Information Extraction, Question Answering, Semantic Zoning, Knowledge Acquisition from text and Named Entity tagging.
Paola Tubaro
Paola Tubaro is CNRS Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique (LISN). Her research focuses on the digital platform economy, the global supply networks of the artificial intelligence industry, the role of human labour in the development of automation, and inequalities in access to data.
Dennis Arku
Dennis Arku is a lecturer at the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Ghana, Legon, and a researcher in the field of Applied Statistics and Probability. He holds a PhD in Statistics. His current research interest is focused on big data analytics.
Rebekka Atakan
Rebekka Atakan works as a PhD student in an DFG-funded project on the analysis of neighborhood changes in Cologne, Germany by means of a dwelling panel at the University of Bonn. Her dissertation focuses on the perception of urban space, the construction of neighborhood images and the interplay of social and spatial inequality.
Abi Atamanesh
Abi is a research assistant at the University of Tehran. She has a multidisciplinary academic background, holding a master's degree in Cognitive Science and a bachelor's degree in Physics. Her research focuses on exploring the relationship between emotions, human belief systems, and the spread of misinformation in social media. Specifically, Abi is currently investigating the impact of network polarization on the dissemination of misinformation through the use of agent-based models. Her work involves designing and executing a series of experiments to gain insights into this complex phenomenon.
Samuel Benkimoun
Samuel Benkimoun is a PhD student at Université Paris-1 Panthéon Sorbonne. He is writing a thesis in Geography, about the interconnection between urban environment, mobility and infectious diseases patterns in Delhi, India. He uses a lot of models and computational methods for spatial analysis, mainly in R. He also has an interest for urban theory and mapping, while trying to develop a critical framework regarding the production and use of spatial data in social science.
Meryem Bezzaz
Meryem Bezzaz holds a Master's degree in Political Science from McGill University and received a Bachelor in Economics and Political Science from the University of Montreal (UdeM). Her research project aims to provide a comparative political economy perspective on issues of energy policy choices in the context of crisis.
Emma Bonutti D'Agostini
Emma Bonutti D'Agostini is a PhD candidate in Sociology between CREST (Institut Polytechnique) and médialab (Sciences Po Paris). She is entered in studying how far-right discourse spreads through the French and Italian mediaspheres, using computational NLP methodologies. Before that, she was a Master's student in Sociology at Sciences Po Paris.
Nicolas Camilotto
I am a historian of economic thought, and I am completing a thesis under the direction of Dorian Jullien at GREDEG (CNRS/Université Côte d'Azur). My research currently focuses on the history of the notion of trust in economic thought.
Javier Carbonell
Javier Carbonell is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh and a teaching associate at Sciences Po, Paris. His research focuses on how nationalist rhetoric frames environmental issues. He is a Research Fellow at Future Policy Lab, an Associate at LSE IDEAS, a member of ASEN, and writes reguarly for El País.
Yacine Chitour
Yacine Chitour is a master's student in history and sociology at École Normale Supérieure (Paris). In 2022, he defended a master's thesis on digital labour and sex work, and the way they overlap on online platforms. He's currently working on research projects in economic sociology.
Annina Claesson
Annina is a PhD candidate in sociology at CREST and Sciences Po Médialab. She researches practices in political communication among parliamentarians and journalists, with a particular interest in social media dynamics, including online violence against public figures.
Baoning Gong
I am a research assistant and doctoral researcher in the research group "Dynamics of Digital Mobilisation" at the Weizenbaum-Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. I investigate the influence of platform functionalities on mobilisation and radicalisation of far-right movements. Prior to that I have completed a Master's degree in Media and Political Communication at the Free University of Berlin.
Karina Gómez
Karina is a masters student in the Paris School of Economics. She holds a BA in Economics and a MSc in Applied Economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). As a research assistant, she has worked on the impact evaluation of programs aimed at improving the quality of education in different middle-income countries.
Malo Jan
Malo Jan is a Phd candidate in political science at Sciences Po (CEE). His research focuses on politicians' responses to climate change in Western Europe. Using quantitative and computational methods, he aims to identify how politicians from several national parliaments engage with this issue as well as to explain the emergence of intra and inter party conflict over climate policies.
Gabriel Kallah-Dagadu
Gabriel Kallah-Dagadu holds a PhD degree in Statistics from the University of Cape Coast and an MPhil degree in Statistics from the University of Ghana. Gabriel joined the department as a faculty in September 2014 and has great experience in supervising and teaching students in Statistics, Probability and Data Science. Gabriel is currently, a postdoctoral fellow in health data science with the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa as the host university and two partner universities Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, USA and Heidelberg Institute of Global Health, Germany. His research interests are centred on applied probability, computational statistics, and machine learning with real-life applications to Genome and Cancer Research, Climate change, Nutrition, and Health.
Elif Kılık
Elif Kılık is a researcher and a PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp. Her research is primarily centered around news content diversity, wherein she utilizes computational methods to extract information from news texts. Additionally, she leads work groups for statistics courses offered to undergraduate students pursuing a bachelor's degree in Communication Sciences at the University of Amsterdam.
Sebastien Le Moing
Sébastien Le Moing is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Sciences Po Bordeaux. His research explores the historical roots and political dynamics of contemporary sensitivities with a case study on French moral evolutions regarding racism from the 1880s to present day. Building on data from various sources (handbooks, pupils’ notebooks, survey data…), Sébastien is interested in applying computational methods to large archival datasets to track changes in emotions and identifications over time.
Maïlys Mangin
Maïlys Mangin is a post-doctoral researcher at the French Air Force Academy Research Center. Her research in international political sociology focuses on the strategic uses of information, expertise and law in international nuclear negotiations. Using automatic arguments mining, she currently work on the analysis of controversies and disinformation operations in the context of the war in Ukraine. She is also an associate with the project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she was Research Fellow (2020-2022).Phoebé Pigenet
Phoebé Pigenet is a PhD student in media studies at the University of Paris-Panthéon-Assas (CARISM). She is currently working on a thesis on digital spaces, discourses and uses of the self-representation of bodies that deviate from the female beauty norm, under the supervision of Cécile Méadel. Her work focuses on the representations of acne, age and female fatness on media sharing platforms (Instagram, Tik Tok and Youtube). In 2022, she conducted a master thesis on the activist dynamics highlighted by the hashtag Plusde70kgetsereine on Twitter.
Luis Sattelmayer
I am a PhD candidate at SciencesPo. After a BA in political humanities, I pursued an MA in Comparative Politics where I discovered quantitative methods. In my PhD, I am interested in mainstream parties' issue engagement with the far-right's salient issues and how this might explain their electoral decline.
Janine Schröder
Janine is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department for Political Science Methodology at the University of Regensburg. She holds a B.A. in Social Science from the University of Augsburg and an M.A. in Criminology and Violence Studies from the University of Regensburg. During her Masters, she worked as a research assistant in the forensic psychiatry of Regensburg. Her Doctoral Thesis focuses on anti-fascist online networks and the quantitative classification of textual content across Europe. She draws on interdisciplinary theoretical elements and computational methods to study anti-fascist movements.
Florian Steig
Florian Steig works as a pre-doc at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. His research uses Natural Language Processing for the analysis of climate discourses. Florian holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Hamburg and an MSc in Global Politics from the LSE.
Leonie Steinbrinker
Leonie Steinbrinker is currently a PhD candidate in Sociology at Leipzig University, specializing in the use of computational methods to investigate the underlying mechanisms of how social influence in social media communication is shaping opinions and behavior. Her research approach is theory-induced, and she applies network analysis and natural language processing methods to analyze large-scale behavioral data.
Daria Szafran
Daria is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Mannheim. Her research focuses broadly on the social impact of AI. In her recent work, Daria is investigating subjective fairness perceptions in the context of automated decision making. She enjoys working both with quantitative as well as qualitative methods.
Jakob Tures
Jakob Tures is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Potsdam. His research concerns the interplay of demand and supply in right-wing populism, i.e. the extent to which voters' expectations and the positions as well as behaviours of the elected align. He employs natural language processing in analysing the supply-side based on official documents and digitally collected text data.
Claudia Uebler
Claudia Uebler is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Educational Sciences, University of Regensburg, and holds a Ph.D. in Physics. Her research analyzes the dropout risk of girls in STEM within an online mentoring program, using time-dependent dynamics in communication and networking behavior. In doing so, she is pursuing a second Ph.D.
Mikael Wallin
Mikael Wallin is doctoral researcher of sociology at Tampere University in Finland. His research focuses on social media platforms, public discourse and cultural stratification. He is currently working in the research project CuWoC (Cultures of the working class in the 2020s) where he is using computational methods such as topic modeling as part of a mixed methods research design to analyse large datasets of online discussions.
Shuyu Zhang
Shuyu Zhang is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology. Her research focuses on the impact of social media on places and urban environment, especially the digital placemaking, mediatization, gentrification, tourisfication, neighborhood change and urban inequalities. Her main interests include urban regeneration, urban analytics and interventions, data-driven urban design and urban studies. Her methodology combines mixed research methods, social media data analysis, text mining, and social network analysis. She holds a master’s degree in Architecture from Tongji University and has experience in Computional Urban Design Lab.
Yacine Chitour
Yacine Chitour is a master's student in history and sociology at École Normale Supérieure. In 2022, he defended a master's thesis on digital labour and sex work, and the way they overlap on online platforms. He's currently working on research projects in economic sociology.
Gaston Vermersch
Gaston Vermersch holds an M.Sc. in quantitative economics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and is currently completing an M.Sc. in computational social sciences at ENSAE. He combines digital methods and econometrics to investigate various socio-economic topics.Penn
All Participants
Xi Song
Xi Song is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research uses statistical, demographic, and computational techniques to understand how patterns of social inequality are created and changed within and across generations. Her current topics of investigation include the gap between factual and perceived inequality, multigenerational social mobility and kinship inequality, the evolution of occupational structure, and statistical methods for characterizing the link between intra- and intergenerational mobility. She received the 2021 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association. Her previous publications have received multiple awards from the American Sociological Association, the International Sociological Association, IPUMS, and the Demographic Research.
Yphtach (Yph) Lelkes
Yphtach (Yph) Lelkes is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication. He studies public opinion, political psychology, and political communication. His interests lie at the intersection of political communication, public opinion, and political psychology. In the broadest sense, he is interested in the antecedents, structure, and consequences of citizens’ political attitudes. He has focused on three, often overlapping, research questions: (1) What are the roots, structure, and consequences of affective polarization? (2) What is the impact of changes to the information environment on political attitudes? (3) What are the psychological underpinning and structure of political belief systems? His work appears in top field journals in Communication (Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication), Political Science (American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics), Psychology (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), as well as general interest journals (PNAS, Nature Human Behavior).
Aj Alvero
AJ Alvero is a computational social scientist at the University of Florida Department of Sociology, Criminology & Law. His primary interests are in in language, race/ethnicity, culture, and education. His current research uses computational techniques to analyze college admissions essays and model the social patterns within them. AJ’s future research plans include investigations into machine translation and multilingualism, social media and counter hate speech, and more investigations into educational systems using data science. Prior to entering academia, AJ was a high school teacher in Miami, FL.
Deen Freelon
Deen Freelon is an associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina and a principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). His theoretical interests address how ordinary citizens use social media and other digital communication technologies for political purposes, paying particular attention to how identity characteristics (e.g. race, gender, ideology) influence these uses. Methodologically, he is interested in how computational research techniques can be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of communication science.
Danaë Metaxa
Danaë Metaxa is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Computer and Information Science department, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. Along with Andrew Head, they are the co-founder of the Penn HCI group. Prior to joining Penn, Dr. Metaxa was a postdoctoral scholar with the Stanford Center of Philanthropy and Civil Society’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, and a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University. In their research, Dr. Metaxa studies bias and representation in algorithmic systems and content, focusing on high-stakes social settings like politics and employment, and in particular on the experiences of maginalized people.
Rebecca Weiss
Rebecca Weiss is an award-winning computational social scientist and data science leader. She has worked in academia and industry, applying innovative methods to large-scale data sets to better understand online environments and their behavioral consequences. As head of research and innovation at Mozilla, she created and incubated the Rally project, a privacy-preserving data platform leveraged by institutions including Princeton, Stanford, and The Markup to conduct research in the public interest. Before that, she founded the Firefox Data Science team and advanced Lean Data Practices as Mozilla’s director of data science. Weiss has held fellowships at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation (a joint effort between Stanford School of Engineering and Columbia School of Journalism).
Meredith Broussard
Data journalist Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of several books, including “More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech” and “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.” Her academic research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting and ethical AI, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good.
Rebecca Johnson
Rebecca Johnson is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, where she teaches data science in the MS in Data Science for Public Policy and is affiliated with the Massive Data Institute and Department of Sociology. Rebecca is also a 2020-2021 Access to Justice Faculty Scholar with the American Bar Foundation, an academic affiliate with the federal Office of Evaluation Sciences, and a visiting Data Science Fellow with The Lab at DC. Her research studies how social service bureaucracies use a mix of data and discretion to decide who deserves help and focuses particularly on prioritization in K-12 schools. Substantively, she studies how underfunded K-12 districts navigate three forces: legal mandates about categories of students to prioritize, fiscal realities, and family advocacy.
Sarah Shugars
Sarah Shugars (they/them/theirs) studies how everyday people talk about, engage with, and collectively shape the modern world around them. Bringing together computational communication and the principles of deliberative democracy, they develop new text and network methods in order to examine the relational nature of public life, the linguistic modes through which people express themselves, and the technological affordances which shape digital discourse. They are a first-generation to college student and are deeply committed to increasing access and equity in higher education.
Shengchun Huang
Shengchun Huang is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in digital news consumption, algorithm-driven aggregators/platforms, and social effects in the high-choice media environment. She applies a variety of computational methods in research work, including network analysis, Markov chains, word embedding and nlp, etc.
Eugenio Paglino
Eugenio is a second-year Ph.D. student in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a BSc and a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. Before becoming a PhD candidate, he worked as a research assistant at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute and the Dondena Center for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. His broad research interests include the interactions between population and the environment, migration, the computational social sciences, and inequality. He loves visualizing data and is interested in studying ways in which data visualization can help researchers to communicate more clearly and to reach a wider audience.
Julia Cope
Julia Cope is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies climate discourse, information communication technology use, natural disasters, and the political economy of climate change. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh and worked as a data scientist before joining Annenberg. Cope is a mixed-methods researcher. Her current research uses computational methods such as natural language processing and machine learning, as well as qualitative methods such as content and discourse analysis to uncover the framing of climate change and patterns of message salience within different industries and groups.
Sunny Rai
Sunny is a postdoc researcher at CIS working under Dr. Sharath Chandra Guntuku and Dr. Lyle Ungar. Her research focuses on misinformation, mental health and cross-cultural variations in human language. SHe completed my PhD from University of Delhi, India. Her PhD thesis was on Computational Metaphor Processing for English Language.Rochester
All Participants
Cantay Caliskan
Cantay Caliskan is an assistant professor of instruction at the Goergen Institute for Data Science, University of Rochester. He studied political science, computer science, and statistics during his PhD, and received his degree from Boston University in 2018. Cantay received his BA in Economics, Mathematics, and Intl. and Global Studies from Brandeis University and his MA in International Relations from Koç University. His research interests include computational social science, emotion quantification and face/gesture recognition, social media, US Congress, and networks of lobbying.
Ezgi Siir Kibris
Ezgi Siir Kibris is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and an alumna of the MS program in Data Science at the University of Rochester. She has MA degrees in Political Science and European Studies and BA in Economics from Sabanci University. Her dissertation research revolves around judicial politics, international courts, democratic backsliding, and gender. She is interested in quantitative methods, specifically causal inference, machine learning, and natural language processing.
Selim Balcisoy
Since 2004, Selim Balcisoy has been a Faculty Member at Sabanci University, Istanbul, where he has led and contributed to groundbreaking research in a variety of areas, including behavioral analytics, computational social science, cultural heritage, augmented reality, and visual analytics. In 2006, he founded one of the first data analytics companies, VisioThink, which quickly became a leading player in the industry. As CEO until 2018, he oversaw the development of cutting-edge technologies that helped clients to gain new insights into their data, enabling them to make better decisions and achieve their business goals more effectively. In 2015, he cofounded a research lab on behavioral analytics and visualization together with MIT Media Lab. This lab has fostered strong industry collaboration, enabling us to develop innovative technologies that have helped companies across a range of industries to gain valuable insights into human behavior and social dynamics. He has also advised and acted in the primary investigator role for several international companies, including Ageas Portugal, Tramontina, Turkcell, Akbank, Garanti Bank, Sabancı Holding, SAS, National Insurance Information and Monitoring Center, Aksigorta, Netaş, and SabancıDx.
Dino P. Christenson
Dino Pinterpe Christenson is an Associate Professor (Ph.D., Ohio State University; B.A., University of Michigan) in the Department of Political Science at Washington University, a Faculty Affiliate in the Division of Computational and Data Science, and a Research Fellow at the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. Christenson studies American political behavior and quantitative methods, with recent work exploring presidential voting behavior, campaign dynamics in presidential primaries and caucuses, the coalition behavior of interest groups, and public opinion and the media environment of institutional outcomes. More generally, his research in American politics concerns electoral behavior, public opinion, political psychology, political communication, interest groups and judicial politics. He has broad methodological interests as well, including survey research, experimental design, longitudinal and nested data models, Bayesian analysis, social network analysis and causal inference.
Gourab Ghoshal
Gourab Ghoshal is Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy with joint appointments at the departments of Computer Science and Mathematics. He came to Rochester from Harvard University, where he was a Research Scientist at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and a member of multidisciplinary Orgins of Life Initiative. Hailing from New Delhi, India, Professor Ghoshal got his BS and MS degrees at the University of London, UK (BS and MSc in theoretical Physics, 2004). He did his doctoral-thesis work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (PhD in Physics, 2009) during which he attended the prestigious Complex Systems summer school at the Santa Fe Institute, NM and the Theoretical Physics school at Les Houches near Chamonix in France. Following his PhD, he was a postdoctoral scientist jointly at Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School as well as a visiting scientist at the Media Lab, MIT.
Jonathan Herington
Jonathan Herington an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, and Assistant Director of Graduate Education in the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering, at the University of Rochester. Between 2014 and 2019 Jonathan was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Kansas State University. Previously Jonathan was a Research Fellow in the Medicine, Ethics, Society and History unit of the University of Birmingham. Jonathan completed my PhD in the School of Philosophy, at the Australian National University. Jonathan is a native of Brisbane, Australia and recieved a BA (Hons I) in International Relations and Philosophy, and a BSc in Microbiology, from the University of Queensland. Prior to undertaking my PhD Jonathan was located at the Centre for International Security Studies, University of Sydney.
Anson Kahng
Anson Kahng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Goergen Institute of Data Science at the University of Rochester. He works on theoretical problems at the intersection of computer science and economics, particularly in computational social choice, which focuses on designing and evaluating methods of aggregating individual preferences to make collective decisions. Recently, he has been focusing on problems at the intersection of computer science and democracy. Some projects he has worked on in this space include virtual democracy, liquid democracy, and participatory budgeting. In general, Anson is excited about solving real-world problems with a combination of theoretical and empirical tools.
Lauren Klein
Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before arriving at Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She received her Ph.D. in English and American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center, and her AB in Literature (English and French) from Harvard University. In 2017, she was named one of the 'rising stars in digital humanities' from Inside Higher Ed. She is the author of two books. The first, Data Feminism (MIT Press), co-authored with Catherine D’Ignazio, offers a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. The second, An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press), shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people, from the nation’s first presidents to their enslaved chefs, who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States.
Mert Moral
Mert Moral is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University, Istanbul. He received BA degree in International Relations from Galatasaray University, Istanbul, and studied political science at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne as an exchange student. In 2012, he received his first MA degree in International Political Economy from Koç University, Istanbul. He then received a Ph.D. in Comparative and World Politics in 2017 from the State University of New York at Binghamton and moved back to Turkey and started working at Sabanci University soon after. His research interests include electoral behavior, political participation, representation, polarization, comparative and Turkish politics, and political and survey methodology.
Moritz Osnabrugge
Moritz Osnabrugge is an Assistant Professor at Durham University. His research focuses on European politics and computational social science. He studies legislative reforms, decision-making in the European Union, political rhetoric, political representation, and policy implementation. His articles have been published in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, The Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Political Science Research and Methods, European Union Politics, and Research & Politics. He teaches courses on digital democracy, European and comparative politics, and political methodology. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Mannheim and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Pedro Rodriguez
Pedro Rodriguez is a results-focused researcher and published scientist leveraging over 10 years’ hands-on research, four years’ team leadership, and five years’ experience teaching quantitative and computational methods, along with a Ph.D. in Political Science and MPhil in Economics. Throughout his career, he has worn numerous hats, including Manager, Thought Leader, Entrepreneur, Academic Researcher, Software Developer, and Teacher. His skillset encompasses network modeling, Natural Language Processing (NLP), experimental methods and machine learning (ML) with strong foundation in statistics. In addition, he possesses expertise in research design from ideation through implementation, publication, and dissemination. He has worked with large and small, structured and unstructured datasets, locally and on high performance clusters. His work has been published in top-ranked peer reviewed journals spanning three disciplines and he actively contributes to open-source software.
Yaron Shaposhnik
Yaron Shaposhnik is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Operations Management at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. Most broadly, he is interested in the optimization and analysis of mathematical models that capture real world problems, and in developing decision support tools that leverage analytics to improve operations. He graduated from MIT where he majored in Operations Research and was advised by professors Retsef Levi and Tom Magnanti. He also holds an MS degree in Industrial Engineering (advised by professors Yale Herer and Hussein Naseraldin) and a BS degree in Information Systems Engineering, both from the Technion – IIT.
Hyunjin Song
Hyunjin Song is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at Kookmin University, South Korea, and was a Post-doc in the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna, working with Univ.-Prof. Dr. Hajo Boomgaarden, Professor for Empirical Social Science Methods with a focus on Text Analysis. He was also a member of Vienna Computational Communication Science Lab and still remains affiliated with the team.
Philine Widmer
Philine Widmer is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics from the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. Her research covers topics related to the media, algorithms, and their relation to political and market institutions. Methodologically, she specializes in developing new approaches to quantify politically and economically relevant concepts from unstructured data such as text.
Thomas Chamberlain
Thomas is pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the University of Rochester. His research uses quantitative methods with a focus on causal inference to study how historical events, institutions, and policies shape contemporary electoral competition in American politics. Previously, he studied political philosophy at Stanford University and worked in NYC politics.
Yuen Ng Du
Yuen Ng (Aaron) Du is a graduating undergraduate at University of Rochester. Soon, he is joining Washington University in St. Louis as a PhD student in Political Science. His research interest concerns racial inequality and local politics in U.S. through statistical and computational methods.
Olympia Mathiaparanam
Olympia Mathiaparanam is a PhD student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. Her research examines how students learn fundamental STEM concepts. She uses developmental, cognitive, and computational methods to investigate her questions, and she is interested in how her research can help educators improve their instructional resources. Her most recent project applies the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to better understand how students’ reason about variability in biological categories. Olympia holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Eunseong Oh
Eunseong Oh is a doctoral student in Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. She studies American Politics and Mass Political Behavior, with a focus on deliberation and ideological polarization. Her current research applies network analysis to explore if and why politicians cooperate despite conflicting interests.
Md Mamunur Rashid
Md Mamunur Rashid is a Ph.D. student in the Teaching, Curriculum, and Change program at the Warner School of Education, University of Rochester. He also works as a graduate assistant at the Center for Learning in the Digital Age (LiDA) at Warner. Previously, Mamunur attended the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant program in 2017-18 at New York University, New York. His research interests include immersive learning, multimodal learning, cinematic films as a pedagogical tool, and artificial intelligence in education. Mamunur is also a photographer and a video maker.
Adam Roberts
Adam Roberts is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Rochester. His research interests lie in the areas of political economy and comparative politics. Specifically, his work examines corruption, inequality, and democratic erosion in developing countries. Previously, he received his B.A. from Brigham Young University with a double major in Political Science and Economics.
Shirin Sultana
Shirin Sultana, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York-Brockport Department of Social Work. Dr. Sultana earned her Ph.D. from the Howard University School of Social Work, and MSSW from the University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work. Her research focuses on social support, coping and mental health of vulnerable and poor women. Dr. Sultana continues to publish and present at conferences both nationally and internationally.
Jiamu Tang
Jiamu Tang, or Chan, is a driven individual with a passion for data science and philosophy. As a rising sophomore, she is pursuing a double major in data science and philosophy, driven by her love for exploring the intersection of logic and data. She sees data science as a tool to uncover hidden patterns and insights that can lead to groundbreaking discoveries. she hopes to earn a Ph.D. in data science or a related field in the future. She is particularly interested in the role that data science can play in advancing artificial intelligence and machine learning, and hopes to explore new algorithms and techniques to make these technologies even more powerful and effective. Her interests lie in using data brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and human-computer interaction (HCI), and she is gaining valuable experience as a research assistant in a BCS lab for better understand human perception and brain, as well as data processing technique. Through Chan's innovative and creative approach to data science, Jiamu aims to uncover new insights, solve complex problems, and make a lasting contribution to society.
Ebube Umeobi
Ebube is a Master's candidate in Data Science and Analytics at Buffalo State University. She holds a BS in Sociology from Covenant University, Nigeria, and a diverse research and work background on Nigerian peoples and organizations. Ebube has worked as a Researcher, Content Creator, UX Researcher, and Operations in the public and private sectors; analyzing climate studies, social determinants of health, and education for historically disadvantaged groups. Her overall research focuses on creating pilot-level development models through computational methods for policy-making, and sustainable community growth.
Lion Wedel
Lion Wedel is a doctoral researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society Berlin as part of the research group Digital News Dynamics. Before, he received a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Economics at Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and a Master’s degree at the RWTH Aachen University in Computational Social Systems. Currently, he explores the methodological possibilities to analyze audio-visual content from the so-called “verticals” (e.g. TikTok) and how news dynamics on such platforms can be researched. He also researches the online presence of the incel community and how concepts such as de-platforming and radicalization can be investigated through them.
Siyi Yin
Siyi is a junior undergraduate student at the University of Rochester, majoring in Business Analytics and Political Science, and minoring in Legal Studies. She is interested in Social Science, Data Science and Machine learning, modeling in policy and Economics.
Chen Zhang
As a passionate and creative early-stage researcher, Dr. Chen Zhang was trained in medicine, social science, and epidemiology. Dr. Zhang is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Nursing, University of Rochester. She has participated in several NIH-funded projects focused on behavioral and biomedical interventions among vulnerable populations (e.g., female sex workers, children affected by AIDS, people living with HIV/AIDS, injected drug users, and men who have sex with men). Dr. Zhang’s current research focuses on reducing health disparities and health inequity among racial/minority who are at risk of HIV infection.Roma Tor Vergata
All Participants
Gustavo Piga
Gustavo Piga, Ph. D. in Economics at Columbia University, is Full Professor of Economics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where he chairs the International Master in Public Procurement Management and the Bachelor degree in English in Global Governance. He has chaired the Italian Procurement Agency for Goods and Services, Consip Ltd., between 2002 and 2005. He is the author of the controversial 2001 report on Derivatives in Public Debt Management. He is the editor of several books, among which the Handbook of Procurement, Cambridge University Press, with Nicola Dimitri and Giancarlo Spagnolo and Revisiting Keynes - Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, MIT Press, with Lorenzo Pecchi. He is the author of the recent book “L’interregno” by Hoepli on the European crisis. He is also the co-editor of the European Journal of Public Procurement Markets and member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian Parliamentary Budget Office.
Simone Borra
Simone Borra is associate professor of Statistics in the Economics Department of University of Rome Tor Vergata. He teaches graduate courses in Business Statistics, Business Intelligence & Data Mining, and Statistical methods for management. Simone is the coordinator of a one year post graduate Master in Customer Experience, Statistics, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence with the partnership of SAS Institute and Accenture. His main research interests are in Statistical methods for Machine Learning and Nonparametric methods to measure prediction error.
Laura Brandimarte
Laura Brandimarte is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona. She obtained her Master of Science in Economics at the London School of Economics and her PhD in Public Policy and Management, with a specialization in Behavioral Sciences, at Carnegie Mellon University, where she continued her academic career as a Post-doctoral Fellow. Her research and teaching interests focus on behavioral aspects of privacy and security decision making, privacy as self-determination, algorithmic bias, and disinformation. Her work was published in several leading academic journals, including Science, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology - General, and the ACM Computing Surveys.
Caleb Ziems
I am a PhD student in the NLP Group at Stanford University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Diyi Yang. My work spans empirical Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science. Previously, I finished my M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and my B.S. with a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics from Emory University. I was fortunate to spend some of my summers interning at Meta AI Applied Research and USC ISI. As of 2021, I am supported by the NSF GRFP.
Adrianna Jezierska
My name is Adrianna, and I am in the first year of PhD at the University of Bristol, researching online climate-diet discourse of online vegan communities. I am particularly interested in exploring (i) how various actors create opinions on vegan and plant-based diets in the context of climate change and (ii) to what extent they influence their social networks. This project will use a mixed-method approach, including computational social science (NLP, topic modelling), network theory and qualitative interviews. Prior to joining the PhD programme, I earned an MRes in Sustainable Futures from the University of Bristol and a BSc in Marketing from the University of Southampton. I also have a wide-ranging experience in (sci)communications, working previously in public administration for sustainability and climate action, public policy and NGOs. Whilst not at my desk, I enjoy tennis, cooking, long walks in the forest and pilates.
Anh Nguyen
T. N. Anh Nguyen is a PhD Candidate at the Human Rights Centre “Antonio Papisca” of the University of Padova, and an International Research Fellow at the Information Society Law Center at the University of Milan. She obtained her M.A. in Human Rights and Multi-level Governance at the University of Padova, with a specialisation in International Law and Women’s Rights. Her research interests focus on the legal aspects of the right to privacy and data protection, cyberviolence against women, and content moderation. Her doctoral study aims to investigate the governance of cyberviolence against women, including governance of (and by) internet intermediaries as hidden influentials in facilitating such violence on their platforms.
Beatrice Bonini
I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Columbia University in the City of New York, where I study public opinion and political economy. Prior to joining Columbia, I earned a B.S. and M.Sc. in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University, where I focused on immigration, voting behavior and populism. I also gained experience in consultancy and in academic research centers in Italy and in the UK. I am currently working on my dissertation project on political communication on social media and (offline vs online) political participation of Millennials and the Gen Z. I am examining (i) whether, and in which ways, political content produced by non-political actors impacts younger generations, their preferences and behaviors and (ii) the trade-offs and incentives that these digital opinion leaders face when “going political”. I will employ different quantitative methods, from causal inference to experimental designs, to text and image analysis. I am also passionate about travelling and I am taking advantage of my time in NYC to travel more around Central America. I am also dedicated to yoga and meditation and eager to improving my surfing skills.
Christoph Sonntag
Christoph Sonntag is a Master's student in Computer Science at the University of Vienna, where he is conducting research on defense methods against backdoor attacks in distributed machine learning. His current work focuses on detecting malicious clients in a collaborative machine learning setting. He aims to identify poisonous model updates in which attackers manipulated training data to make a model behave in a specific way when it encounters a particular trigger. Previously, Christoph applied visual data analysis methods on data from CERN in an effort to make large deep learning models more interpretable. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Internet Computing from the University of Passau, Germany, where he also worked as a lecturer, teaching programming to non-computer science students. Christoph works part-time as a freelancer on contract-based web development projects, offering customer-tailored software engineering and development solutions since 9 years. Alongside his academic pursuits, Christoph engages in various creative projects, including making music, shooting on film, and editing the Wikipedia. He is also a French language learner, hobby chef and an avid explorer who enjoys discovering new things about the world.
Elena Bashkova
My name is Ellie and I am an MPhil student in Criminological Research at the University of Cambridge. For my master’s thesis, I am researching justifications that people give on online social media platforms and discussion forums for violence towards gender and sexual minorities. My other interests in criminology lie in global violence, international criminal law, and moral philosophy. After my MPhil, I would like to pursue a doctorate degree (please sponsor me). Prior criminology, I received a BA in Classics from University College London (UCL) in 2022. In my free time, I enjoy reading and cycling, and I am currently learning how to play on a guitar.
Genevieve Smith
Genevieve Smith is a DPhil candidate at Oxford University in the International Development department. Her research explores gender-related impacts and opportunities of artificial intelligence using machine learning (ML). In particular, she focuses on if/how ML-based alternative lending apps in India may reinforce gender inequity in low- and middle-income countries and methods to advance more feminist ML tools. Genevieve holds a Master’s in Development Practice from the University of California, Berkeley and works as the Associate Director at the Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Here, she examines socio-technical questions of how bias in AI is perpetuated through organizational governance and team structures, as well as how to advance equity and inclusion within teams and technology products. She worked previously with UN Women, the UN Foundation, and the International Center for Research on Women exploring topics of women’s economic empowerment, inclusive technology, and digital inclusion. Genevieve is a Research Affiliate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at Cambridge University. Genevieve’s an avid adventurer and can be found skiing, kiteboarding, mountain biking, backpacking or otherwise exploring in her free time! She also loves football (soccer), dancing, and yoga.
Leah Rothschild
I have an academic background in Political Science, having studied Economics, Development and Governance at Leiden University, the Hague for my undergraduate degree and Politics and Government at St. John’s University, Rome for my masters. Since then, I have focused on honing my skills in the field of Data Science and Machine Learning by following a 12-week-full-time bootcamp with Le Wagon in autumn 2022 during which I learnt about different machine learning models and their applicability. I now work with Le Wagon as a teacher’s assistant and I am excited to participate in this year’s Summer Institute in Computational Sciences to discover how best to connect my two centers of interest in an effort to use Data Science as a tool for research in Social Sciences, in particular Political Analysis.
Lenard Strahringer
Lenard just finished his MSc in Sociology and Social Research at Utrecht University (Netherlands). In his research, he uses networked experiments and social network analysis to study how socio-psychological and sociological mechanisms bring about network dynamics that explain macro phenomena (such as polarization or social cohesion) in groups and markets. Most recently, he has studied the effects of reputation systems on social cohesion in economic interaction. In the fall, he will be starting his PhD in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Lenard also holds a BSc in Information Systems from the University of Munster (Germany).
Marco Fontana
I am a Ph.D. student in legal sciences at the University of Pisa. My fields of research are administrative law, economic public law, and legal technology. My research project focuses on the use of law and technology instruments by public administrations. More in details, I study the possible use and legal issues of existing computational technologies, based mostly on machine learning algorithms, to help public officers in the interpretation of texts of law and the management of administrative procedures. I graduated in law at the University of Milan in 2012. In 2015, I was admitted to the Milan Bar Association and actively practiced law before starting my Ph.D. program, in 2021. I am also collaborating with the Polytechnic University of Milan in administrative, public procurement and data protection law courses. I am interested in learning and experimenting computational social science methods to be applied in the field of analysis of legal texts and legal documents.
Marta Inácio
Marta Inacio is a Master's student in Human Rights and Democratization, currently enrolled in a joint program offered by the Global Campus of Human Rights and Adam Mickiewicz University. Her research primarily centers around human rights obligations in the development of migration management technologies under EU law. Marta's academic interests extend to neurorights and neuroscience, as well as predictive analytics and its implications, privacy, and labor rights. In addition to her pursuit of a Master's degree, Marta holds a Bachelor's degree in Marketing Management. She aspires to integrate these two fields and foster research in social impact and project management.
Muhammad Muhammad
I am a master’s student in political science at the University of Mannheim. I obtained my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in water and environmental engineering at Cairo University (Egypt), and then obtained my PhD in civil engineering with a focus on water resources at the University of Texas at Austin (USA). I eventually decided to direct and adapt the quantitative analytical skills obtained from my engineering studies to tackling political and societal problems, and I am currently employed as a research assistant at the Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES) as part of the PARFORM project (Partnership Formation in the Context of Recent Refugee Migration). In our research we investigate the question of whether the newly arrived refugee migrants in Germany would consider forming partnerships with the majority population? Or would they search for partners in their country of origin, or among the established ethnic minorities? How would members of the majority and from established immigrant groups perceive and react to partnership attempts of newcomers? Finally, when I am not spending time worrying about democratic backsliding or social cohesion in multi-ethnic liberal democracies, I like to read (especially the philosophy of Nietzsche), go cycling, and discover interesting restaurants!
Sara Veronesi
Sara is a Master student in Economics at Bocconi University (Milan). Her research interest lies at the intersection between political, behavioral and development economics. In particular, she is now interested in studying the relationship between the increasing salience of divisive political topics in the public debate and the formation and strengthening of stereotypes of disadvantaged groups in Italy. Previously, she worked on a theoretical model that explained how globalization in specific developing countries contexts contributes to the worsening of the already low economic and social progress of women through their higher employment in the grey economy.
Wafa Khalfan
Wafa Khalfan is an emerging scholar, currently an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at the University of Sharjah. She completed her doctoral training at the Centre for Cultural Policy Research (CCPR), University of Glasgow (PhD in Media and Cultural Policy). Wafa Khalfan is interested in investigating sociopolitical changes through the lens of media and technology. Her work (in progress) includes research that investigates digital platforms and the influence of technology on journalism. Before joining academia, Wafa Khalfan worked in different roles for more than a decade including the media industry, the public sector and several NGOs in the UAE and the UK.Weng Lam Ao
Weng is a PhD student in Human Sciences at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She completed her master’s degree in regional planning from Cornell University and received her bachelor’s degrees in urban studies and economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interest lies at the intersection of data science and human-centered research to tackle complex and intractable urban challenges, with a focus on the role of sustainable transportation planning and policymaking in addressing economic, environmental, and social equity. Her PhD research is to analyze active travel behavior through leveraging massive, user-generated social media data. Her study aims to examine the changes in the active mobility behavior of different social groups across different time spans in Italy. Her methodological perspective is multidisciplinary, combining transport management, computational social sciences, social psychology, and spatial planning. She hopes to induce positive behavior changes toward adopting active mobility through social media communication.
Yawri Carr
Yawri Carr is a master’s candidate at Technische Universität München. Her current work and research focus on responsible development and deployment of AI. Yawri is has been invited a public speaker in different conferences and spaces worldwide such as the Internet Governance Forum, Global Digital Compact, World Summit on the Information Society and a youth conference from the Ministry of External Affairs of Germany, to discuss topics regarding Internet Governance, Artificial Intelligence, responsible innovation, technology in society, digital rights, etc. She is an intern on Digital Governance and AI at a recognized company in Germany, advising on AI projects. Additionally, she’s a digital youth envoy at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where she participated in the first ITU youth summit. During the SICCS she’s interested to learn more and apply methods from computational sciences to her current research interests and to bridge the gap between computer science and social sciences/legal.
Ümit Seven
Ümit is a PhD candidate at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Building on an exploratory sequential design, his research examines the strategies and tools international humanitarian organizations make use of to preserve humanitarian space in Syria. He performed text analysis and multivariate analysis, using R in his research. While pursuing his doctoral degree, he also works for UNDP Turkey country office in Ankara. As a security professional, he has used geospatial data to support the country office to enable effective programme planning, implementation and delivery within the framework of United Nations’ policies and procedures.Vlad Simon
Vlad is a Software Engineer working in Fintech. He is a Computer Science undergraduate at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.Singapore
All Participants
Yuanyuan Wu
Yuanyuan Wu is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication and New Media at National University of Singapore. Her research interests mainly extend to health-related misinformation, media psychology and media effect. She is particularly interested in exploring media related to alternative medicine.
Zicheng Zhu
Zicheng Zhu is a doctoral student in the Department of Communications and New Media at National University of Singapore. Her research interest includes digital well-being and game studies, lying at the intersection of communication and human-computer interaction. She is currently interested in understanding players' tension between play and non-play and helping people develop an intentional relationship with technology.
Xin Huang
Xin Huang is a doctoral candidate from the Department of Information Systems and Analytics, School of Computing, NUS. Her research interests mainly lie in gaming and human-AI/robot interactions. Her current projects focus on the comparing the quality of decisions made by machines versus those by humans, with a specific context in game team formation teams and translation.
Subhayan Mukerjee
Subhayan Mukerjee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media, and a principal investigator at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community at the National University of Singapore. He researches online audiences using computational methods, and teaches courses in quantitative methods, programming, and data visualization.
Renwen Zhang
Renwen Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. Her research lies at the intersection of health communication, human-computer interaction, and interpersonal communication. She examines the design, use, and effects of digital technology for promoting wellbeing and mental health.
Cuihua (Cindy) Shen
Dr. Cuihua (Cindy) Shen is a professor at the Department of Communication, University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching interests revolve around the structure and impact of social networks in various online platforms. Methodologically, she frequently uses digital footprint data (big data) in addition to surveys and experiments. Her work has won several Top Paper awards from the International Communication Association. Since 2017, she has served as the Chair and Vice Chair of the Computational Methods Interest Group of the International Communication Association. Currently, she is the Associate Editor of two journals: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and Computational Communication Research.
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).
Poong Oh
Dr. Poong Oh is an assistant professor of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI). Prior to joining NTU in 2017, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the evolutionary dynamics of social and collective actions and the roles of communication in it. Also, his research interest lies in advanced data analytic methods, including experimental social science, computational methods, and Bayesian analysis.
Subhayan Mukerjee
Dr. Subhayan Mukerjee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media, and a principal investigator at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community at the National University of Singapore. He researches online audiences using computational methods, and teaches courses in quantitative methods, programming, and data visualization.
Prasanta Bhattacharya
Dr. Prasanta Bhattacharya is a Research Scientist and Innovation Lead with the Social and Cognitive Computing Department at the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR Singapore, where he works on network science and behavioral analytics. Prasanta holds a Ph.D in Information Systems from the Department of Information Systems and Analytics, National University of Singapore, where he studied network science with a special focus on predictive and inferential methods in large social networks. His current research agenda aims at understanding the role of big data in emerging social and business applications from finance, education and healthcare. Prasanta actively collaborates with major industry partners from around the world, and has presented his research in leading computer science, information systems and marketing science venues.
Tian Yang
Dr. Tian Yang is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research lies at the intersection between digital media, political communication, and computational social science, which particularly looks at people’s news consumption and information behaviors in the current new media environment across the globe.
Anfan Chen
Anfan Chen is a Research Assistant Professor at the School of Communication, The Hong Kong Baptist University. His research field includes Computational Communication and Political Communication, and Science Communication. In addition, his work applies computational method to understand the nuances and dynamics of controversial/emerging science social discussion, online social participation, and online health behavior. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, International Journal of Politics/Press, Science Communication, Public Understanding of Science, Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Review, Social Science Computer Review, among other peer-reviewed journals.
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.
Chao Yu
Chao Yu is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Yu’s research interests include online communication behaviors with a focus on individual motivations in crowdsourcing platforms and their impacts on collective behaviors. He is especially interested in topics of social status, homophily, and inequality. Yu earned a B.A. in Journalism from Peking University, a M.S. and a Ph.D. in Communication from Cornell University.
Han Li
HAN LI is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Communication and New Media at National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on AI in healthcare, computational communication, human-computer interaction, and online support communities. As a computational and mixed-method researcher, she used a wide variety of research methods to explore how information and communication technologies can be designed and used to improve health and well-being, enhanced social relationship, and contribute to social good.
Ashley Chenn
Ashley Chenn is a doctoral student in the School of Fashion and Textiles at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her work spans data ownership and privacy, entrepreneurial marketing, and consumer co-creation in Web3 environments. Prior to returning to academia, Ashley worked as a digital marketer for Adobe and with an ESG startup.
Bhargav Nimmagadda
Dr Nimmagadda Bhargav earned his PhD from the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. He teaches at the Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Udupi, Karnataka, India. Bhargav’s ethnographic research on Indian-language journalism is published as a monograph, “Stringers and the Journalistic Field: Marginalities and Precarious News Labour in Small-Town India”, by Routledge.
Han Wei (Ken) Tan
Han Wei (Ken) is a master’s student in the Department of Communication and New Media at National University of Singapore. His research interests lie in online collaborative learning and educational technology. He is currently exploring how individuals learn through engaging in discussions on social media utilising topic modelling and social network analysis.
Liang Ze Wong
Liang Ze is research scientist in the Social & Cognitive Computing Department of the Institute of High Performance Computing. His background is in mathematics, and his interests are in natural language processing, network analysis and data analysis. He is also an adjunct assistant professor at the National University of Singapore's Business School.
Lianshan Zhang
Lianshan Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She received Ph.D from National University of Singapore and M.S. from Iowa State University. Her research is at the intersection of health communication, human-computer interaction, psychological effects and social impact of emerging media. Her recent research focuses on older adults’ new media use and digital inclusion in the era of AI.
Narayani Vedam
I am a computational social scientist working with agent-based models to understand the impact of human mannerisms on the virtual and physical communities they inhabit. In the past, I have worked on human-like automotive speed control, opinion formation in virtual social platforms, and disease spread in communities. I am keen on exploring top-down, and bottom-up modelling approaches to social and behavioural studies.
Mengxia Nova Huang
Nova is a PhD student at Nanyang Technological University. Her research focuses on social media and health communication. Specifically, she is interested in how users, especially vulnerable populations, conduct supportive communication in online communities and the corresponding health outcomes.
Qiaofei Wu
Qiaofei Wu is a PhD candidate in Communication at NUS. His research focuses on how human’s communication behaviors trigger psychological and behavioral processes that contribute to well-being. He is interested in understanding how media, information, and technologies can be employed to promote social participation and improve health outcomes.Sakaria Auelua-Toomey
Sakaria Laisene Auelua-Toomey is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. His research focuses on identifying and dismantling systems of advantage by examining the ways in which different contexts shape marginalized groups meta-beliefs.
Xiayu Summer Chen
Xiayu Summer Chen is a doctoral student in Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on reducing health disparities among older adults through the implementation of technology-based interventions. Her most recent work examines the longitudinal impact of technology usage on cognitive functioning among older adults.
Xiaoya Fu
Xiaoya Fu is a Ph.D. candidate at Renmin University of China and a joint Ph.D. candidate at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests lie in interactive technology, media effects, and media psychology. She explores the intersection of machine learning, network analysis, and social science to understand social inequality, user experience, and the impact of interactive communication technologies. Xiaoya holds a bachelor's degree from the Communication University of China.
Xiaoxiao Meng
Xiaoxiao Meng is an Assistant Professor in the College of Arts and Media at Tongji University. She received her Ph.D. in communication from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a visiting scholar at National University of Singapore. Her research interests include privacy studies, digital governance, and media effects.
Xiaofen Ma
Ma Xiaofen is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China, and she is affiliated with Research Center ofJournalism and Social Development. Her research interests include information security, privacy, and risk communication.
Yiyan Zhang
Yiyan Zhang is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China. She earned her Ph.D. degree in Emerging Media Studies from Boston University. Her research focuses on digital media effects, international communication, and computational communication connecting traditional and computational social science methods.
Yuanxin Wang
Yuanxin Wang is an assistant professor at Minzu University of China. She received her PhD degree from School of New Media at Peking University and she was a visiting scholar in SONIC, Northwestern University. Her current research focus on the the human-machine communication, especially to explore the relationship between human and AI machine (AIGC). She draws upon computational methods to understand how HMC can affect intimate relationship.
Yunbo Mei
Yunbo Mei is a Ph.D. candidate studying sociolinguistic phenomenon at the National University of Singapore. Her research interest focuses on variation phenomena in Mandarin and English, in particular, sociolinguistic variation on social media, the sociophonetic construction of style, and English teachers’ stylistic variation. Her dissertation revolves around the agentive self-representations of Chinese English teachers through their English pronunciation.
Zhuoman Li
Zhuoman(Gemma) Li is a doctoral student at Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information. Her current research interest user trust in large language model-based AI, particularly in dialogue systems like ChatGPT. She has broad interests in computational methods and AI-related studies. Prior to beggining her Phd, she obtained her MA in Digital Humanities from King's College London.
Yi Ting Chen
Yi Ting Chen is a research assistant at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community in the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include computational communication, social media and news. She is particularly keen in exploring the impact of regulations on news production and consumption.South Florida
All Participants
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Dr. Albrecht’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study fear, violence, and data distortions. She is particularly interested in the nexus of fear and risk-taking behaviors, digital trace data, and the impact of law on decision-making. She frequently serves as a computational science expert for the defense on active legal cases about life without the opportunity of parole, felony murder, gang enhancements, and the Racial Justice Act. She is presently a Fellow with CJARS where she is conducting research on felony case processing speeds across the United States.
AJ Alvero
AJ Alvero is a computational social scientist at the University of Florida Department of Sociology, Criminology & Law and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Data Science & Computing at the University of Miami. His primary interests are in in language, race/ethnicity, culture, and education. His current research uses computational techniques to analyze college admissions essays and model the social patterns within them. AJ’s future research plans include investigations into machine translation and multilingualism, social media and counter hate speech, and California parole hearing transcripts. Prior to entering academia, AJ was a high school teacher in Miami, FL.
Kevin Lanning
Kevin Lanning is a Professor of Psychology and Data Science at the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. His research uses simple tools in natural language analysis and network analysis to understand complex social and psychological phenomena. In his spare time, he is training for his first marathon.
Candace Cunningham
Candace Cunningham is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University, where she teaches courses in U.S. History, African American History, and Public History. Her research is on the 20th century African American experience with a special emphasis on civil rights, education, gender, and the South. She is currently working on a manuscript about African American teachers who were in the long civil rights movement.
Ivan Garibay
Ivan Garibay is an Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, where he directs a number of programs including the UCF AI and Big Data Initiative, the MS in Data Analytics program, and the Complex Adaptive Systems lab. He uses computational tools to model complex socio-technical systems such as social media and artificial social intelligence, and is interested in a wide range of methods and problems in computational social science.
Jae Yeon Kim
Jae Yeon Kim is a Senior Quantitative Researcher at Code for America who helps team efforts to improve safety net experiences and outcomes. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley. His dissertation received the Best Dissertation Award in Urban and Local Politics from American Political Science Association. Since 2020, he has been involved in the Mapping Modern Agora Project at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which uses big data and machine learning to map the US civil society at scale. In 2022, he was an assistant professor of data science at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management in South Korea. Jae loves using data to solve public problems and strengthen civic engagement.
Mark Tunick
Mark Tunick teaches political theory, ethics, and constitutional law at FAU’s Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and previously taught at Stanford University. Many of his publications apply key figures in the history of political philosophy—Hegel, Kant, Locke, Mill—to topics of current importance such as privacy, punishment, property rights, and the right to bear arms. He is interested in the threat posed to reasonable expectations of privacy by surveillance in public places, the use of facial recognition technologies, and widespread collection of data for later use. Recently he developed an interdisciplinary undergraduate course on ethical issues raised by artificial intelligence such as liability issues of self-driving cars or drones, economic impacts of artificial intelligence, ethical concerns with predictive analytics using big data, and the ethical status of robots.
Ahmad Abdelnabi
Ahmad Abdelnabi is a doctoral student in Modeling and Simulation at University of Central Florida. His research interests include Human Centered Engineering, Agent-Based Modeling, Machine Learning, and Operations Research. He holds a BSc in Industrial Engineering from Yarmouk University and a MSc in Industrial Engineering from Jordan University of Science & Technology
Sina Abdidizaji
I am a PhD student in the Industrial Engineering and Management Systems department at the University of Central Florida. I work in the Complex Adaptive Systems laboratory which focuses on using computational algorithms to explore complex networks. Before my PhD, I worked as a system analyst of online trading platforms. As I majored in Financial Engineering for my master’s, I did my dissertation on identifying statistical arbitrage opportunities in stock markets.
Seun Ajoseh
Seun Ajoseh is a sociology doctoral student at the University of Florida. His research interests include social determinants of health, maternal health, and migration. He seeks to employ computational methods to understand health narratives on social media. Seun holds an MS and BS in sociology from Lagos State University.
Abhay Alaukik
Abhay Alaukik is a Social Psychology doctoral student at the University of Florida in the Attitudes & Political Cognition, and Cognition & Decision Modeling labs. He is broadly interested in political and moral psychology, with a focus on the spread polarization and extremism based on rational decision processes. He received his BA in Psychology from the University of Kansas and his MS in Psychology from the University of Florida. He is interested in using computational formal models to specify theories about complex social processes.
Debarshi Datta
Dr. Debarshi Datta is a Senior Research Fellow at the Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). He holds a doctoral degree in Experimental Psychology from the Behavioral Science Department at FAU. He has experience working as an AI-driven decision support system in different domains, including healthcare, business, insurance, and image processing. He possesses technical skills in the complete data science cycle: problem statement, data disputes, exploratory data analysis, modeling, evaluation, data visualization, and data storytelling. During his tenure as a Senior Research Fellow, he analyzed data from electronic medical records (EMRs), survey data, and various cross-sectional and retrospective datasets to understand disease prevalence. Moving forward, it focuses on utilizing data-driven domains, such as machine learning, on understanding a population-based prognosis for modeling disease progression.
Ansley Davis
Ansley Davis is a Ph.D. student in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of South Florida. She studies the interaction of cognition and language in learning patterns for school-aged children and adolescents. She is particularly interested in using eye-tracking methodology to study language processing.
Jonathan Doriscar
Jonathan Doriscar is a social psychology doctoral student at Northwestern University. He researches how people regulate threats to the moral self. Most of his work focuses on white people's defensiveness to conversations/information that suggests they might be racist. In addition to his doctorates he is pursuing a masters in statistics. This masters focuses on data science, as his he utilizes a variety of computational methodology in his work. Before joining, Northwestern he received his B.A. from Knox college in psychology with a minor in composition & rhetoric.
Coral Flanagan
Coral Flanagan is a doctoral student studying higher education policy at Vanderbilt University. Her work focuses on how state- and institution-level policies impact postsecondary access and success, particularly for multilingual students. She is interested in using natural language processing to study the role of text-based elements in undergraduate admissions. Prior to graduate school, Coral taught high school English in Providence, Rhode Island.Chad Forbes
Chad E. Forbes, Ph.D., is a social neuroscientist, associate professor of psychology, and the Associate Director and Director of Research Development and Diversity for the FAU Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute. Dr. Forbes has studied the consequences of bias on stigmatized individuals’ career pursuits and health for more than 20 years.
Madhwa Galgali
Madhwa Galgali is a doctoral student at University of Missouri. His mostly concerned with existential motivations underlying shared belief systems such as religion and conspiracy beliefs and his work has examined regulation of religious intuitions following mortality salience and of interpersonal isolation, moral intuitions and ideology underlying conspiratorial mindsets.
Dilara Hekimci-Adak
Dilara Hekimci-Adak is a part-time lecturer in political science at both Florida International University and the University of Miami. She teaches courses in American government, comparative politics, democratic erosion, populism, and political institutions. Dr. Hekimci-Adak recently earned her Ph.D. in political science at FIU. Her dissertation focused on the opposition strategies against populist exclusion in Turkey and Hungary. Her research interests include political parties, populism, opposition, and de-democratization in developing nations. She is currently conducting research on the use of social media as an alternative platform for opposition campaigns in hybrid regimes, where populists are in power, utilizing computational techniques.
Rafael Hurtado
Rafael Hurtado, formerly a naval officer in the Colombian Navy, obtained his MSc degree from the World Maritime University in Malmo, Sweden. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in Security Studies at the University of Central Florida. Rafael's research interest is to explore the connection between marine ecosystem services and social phenomena, employing agent-based and other numerical models as analytical tools.
Jinpeng Li
Jinpeng Li is an M.A. student in Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. His passion lies in integrating journalism, finance, and computational methods to create investigative stories. He specializes in data analysis and visuals, drawing from his experience as a former business journalist intern at Yicai Media and Caixin Media in China. Jinpeng is a recipient of the Walt Disney Fellowship in China.
Samantha McKinney (Gnall)
Samantha is a PhD student in Experimental Psychology at Florida Atlantic University. Her research interests include impression formation, stereotype transmission, and intergroup helping behaviors. Currently, she is investigating the link between helping orientations and help seeking in underrepresented groups in STEM as it relates to identity and performance.
Eli McKown-Dawson
Eli McKown-Dawson is an undergraduate student at Florida State University studying political science and statistics. He is also a Research Fellow with the LeRoy Collins Institute and a Contributor at YouGov. Eli's research focuses on survey methodology, U.S. voting behavior, and how election laws impact voters' confidence in election administration.
Soyoung Park
Dr. Soyoung Park is an Assistant Professor of the Hospitality and Tourism Management Program and an affiliate faculty member of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Initiative Center at Florida Atlantic University. With a Ph.D. in Tourism Management (graduate minor in Social Data Analytics) from the Pennsylvania State University and an M.S. in Economics from Korea University, she takes a computational social science approach to her teaching and research. Her research utilizes big data analytics to investigate social issues in tourism and hospitality, particularly those affecting marginalized populations.
Maria Cristina (MC) Ramos
Maria Cristina Ramos is an Assistant Teaching Faculty at Florida State University’s Interdisciplinary Social Science Program. She obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology from Duke University. Her research primarily focuses on exploring identity processes. She also uses network analysis to study diverse phenomena including social-ecological systems and health applications.
Jieun Shin
Jieun Shin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Production, Management, and Technology in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. She teaches and researches social media dynamics with a focus on the spread of misinformation and fact-checking.
Inna Smirnova
Inna Smirnova is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information, holding PhD in Management from the University of Vienna in Austria. Her research explores how managers can use organizational design choices (e.g., the reward structure, evaluation processes, or delegation of authority) to improve the supply and retention of innovators and, ultimately, organizational performance. She examines these topics in settings ranging from online communities, including GitHub and Stack Overflow, to academic science, using methods ranging from quantitative data analysis to survey-based studies to online and field experiments.
Jordan Thompson
Jordan Thompson is pursuing a PhD in Experimental Psychology at Florida Atlantic University. Her research focuses on political psychology, with an emphasis on affective polarization and prejudice. Jordan is interested in incorporating web scraping and "big data" into her research.
Ben Trautman
Ben Trautman is a PhD Candidate at Florida Atlantic University's School of Public Administration. He has an interest in linguistic processes and communicative practices found in public sector organizations. His current research compares organizational culture with popular theories looking for similarities with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools based on semiotic models. Prior to his studies at FAU, Ben has had a two-decade career with the U.S. Coast Guard.
Aaron Trujillo
Aaron Trujillo is a doctoral student at George Mason University. His work examines health campaigns. He wants to use big data and machine learning to understand immigrants’ navigation of the healthcare system, informatics and sentiment analysis of social media posts and information diffusion. His MA is in Communication from KSU.Geoffrey Wetherell
Geoffrey Wetherell is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University. His research examines how stereotypes about groups relate to public policy preferences and perceived value differences as a contributor to partisan conflict. He is also interested in the moral component of world views.
Boyuan Zhao
Boyuan Zhao is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Public Administration at Florida International University. His research interests focus on electronic governance and science and technology in government. His dissertation examines how information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled online crowdsourcing system facilitates public services and civic engagement.Syracuse
All Participants
Tokyo
All Participants
Hirokazu Shirado
Hirokazu Shirado is Assistant Professor of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his doctorate in Sociology at Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His reseach interests include social networks and computational social science. He is particularly committed to the experimental study of cooperative behaviors as they manifest through interactions between people located within social networks.
Atsushi Ueshima
Atsushi Ueshima is a postdoctoral fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and now working in the Human Nature Lab at Yale Sociology. His current research interests lie in collective decision-making and mean-making process in human groups. He combines online experiments and natural language processing to study how people generate, share, and maintain social norms and culture. He uses methods from psychology, sociology, and computational social science.
Takahiro Yabe
Takahiro Yabe is an urban scientist working as a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and Media Lab with Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland and Esteban Moro. Taka’s research focuses on computational social science and network science approaches to model the resilience of cities to disasters, policy interventions, and disruptive mobility technology. He obtained his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2021, and MS and BS from The University of Tokyo in 2017 and 2015, respectively. Taka has also worked as a Data Science Consultant for the World Bank, where he developed data science toolkits for disaster risk management and resilient urban transport. He will start as an Assistant Professor at New York University, Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) from January 2024.
Ryota Takano
Ryota Takano is a postdoctoral fellow (JSPS PD) at the University of Tokyo in Japan. His research areas include psychology, cognitive science, physiology, neuroscience, experimental social science, and computational social science. He is fundamentally interested in the mechanisms underlying how humans can handle various events that arise throughout time.
Yume Souma
Yume Souma is currently a master student at Hokkaido University in Japan and specializes in Social Psychology. She studies group decision making and consensus building through public deliberations, using group discussion experiments. She is interested in the conditions that multiple common goods are discussed and reflected in group consequences.
Yuxuan Du
To Usen is an MA student studying at the Journalism School of Waseda University in Japan. She is currently filming a documentary about Japanese technical interns and interested in data journalism.
Kento Ohara
Kento is an MPhil student reading comparative politics at the University of Oxford. He is primarily interested in legislatures in parliamentary democracies, mainly in the UK, Germany and Japan, and how their internal procedures change over time. His methodology involves both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Xinhe Li
I'm Li Xinhe, a third-year doctoral student at the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University. My research focuses on post-disaster policies following the Great East Japan Earthquake. By combining traditional policy research methods with state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, my aim is to gain deeper insights into policy formulation in areas affected by disasters. Through evidence-based decision-making, my ultimate goal is to translate my research into social value.
Yuxuan Cai
Yuxuan Cai is a master program student in architecture at the UC Berkeley.He has a diverse background in environmental design, landscape design, urban design, and architectural design, and has received awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects, IFLA, and WLA. His recent research focuses on urban data and exploring characteristics and different elements relationship of urban dynamic system using computer technology.
Zachary Pangan
Zac Pangan is a doctoral student majoring in Information Science at Nara Institute of Science and Technology. His current research interests are focused on the integration of social computing methodologies such as social network analysis and agent-based modeling on large language models and recommendation systems.
Yue Zhong
Yue Zhong is a Ph.D. candidate at Graduate School of Commerce, Waseda University. Her work examines how individuals grow into stars (people with high performance, status, visibility, and rich social capital) through sociological and economic lenses. From 2021 to 2022, Yue visited Yale University as a Fox International Fellow.
Yutaro Okano
I am a doctoral student whose major is politics. I also have been studied image data professing, biology, bioinformatics, and medical informatics.
Yuki Hotta
Assistant Professor of Economics at Doshisha University. He received his Doctor of Economics in March of this year. His research area is the theoretical study of business cycles, especially the analysis of endogenous oscillations from nonlinear dynamic modeling. Recently, he would like to conduct empirical analysis as well.
Robin Forsberg
Robin Forsberg is a Data Scientist and Engineer currently pursuing a PhD in responsible AI and machine learning at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Having lived and worked in Denmark, Ireland and the US, Robin has industry experience in social media and advertising, healthcare and financial services, working for Meta, Schibsted and Nordic Healthcare Group. Robin is trained in information technology and holds a Master of Science in Economics.
Guillermo Lezama
Guillermo Lezama is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born and raised in Uruguay, where he also completed his undergraduate studies at the Universidad de la República (Udelar). His research interests lie in the field of Political Economy, specifically in the different approaches that can be used to address Political Economy questions. He is particularly interested in the application of text-learning methods and applied microeconomics to study political behavior.
Moena Hashimoto
Moena Hashimoto is a Ph.D. student at Tokyo Institute of Technology. She is currently conducting research using social media analysis and online surveys to identify consumer interest in Food-Tech, especially meat alternatives. Her further research interests include social networks, polarisation and morals.
Bingyu Chen
Bingyu is a Ph.D. student at WKWSCI, Nanyang Technological University, as well as a Ph.D. scholar at AI Singapore. His research interests include human-computer interactions, media psychology, and information studies. He is now working on how technical features and individual differences influence public opinions about AI.
Nelson Cainghog
Nelson Cainghog is a PhD student at the Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University, Japan. He is also an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. He holds a Master of Arts in International Relations degree from the Australian National University.
Aoi Naito
Aoi Naito is a postdoctoral researcher (JSPS) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and is now working as a visiting researcher at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. With a background in social psychology and cognitive science, he has studied social influence and collective intelligence in humans. Currently, he tries to establish new research methods that utilize techniques from computational social science to expand the scope of his research interest through the use of big data.
Elijah Claggett
Elijah is a Ph.D. student in Societal Computing at Carnegie Mellon University. His research centers around applications of machine learning to improve prosocial behaviors in large-scale virtual experiments. His current projects include developing and rigorously testing conversational aids to encourage cooperation between people with opposing beliefs. Previously, Elijah worked as a visiting researcher at Kyushu University’s Center for Cybersecurity after graduating from University of Maryland, Baltimore County with a B.S. in Computer Science.UCLA
All Participants
Jennie Brand
Jennie E. Brand is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is Director of the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) and Co-Director of the Center for Social Statistics (CSS) at UCLA. She is Chair of the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), Chair-Elect of the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of ASA, and an elected Board Member of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28). She previously served on the councils of the ASA Methodology, Sociology of Education, and Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility sections. She was elected to the Sociological Research Association (SRA), an honor society for excellence in research, in 2019, and received the ASA Methodology Leo Goodman Mid-Career Award in 2016, and honorable mention for the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility William Julius Wilson Mid-Career Award in 2014. Prof. Brand is a member of the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was previously a member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey (GSS). She is Associate Editor of AAAS’s Science Advances, the open access extension of Science magazine, and serves on the editorial boards of Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, Sociological Methods and Research, Sociological Science, and Sociology Compass. She also previously served on the boards of American Sociological Review, Demography, and SAGE Research Methods. Prof. Brand studies social stratification and inequality, mobility, social demography, education, and methods for causal inference.
Nanum Jeon
Nanum Jeon is a Ph.D. student of Sociology and M.S. student of Statistics at UCLA. She is also a student affiliate of the California Center for Population Research. Nanum Jeon specializes in the areas of social stratification and gender inequality. Her research interests include (1) how disruptive events, such as job displacement, influence individuals, paying close attention to their labor market outcomes; (2) how social conditions, particularly cultural norms and the division of household labor, shape gender ideology and inequality; and (3) causal inference, quantitative and computational methods.
Tanvi Shinkre
Tanvi Shinkre is a Ph.D. student in Statistics at UCLA, and a student affiliate of the California Center for Population Research. Her main research interests are in causal inference and social statistics, with a focus on analyzing different types of bias that arise in causal effect estimation. She is also interested in applications of causal methods in public policy settings.
Christina Wilmot
Christina Wilmot is a Ph.D. student in sociology at UCLA. Previously, she studied computer science and worked as a software engineer at Google. She is interested in the varying intersections of technology and society, including using novel computational methods to analyze social information, studying online social behavior, and looking at the effects of the adoption of new technologies on a society. She also aims to make computational methods more accessible to social researchers from a variety of substantive and methodological fields.
Zack Almquist
Zack W. Almquist is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Adjunct Associate Professor of Statistics, and Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington. Before coming to UW in 2020, Prof. Almquist held positions as a Research Scientist at Facebook, Inc and as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Almquist is a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Methodology’s Leo Goodman Award. He is also a recipient of the NSF’s CAREER Award and the ARO’s Young Investigator Program Award. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Mathematical Sociology. His research centers on the development and application of mathematical, computational and statistical methodology to problems and theory of social networks, demography, homelessness, and environmental action and governance.
Onyebuchi A. Arah
Onyebuchi ("Onyi") Arah, MD, MSc, MPH, DSc, PhD, is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health, an Affiliated Professor in the Department of Statistics, and an Associated Dean of Graduate Education at the Division of Graduate Education, at UCLA. He has served as President-Elect and is now President of the Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER). An internationally renowned scholar, he is also Honorary Skou Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is the Chair of the Epidemiology Doctoral Qualifying Examination Committee. He has served as Director of the Center for Global and Immigrant Health and Associate Dean at the Fielding School of Public Health. He has received several research, teaching, and service awards, including the Council of Science Editors Award (hosted by Fogarty International, NIH) for outstanding contributions to global health policy and practice, the European Society for Philosophy, Medicine and Health Care’s First Prize for Young Scholars under age 35 who have made innovative contributions to the philosophy of medicine and health care, the Causality in Statistics Education Award from the American Statistical Association, an Honorary Skou Professorship in Epidemiology, Health Policy and Biostatistics from Aarhus University in Denmark, and the Academic Council Chairs Award for Mid-Career Leadership from the University of California Systemwide Academic Senate. In addition to serving on the editorial boards of epidemiology, public health, and interdisciplinary science journals, he regularly reviews manuscripts for biostatistics, epidemiology, general medicine, and public health journals. His research areas include causal inference, quantitative bias analysis, computational epidemiology, population health data science, and reproductive, pediatric, perinatal, occupational, clinical, and social epidemiology.
Alina Arseniev-Koehler
Alina Arseniev-Koehler (she/her) is a National Library of Medicine T15 Postdoctoral Trainee at the University of California, San Diego in the Division of Biomedical Informatics. She is also an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University (currently on leave for this postdoctoral training). Alina is a computational social scientist who studies culture and social categorization, and their intersections with health. She is specialized in natural language processing. Alina received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2022. During her PhD, she participated in SICSS-University of Washington and subsequently co-organized SICSS-Los Angeles.
Ryan Cho
Ryan is a Research Scientist in the Demography and Survey Science Division (DSS) at Meta Platforms. In this role, he conducts research on company sentiment to help inform and drive decisions made by executive leadership. Ryan received his PhD in Sociology from UCLA supervised under Prof. Jennie Brand and holds an AB in Political Science from Columbia University.Duncan Clark
Duncan currently a Data Engineer/Scientist at Atalan Tech. He works to build infrastructure and test models supporting machine learning based prediction of clinician burnout. Previously, he was employed at Meta, as a Research Data Scientist in the infrastructure group. Duncan was part of the mass layoffs at Meta in May 2023. Duncan received his PhD from the UCLA Statistics Department in June 2022 under the guidance of Prof. Mark Handcock. His PhD research pertained to network generation processes, Bayesian social network models and causal inference for social networks. In general he is interested in problems where applying an "off the shelf" method does not yield sensible results.
Jiale Han
Jiale Han is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics at UCLA. Previously, he received my B.S. in Mathematics from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2022. In the fall of 2021, he also attended Columbia University as an exchange student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. His research interests are focused on statistical machine learning theory. Currently, he is a member of the Lab for Statistics, Computing, Algorithms, Learning, and Economics (SCALE) at UCLA. Under the supervision of Prof. Xiaowu Dai, he is conducting research on machine learning and economics. Specifically, his current focus is on studying mechanism design in auctions.
Mark S. Handcock
Mark S. Handcock is Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics and Data Science. His research involves methodological development, and is based largely on motivation from questions in the social sciences, social epidemiology and environmetrics. Recent work focuses on statistical models for social networks, the development of statistical methodology for the collection and analysis of social network data, surveying of hard-to-sample populations, spatial processes and demography.
Jiayi Li
Jiayi Li is currently a 4-th year Ph.D. student in the department of statistics at UCLA. Prior to that, she did bachelors in mathematics at the University of Hong Kong and SUNY, Stony Brook. Jiayi's research is centered around statistical learning theory. In particular, she studies the training and optimization process of neural networks, seeking to understand how parametrization and algorithms influence the expressive power and generalization ability of neural networks.
Ian Lundberg
Ian Lundberg is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. His research develops statistical methods and applies those methods to questions about inequality, poverty, and mobility. After completing his PhD in sociology at Princeton University, Ian spent one year as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Ian enjoys hiking, surfing, and making oatmeal with blueberries.
Natasha Quadlin
Natasha Quadlin is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her research examines social inequality in the contemporary United States, with an emphasis on inequality in access and returns to education. She is particularly interested in using large-scale experiments and surveys to examine the mechanisms behind inequalities in schools, families, and labor markets. Other projects use experimental methods to examine public attitudes, and how these attitudes are linked with inequalities on account of gender, social class, race, and other characteristics.
Wenlu Xu
Wenlu Xu is currently a first year PhD student at the UCLA Department of Statistics. She receives her bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Shandong University. She is under the guidance of Dr. Xiaowu Dai. Her research interests include (1) recommender system; (2) causal inference; (3) machine learning in economics. She is currently a member of the Lab for Statistics, Computing, Algorithm, Learning, and Economics (SCALE).
Bernadette Blashill
Bernadette Blashill is a doctoral student in Sociology at Harvard University. Her research interests center on mental health inequities in the United States, with a focus on the intersection of law, race/ethnicity, and trauma. She is currently a research assistant at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Prior to pursuing graduate school, Bernadette worked in asylum and disability law in the Bay Area for three years, and after as a Policy & Research Analyst in educational equity for Catalyst California. She also contributed to two UC Berkeley studies investigating economic precarity, race, and the social impact of COVID-19 in California.
Taylor Brown
Taylor Brown is a PhD Student with the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests lay at the intersections of climate change and social policy using computational, comparative, and critical methods, and his current research examines the U.S. eco-social safety net and the impacts of climate change on the U.S. welfare state. Taylor is currently affiliated with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, the Social Science Data Laboratory and Discovery Hub, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry at UC Berkeley. Taylor holds an MSW from Washington University in St. Louis and has informed social and environmental policy through a number of advocacy, administrative, and consulting roles.
Yvonne Carrillo
Yvonne Carrillo is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She studies the housing and labor strategies of Latinx immigrants in California using in-depth interviews. She seeks to use computational methods to examine residential mobility differences by race/ethnicity, immigration status, and income.
Jon Benedik Bunquin
Jon Benedik Bunquin is a doctoral student in communication and media studies at the University of Oregon as a scholar of the Fulbright program. His research explores science and risk communication in digital media and its implications on people's understanding of and engagement with science and technology. Ben is affiliated with the UO Center for Science Communication Research and the University of Philippines Department of Communication Research.
Joshua Ferrer
Joshua Ferrer is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, with concentrations in American politics, methods, and racial and ethic politics. His research focuses on the link between electoral institutions and representation, partisanship, and participation, with a special emphasis on U.S. election administration and local and state election officials. His work has been published in The American Political Science Review, Representation, and Political Science.
Bing Han
Bing Han is a dual-title PhD in Sociology and Gerontology from Purdue University. She has also obtained two graduate certificates in Advanced Methodology from Purdue and in Applied Statistics. Her research focuses on how childhood experiences, gender, and social relationships influence health behaviors and outcomes throughout the life course.
Eleanor Hayes-Larson
Eleanor Hayes-Larson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at UCLA. Her research takes a lifecourse perspective to study psychosocial determinants of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in diverse populations, with an emphasis on groups historically underrepresented in research.
Tate Kihara
Tate Kihara is a JSPS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Tokyo. Social demographer by training, he studies international migration and immigrant integration in both historical and contemporary settings, in the regional contexts of Japan and the United States. He recently received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University.
Tracy Lam-Hine
Tracy Lam-Hine (he/him), DrPH, MBA, is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford in Epidemiology and Population Health. His research focuses on improving the measurement of structural racism, the health of Multiracial people in the United States, and the application of methods in social epidemiology to racial health inequities.
Gabriel León
Gabriel León is a PhD student in Clinical Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC) and a member of the Neuroendocrinology of Social Ties (NEST) Lab. He studies the dynamic, biopsychosocial processes by which acute and chronic stress is regulated within complex social systems (e.g., families). As a clinical scientist, Gabriel aims to leverage multimodal biobehavioral data streams to inform the development of personalized interventions for minoritized parents and children.
XunFei Li
XunFei("Shoon-Fay") Li is a Ph.D. candidate at the UC Irvine School of Education. Using large-scale data, she constructs measures to examine how institutional factors impact student pathways in higher education. She explores the influence of curriculum structure/policy on student outcomes and conducts interventions to investigate how group composition affects student behaviors.
Kristin Liao
Kristin Liao is a PhD student in Sociology and MS student in Statistics at UCLA. Being trained as a social demographer, her research focuses on the stratification and mobility of immigrants and other sociodemographic minorities in the American educational system, labor market and families. Kristen's ambition is to bridge the fields of stratification and immigration, incorporating stratification theories and methods into the study of immigrant integration and intergenerational mobility and highlighting the often overlooked role of immigration in classic status attainment models.
Yujia Liu
Yujia is a Ph.D. candidate in Education Policy at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on understanding social and educational inequality in schools and homes, with an emphasis on policies and programs that support teacher recruitment, development, and retention and their relationship to student learning environments.
Sisi Peng
Sisi Peng is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication at UCLA. Her research focuses on women’s health, and she is interested in applications of big data in understanding health issues. She holds an MPH in Health Policy & Management from SUNY Downstate and a BS in Communication from Cornell University.
Tyler Reny
Tyler is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Claremont Graduate University. He received his PhD in political science from UCLA and held a post-doctoral research fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. His work uses a variety of methods and datasets to investigate politically salient questions related to inequality.
Shiva Rouhani
Shiva Rouhani is a doctoral student in the UCLA Sociology department, and is associated with the California Center for Population Research. She is broadly interested in inequality and intergenerational mobility. Her dissertation explores the classed pathways of career lines. Shiva holds an MA in Sociology from UCLA and an MA in Applied Quantitative Research from NYU. Prior to beginning her PhD, Shiva worked as a research assistant for the Future of Families and Wellbeing Study.
Will Schupmann
Will is a PhD student in sociology at UCLA. His research examines the social forces shaping how healthcare professionals provide services, and how patients gain access. His most recent projects include a qualitative study investigating the social position ethics consultants hold within hospitals and a network analysis study investigating the diffusion of elective obstetric interventions. Prior to enrolling in graduate school, Will conducted empirical bioethics research at the National Institutes of Health.
Ke Shen
Ke Shen is a PhD student at Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and a Graduate Research Assistant with Information Sciences Institute, both are units of USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Ke started her PhD in 2021, advised by Dr. Mayank Kejriwal. Ke's research interest lies in the intersection between knowledge graph and natural language processing. Her current focus is language model and its application in commonsense reasoning, especially for multiple-choice question answering tasks.
Justin Sola
Justin Sola is a PhD candidate at UC Irvine’s Criminology, Law & Society program, with a Race and Justice emphasis. His research focuses on how the criminal justice system interacts with inequality and the origins of security-seeking behaviors like gun ownership. He is affiliated with the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, a member of the Irvine Laboratory for the Study of Space and Crime, and is a researcher on the Shadow Costs project - which tests the impact of rehabilitation classes and monetary sanctions.
Xiaoqian (Clare) Wan
Xiaoqian (Clare) Wan is a doctoral student in sociology at Brown University. Her research interests include economic sociology, race, and migration. Her dissertation examines the formation of global markets between China and Africa, using archival data and conducting interviews and participant observations with African diaspora in China. Before attending graduate school, she earned her M.A. degree from the University of Chicago and her B.A. from Zhejiang University in China. Her current computational social science project involves analyzing Chinese state newspaper texts to trace the evolution of market ideologies.
Hsiu-yu Yang
Hsiu-yu is a doctoral student in sociology at UCLA. She is affiliated with the California Center for Population Research (CCPR). Her research focuses on fertility, family dynamics, and reproductive health. Hsiu-yu obtained an MA in sociology and dual bachelor's degrees in journalism and sociology from National Chengchi University in Taiwan.
Xiaoya Zhang
Xiaoya Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences at the University of Florida. She obtained her PhD in human development from UC Davis. Her research concerns how environmental and personal factors shape children’s development using both traditional statistical approaches and computational methods.
Shibing Zhou
Shibing Zhou is a doctoral student in the UCLA Sociology department. Her research interests lie in the intersection of political sociology and science and technology studies. Methodologically, She is interested in text analysis. She holds a BS in Physics and Math from the University of Michigan and a MA in Sociology from the University of Chicago.2022
AMU/Law
All Participants
Lukasz Szoszkiewicz, PhD
Lukasz Szoszkiewicz is an Assistant Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University, Data Coordinator within the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty. A former participant of SICSS-Law 2021 (Maastricht University). His research interests include international protection of human rights and data science. Knows basics of R, Python and has advanced knowledge of SPSS.
Igor Gontarz
Igor Gontarz is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, trainee attorney-at-law, town hall associate. His scientific research focuses on the right to information and the automation of public administration. Member of research projects devoted to digitalisation of judiciary, algorithms, and criminal procedure.
Wojciech Biernacki
Wojciech Biernacki is an extramural PhD researcher and cooperator at the European Law Chair at the Faculty of Law and Administration at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and an attorney’s assistant. In his research, he focuses on intellectual property rights, mostly copyright, and issues related to data processing and data ownership. He is familiar with the basics of Python, PHP, and MySQL databases.
Jedrzej Wydra
Jedrzej Wydra is a PhD Student at the laboratory of criminalistics (of AMU), Master Student at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science (of AMU) majoring in theoretical mathematics. He holds a Master’s degree in Law, and a degree of Bachelor of Science (mathematics, speciality in data analysis). His research interests include the application of mathematics in legal reasoning (especially time of death estimation and deontic/normative logic). R-programmer (more than 3 years of experience) and data scientist. He also knows the basics of Python and Sage.
Tomasz Górecki
Tomasz Górecki is a professor at the Department of Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. His main research interests include methods of artificial intelligence, machine learning and time series analysis and their applications. He is the author of over 80 scientific papers and 3 books. R-programmer & Python (more than 15 years of experience) and data scientist.
Michał Kosiński
Michal Kosinski is an Associate Professor in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He studies humans in a digital environment using cutting-edge computational methods, AI and Big Data. With over 90 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals, he is among the top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers according to Clarivate. Professor Kosinski was behind the first press article warning against Cambridge Analytica. His research exposed the privacy risks that they have exploited and measured the efficiency of their methods. Recently, he has explored the problem of personality traits possible to predict from naturalistic facial images. During our event, the Professor will give a speech regarding the prediction of personality traits on the basis of social media data and its implications for proxy discrimination. (photo taken by Gorm K. Gaare)
Monika Leszczyńska
Monika Leszczyńska is Assistant Professor of Empirical Legal Research and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow the Maastricht University Faculty of Law, Netherlands. She received her PhD in law from University of Bonn (Germany). In her research, she studies how contract law interacts with individual contractual behavior. Specifically, she focuses on how people approach the making of a contract and its performance and what this behavior means for our understanding of contract law. To answer her research questions, she uses a variety of empirical methods such as behavioral experiments, vignette studies as well as systematic content analysis and computational methods.
Ineke Marshall
Professor Ineke Haen Marshall specializes in the study of comparative criminology, minorities and crime, self-report methodology, juvenile delinquency and criminal careers. Her current research focuses on cross-national surveys of juvenile delinquency. She is the chair of the Steering Committee of the International Self-Report Study of Delinquency (ISRD), an international collaborative study with participants from over 50 countries. She also serves on the editorial board of several international and national journals, and she is the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of International Criminology, the official publication of the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology.
Michal Ovádek
Michal Ovádek is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg. As part of the IUROPA project, he is currently conducting research on European judicial politics. Previously, he was a political advisor in the European Parliament and a research fellow at KU Leuven. Most of his research addresses different aspects of the interplay between law and politics, frequently in the context of the European Union. He maintains the eurlex R package for accessing data on European Union law.
David Reichel
Dr. David Reichel has been working for almost two decades with human rights related data in an international context. He works as a project manager at the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), based in Vienna, where he is responsible for managing research projects in relation to artificial intelligence and online content moderation. Until 2014, he worked in the research department of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). He has taught several courses on quantitative methods at Vienna University and has published widely on topics such as human rights, citizenship and migration statistics.
Malgorzata Jurczak
Malgorzata Jurczak is a master student at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science (of AMU) majoring in Statistics & Data Analysis. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (speciality in Data Analysis). She is interested in the area of machine learning, currently she is preparing her master’s thesis about Deep Stacking Networks. Professionally she is connected with actuary. Her skills include R programming (more than 3 years) as well as the basics of SQL.
Anna Holdynska
Anna Holdynska is a master student of Data Analysis and Data Processing at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She works for a company Unilever in Poznań where she prepares reports for technical department using Power BI Service and helps employees understand trends and deriving insights from company data. Her master’s thesis is about integration R language with different types of Business Intelligence tools. She is R-programmer, but she also knows basics of Python and SQL.
Mateusz Gruszczynski
Mateusz Gruszczynski holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (specialty in data analysis). He is a master student at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science (of AMU) majoring in Data Analysis and Data Processing. He is currently focusing on his master’s thesis about forecasting exchange rate risk using GARCH models. His interests includes programming and machine learning. He is R-programmer, but he is also familiar with the basics of SQL and Python.Aachen-Graz
All Participants
Jana Lasser
I am a PostDoc at David Garcia's Computational Social Science lab at the Graz University of Technology and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Drawing from my experience in nonlinear dynamical systems, my current research activity centres around emergent phenomena in complex social systems. I employ methods from machine learning, data science, sociophysics to understand a diverse range of topics, from emotion dynamics to the spread of diseases and misinformation in the field of Computational Social Science.https://janalasser.at
Ivan Smirnov
I am a computational social scientist working at RWTH Aachen University. After receiving a doctoral degree from HSE University in Moscow, I founded and led a computational social science research group there. We were using big data and machine learning to better understand human behavior and complex social phenomena. Our main focus was on inequality in education and the psychological well-being of students.https://ismirnov.eu
David Garcia
David holds computer science degrees from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain) and ETH Zurich (Switzerland). David did a PhD and Postdoc at ETH Zurich, working at the chair of systems design. His research focuses on computational social science, designing models and analysing human behaviour through digital traces. His main work revolves around the topics of emotions, polarization, inequality, and privacy, combining statistical analyses of large datasets of online interaction with computational models. His thesis “Modeling collective emotions in online communities” provides an example of how agent-based modeling can be used to construct an integrated approach to collective emotional phenomena in cyberspace. His postdoctoral research on opinion polarization and online privacy has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the ETH Risk Centre. https://dgarcia.eu/
Markus Strohmaier
Markus Strohmaier leads the Chair for Data Science in the economic and social sciences at University of Mannheim (Germany). He is also the Scientific Coordinator for Digital Behavioral Data at GESIS and an External Faculty Member at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Previously, he was a Post-Doc at the University of Toronto (Canada), an Assistant Professor at Graz University of Technology (Austria), a visiting scientist at (XEROX) Parc (USA), a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University (USA) and the founder and scientific director of the department for Computational Social Science at GESIS (Germany). He is interested in applying and developing computational techniques to research challenges on the intersection between computer science and the social sciences / humanities. http://markusstrohmaier.info/
Anna Di Natale
I am a PhD candidate at the Medical University of Vienna, Graz University of Technology and Complexity Science Hub. I am part of the Computational Social Science Lab Austria, led by David Garcia, where we study human behavior through digital traces. Previously, I have studied mathematics at the University of Bologna. I am mainly interested in approaching linguistic theories through data science and in the use of the insights gained in such process for the creation of novel NLP methods. In my PhD I study the linguistic idea of colexification from a computational point of view.
Max Pellert
Max Pellert has a background in Cognitive Science and Economics (University of Vienna, Austria and University of Ljubljana, Slovenia). He was a doctoral researcher affiliated to Complexity Science Hub Vienna and Medical University of Vienna in the WWTF research group 'Emotional Well-Being in the Digital Society' lead by David Garcia (University of Konstanz). He works now as Assistant Researcher at Sony CSL Rome. His research focuses on analyzing the digital traces of individual and collective emotional behavior and affective expression on social media. He is broadly interested in the social sciences and uses traditional and novel computational methods to study emotion dynamics, belief updating, collective emotions and other interesting phenomena.
Alina Arseniev-Koehler
Alina Arseniev-Koehler is a computational and cultural sociologist with substantive interests in language, health, and social categories. Alina strives to clarify core concepts and debates about cultural meaning in sociology, such as how humans process meanings in their cultural environment and how widely-shared meanings are encoded in language. Alina's empirical work focuses on cases where meaning is linked to stigma and inequality, such as the moralization of body weight and disease.
Roberta Sinatra
Roberta Sinatra is Associate Professor in Data Science and Network Science at ITU Copenhagen and holds visiting positions at ISI (Turin, Italy) and Complexity Science Hub (Vienna, Austria). Starting in October 2022, she will be Professor in Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen. She is the coordinator of the NEtwoRks, Data, and Society (NERDS) Research group and a co-lead at the AI pioneer centre in Copenhagen. Her research is at the forefront of network science, data science and computational social science. Currently, she spends particular attention on the analysis and modeling of dynamics that lead to the collective phenomenon of success, with focus on science and art, and on data-for-good applications. Roberta completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Physics at the University of Catania, Italy, and was first a James McDonnell postdoctoral fellow, then a research faculty at the Center for Complex Network Research of Northeastern University (Boston MA, USA). Her research has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, The Guardian, The Washington Post, among other major media outlets. Her research has been awarded the Complex Systems Society Junior prize, the DPG Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics, and a Villum Young Investigator grant.
Suhem Parack
Suhem Parack is a Staff Developer Advocate at Twitter. He helps students and academic researchers with their research using the Twitter API. Before joining Twitter, he was a Solutions Architect at Amazon.
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.
Bolaji Akorede
Bolaji Akorede is a master's degree student at the school of collective intelligence at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Morocco. He has a bachelor of technology in human physiology. He has conducted studies on aging, ulcer healing, and memory. He is a tech lover and has expertise in data science using python, R, SAS, etc. He is currently conducting research using the wisdom of crowds. He is making use of how we can use the wisdom of crowds and different cognitive tools present in humans to solve human problems. He has an interest in behavioral and social science and is interested in how drug abuse affects decision-making and other cognitive abilities. He is open to Ph.D. opportunities and is ready to relocate. You can contact him for further discussion.
Gülşah Akçakır
Gülşah Akçakır is a first-year PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research examines the dynamics of complex social systems using social networks and agent-based models. She holds an MS in industrial engineering from Boğaziçi University, and a BS in industrial engineering from Istanbul Technical University.
Yegor Albitskii
I am a MA of Sociology from the European University at St. Petersburg. Previously I got BA in History at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. The topic of the main research is polarization and relationship between lifestyles and regime preferences of the population in Russia.
Dovlat Aliyeva
I am pursuing a Master's in Computational Social Systems at RWTH Aachen. I have an academic background in Informatics and Computer Engineering from the Bauman Moscow State Technical University. Also, I am an experienced IT Project Manager with over two years of experience effectively managing IT projects related to Big Data, Data Processing, chatbots and websites. I know a lot of strange words and abbreviations: Agile, HDFS, MapReduce, Kafka, Data Lakehouse, Тarantool, Yarn, GIT and so on :)
Teodora Alorić
Teodora Alorić is a student at the Sociology Master programme at the University of Belgrade. Topic of her Master's paper concerns how different professional groups see the distribution of fairness in their country. Other topics that interest her include data feminism and use of data as a tool for society.
Mathias Angermaier
I am a student at the University Graz/Technical University Graz in Computational Social Systems with a background in Computer Science and Economics. My research interest focuses on the analysis of various political and economic systems and their influence on individual decision-making via Agent-Based Modelling. Further interest lies in the analysis of societal phenomena with the motivation to computationally calculate parts of their outcome while they still evolve.
Yasaman Asgari
Yasaman is an undergraduate student studying computer science. She will attend École Normale Superieure Lyon for her master's degree. Previously, she has studied temporal aspects of human behavior on social media and social networks using tools from network science, agent-based modeling, and machine learning.
Emil Bakkensen Johansen
Emil Bakkensen Johansen is a PhD student at Digital Democracy Centre, University of Southern Denmark. He holds a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Copenhagen. His academic interests are computational social science, information/knowledge networks, organizational ecosystems, social movements and digital communication technologies.
Christopher (ZHENZHI) CHU (ZHU)
Christopher Chu (Zhenzhi Zhu) received his Bachelor's degree in Economics at Sun Yat-sen University, China. Christopher is passionate about machine learning and green finance. He is the Gold Medalist of the National Geography Olympiad and published research on green finance and machine learning in high-level forums. Christopher aspires to deeply engage in machine learning and forge new paths for global green finance collaboration paths. Christopher is from China.
Andrea Cass
Andrea is a Masters student in Sociology & Social Research. Her research interests center around immigrants. She is currently studying exclusionary attitudes towards immigrants across Europe and is hoping to use computational methods for her thesis.
Theodore Charm
Theodore is a PhD candidate in Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His research uses regression, online experiments, and formal models to study social movements in East Asia. His work focuses on factors that motivate individuals to protest. He holds a MMath in Mathematics from the University of Oxford.
Muhsin Ciftci
Muhsin Ciftci is a PhD Student at Goethe University Frankfurt School of Economics, Finance and Management. His research interests include international finance, macroeconomics, transmission of the risks and further the application of machine learning to the field.
Íris Damião
Íris Damião is a research assistant in computational social science, working in the Social Physics and Complexity Lab (SPAC) at LIP. With a background in Biomedical Engineering and Neurosciences, she shifted her research focus and is currently addressing online disinformation's spreading and ways to tackle it, particularly outside of social media, where this problem tends to be overlooked. Her main interests are online privacy and tracking, the personalization of our online world, and its effects on individuals and society. She uses computational and ethical methods to understand how the information collected about us (by who and how extensively) can emphasize polarization and the spreading of disinformation.
Xinkai Du
Xinkai Du is a doctoral candidate at the Statistical Modeling in Psychology. He is interested in the network modeling of attitudes and morality. Recently, he grew a strong interests in methods development and is currently developing new network psychometrics techniques.
Martin Faschingbauer
In 2007 I graduated in Psychology (Master's degree) from Karl Franzens University in Graz. Since then I have been working in different work-fields like rehabilitation of people with mental impairments and school-psychology. Since March 2022 I am on a one-year educational leave, during which I am studying Computational Social Systems at TU Graz.
Annette Goldhausen
Annette Goldhausen is pursuing a Master's in Computational Social Systems at RWTH Aachen. She best fits the 'broadly conceived' category for both social scientists and data scientists with her longish career in international Human Resources and a background in Business Administration (International MBA Instituto de Empresa in Madrid 2006). A curious and interested party looking for additional ways to integrate learnings and research from CSS into practice.
Tri Hoang
Tri Hoang is a master student at Department of Economics, University of Bonn. His research interests include Computational Economics, Information Economics, Game Theory, and Optimal Control.
Elçin Istif Inci
Elçin Istif Inci obtained her PhD degree in Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul University as the Council of Higher Education Migration Studies and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey scholar. She was a 2020 junior visiting fellow at Maastricht University’s Centre for Citizenship, Migration and Development. Elçin also holds an Advanced MSc. in Digital Humanities from KU Leuven. Her research areas are international migration, citizenship, naturalization and sports, and computational techniques in social science research.
Shufan JIANG
Shufan Jiang is a doctoral student in Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Management at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne and at ISEP Paris. Her research interests include crowdsensing, social media, text mining for farmer-centric smart agriculture applications. Methodologically, she is very interested in using pretrained language models as explicit knowledge base for domain-specific textual data integration. Prior to beginning her PhD, Shufan worked as a chatbot developer at BNP Paribas Securities Services.
Evgeniya Korotchenko
Evgeniya Korotchenko is an independent professional with an academic background (a research psychologist, Ph.D.) working with market data, doing socio-cultural research and segmentation, and corporate ethnography for strategic decision making. During the Pandemic was released a collective whitepaper in which was discussed the research on self-confidence as a concept among females in different cultures. Evgeniya is passionate about data visualization and is attracted to getting a sense of the city through social data. Besides professional work, her lifelong interest is in the field of perception of art
Nick Lewis
Nick Lewis is a PhD student at the London School of Economics and Political Science examining the effects of digital technology on democratic deliberation. Combining computational methods in R and Python with field experiments and surveys, he focuses on political behaviour and its interaction with communication, psychology, polarisation, and nationalism.
Haokun Liu
Haokun is an MSc student in Geography at Uni Bern, Switzerland. His BSc is in Geographic Information Science and Finance from Southwest University, China. Haokun’s research concerns the interdisciplinary studies that apply methods about GIScience, Complex networks, and statistics to solve questions related to social data, sustainable development, and environmental issues.
Caio Mello
Caio is a Ph.D. student in Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, working for the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project CLEOPATRA, under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network. He holds a BA in Journalism and a MA in Communication, both from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil. His main research interests lie in the fields of digital methods, Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP), data visualisation, media studies, urban studies and digital activism. His project 'Nationalism, internationalism and sporting identity: the London and Rio Olympics' explores the media coverage of the Olympic legacies in a cross-cultural, cross-lingual and temporal perspective.
Muhammad Zahidul Islam Miaji
Miaji is an MPP student specialising in Global Governance & Political Economy from the Korea Development Institute (KDI) School of Public Policy & Management, South Korea. He completed his Bachelor of Social Science (BSS) in Sociology. He has two years of experience as a research assistant with several mixed methods research projects. He is a data enthusiast and interested in using social media data to discover various political movements and governance challenges. His interest areas are political sociology, quantitative methods, environmental politics, civic engagement, and CSS.
Michal Monselise
Michal Monselise is a PhD candidate at Drexel University studying data science and specializing in healthcare informatics. Her research spans multiple areas in healthcare including mental health and social media, pregnancy loss, vehicle safety, and prostate cancer. Primarily, she is interested in studying relationships and how networks influence behavior. Before going back to school for a PhD, she worked as a data scientist mainly in marketing.
Nikita Olefir
Nikita Olefir is a Political Science student in Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg. He holds a double degree of the Tor Vergata University in Rome. His research interests concern social movements and electoral behavior in the European Union.
Katharina Roetzer
Katharina is a member of the research group OCKO (“Organizing Cognition in Knowing Organizations”, University of Vienna). Academic background in sociology and cognitive science, further education in data science. Research interests: socially situated cognition in (adult) learning, educational technologies, integrating approaches from design, sociology, cognitive science, and data science.Sudhang Shankar
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at ION Trading and concurrently pursuing an MSc. in Computational Social Systems at the Technische Universität Graz.
Abdoul kafid TOKO KOUTOGUI
Abdoul kafid TOKO KOUTOGUI, is a student in the Master of Collective Intelligence at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. His research is in the field of digital transformation, cognitive sciences, and the use of computational social sciences for a better understanding of our society complex problems.
Alexandros Vlazakis
Alexandros Vlazakis is a PhD Candidate in Social Psychology Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His research interests focus on the fields of political and social psychology, mainly in minority influence, social change processes, social movements, media framing, political engagement and participation in civic society.
Zehui Yu
Zehui Yu is a PhD candidate in Computational Social Science at GESIS - Leibniz Institut für Sozialwissenschaften. Before that, she followed the Research Master's program in Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam and has a multidisciplinary background in Journalism and Human Resource Management. Current research focuses on online hate detection and computational methods in social science research.
MANAL ZARIK
Manal Zarik is a final year Master of science student in Collective intelligence at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. She is engaged in several research projects that tackle human behavior and computational sciences. She has a passion for deploying solutions to various complex problems that exist within groups of workers in organizations to achieve the ultimate goal of enhancing the future of humankind. Her research interests include digital transformation, social networks, and computational social sciences and methods in collective intelligence for the resolution of complex problems within organizational transformations and digitalization context.
Qingcheng Zeng
Qingcheng Zeng will start his PhD journey at the Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University in 2022 fall. His main research interests are NLP and social computing, especially on online hateful contents and discourse processing. Previously he got his BA from University of Manchester and Zhejiang University.
Federico Zimmerman
Federico Zimmerman is a PhD candidate at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Argentina. His current research focuses on the psychological underpinnings of affective polarization and political segregation. By performing behavioral experiments and computational models he is trying to understand the role of political extremes in the increasingly polarization.Atlanta
All Participants
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Dr. Albrecht’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study fear, violence, and data distortions. She is particularly interested in the nexus of fear and risk-taking behaviors, digital trace data, and the impact of law on decision-making. She frequently serves as a computational science expert for the defense on active legal cases about life without the opportunity of parole, felony murder, gang enhancements, and tribal jurisdiction.
Cynthia Searcy
Cynthia Searcy is Associate Dean of Academic Innovation and Strategy and Clinical Associate Professor of Public Management and Policy at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. She leads efforts in the college to elevate the use of data science in policymaking. Dr. Searcy builds curricula to develop skills in computational social science to harness these techniques for the public and nonprofit sectors.
Charlotte Alexander
Charlotte S. Alexander holds the Connie D. and Ken McDaniel WomenLead Chair as an Associate Professor of Law and Analytics at the Robinson College of Business and the College of Law at Georgia State University. She founded and directs the university’s Legal Analytics Lab, which brings together faculty from law, business, and data science to take on legal problems and questions using computational methods. Professor Alexander’s own scholarship focuses on civil litigation, and particularly employment litigation, using text mining, natural language processing, and machine learning to uncover patterns in case filing, progress, and resolution in both courts and private dispute resolution fora. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Omar Issac Asensio
Omar I. Asensio is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the intersection of big data and public policy, with applications to energy systems and consumer behavior, smart cities, and machine learning in transportation and electric mobility. He directs the Data Science and Policy Lab at Georgia Tech, where he collaborates with the private sector and city governments on data innovations in policy analysis and research evaluation. He is a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS), the Machine Learning Center, and the Strategic Energy Institute. Dr. Asensio’s research has been published in leading journals such as Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, and PNAS. His work uses statistical and computational tools to advance our understanding of how large-scale civic data and experiments can be used to increase participation in civic processes, while addressing resource conservation and environmental sustainability. He received a B.S. and M.S. from the University of Southern California, and his doctorate in Environmental Science & Engineering from the University of California Los Angeles.
Lauren F. Klein
Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Dr. Klein works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science, and early American literature, with a focus on issues of gender and race. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, modeled the invisible labor of women abolitionists, and recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs. In 2017, she was named one of the "rising stars in digital humanities" by Inside Higher Ed. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). Her current project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1786-1900, was recently funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant.
Jesse D. Lecy
Jesse Lecy is college professor of Data Science and Nonprofit Studies at the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions and an associate professor in the School of Community Resources and Development. He is currently on leave as a Data Scientist at the Urban Institute. His research examines the economics of the nonprofit sector with a focus on the life-cycles of charitable organizations, nonprofit entrepreneurship, and performance of social programs, as well as work on urban policies that promote strong communities. He has worked actively to integrate data science into public affairs and data-driven management practices in public and nonprofit organizations. He is an advocate of open science practices in scholarship and a co-founder of the Nonprofit Open Data Collective, a group of industry experts and data scientists that are committed to creating better data for the sector. He received his B.A. from the University of St. Thomas, an M.S. from Carnegie Melon, and his doctorate from Syracuse University.
Dror Walter
Dror Walter is an Assistant Professor of Communication in the College of Arts & Sciences at Georgia State University. His research is centered on the intersection between traditional media effects theories and novel computational social science methods. His research addresses the ways computational methods such as network analysis, unsupervised machine learning, and supervised machine learning can aid in the analysis of online politically relevant content. Specifically, his past and current work is often situated within the field of political communication with projects such as the conceptualization, measurement and impact of thematic diversity, strategies of political candidates on social media, impact of news framing on candidates’ electoral success, and inductive approaches to nation branding. Additionally, he also studies extremist forms of political discussion focusing, and political/health misinformation.
Lorenzo Almada
Lorenzo Almada is a clinical assistant professor of economics at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University (GSU). He received his PhD in Economics from GSU in 2014 and spent 3 years as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Columbia Population Research Center and Columbia University’s School of Social Work. Dr. Almada’s research interests focus primarily on policy-driven questions in the field of health economics centered around the effects of food assistance programs and social policies on diet-related outcomes.
Allyson Bachta
Allyson Bachta is a PhD candidate at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research lies at the intersection of intrastate political violence and education in post-conflict, polarized, and divided societies. She is specifically interested in examining how machine learning can support early conflict warning and prevention research.
Can Chen
Can Chen is an associate professor in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. His substantive research topic interests include infrastructure (transportation) finance and policy, disaster finance, and fiscal transparency. His methodological interests are causal research designs and emerging data sciences.
Ryan Ellis
Ryan Ellis is a PhD student in the School of Economics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include migration and borders, health, and development economics. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Ryan worked as an educator and financial counselor with immigrant-led non-profit organizations in Nashville, TN.
Amy Eremionkhale
Amy Eremionkhale is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Economics at Georgia State University. Her current research focuses on the impact of price, income, and externalities on incentives for health care providers and on patient behaviors. Additionally, she does research on the impact of pricing on antimicrobial use and antimicrobial resistance.
Ivan Flores Martinez
Ivan Flores Martinez is doctoral student in the Public Policy Program at UNC Charlotte. He studies the dynamics of criminal violence in Mexico and its consequences on citizens´ wellbeing. Additionally, he uses NLP and transformer models to build new datasets about phenomena that is hard to quantify.
Thomas Goldring
Thomas Goldring is the Director of Research at the Georgia Policy Labs. His research leverages research-practice partnerships with state agencies and school districts to build, support, and improve evidence-based decision-making that serves vulnerable populations in Georgia. He holds a PhD in public policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University.
Juan Gomez-Cruces
Juan S. Gómez Cruces is an ABD Ph.D. student at Georgia State University, in the Political Science program. Gómez Cruces was born and raised in Mexico City. In 2013, he moved to Denver, Colorado where he obtained an M.A. in Political Science for the University of Colorado, Denver. His research interests include populist rhetoric, social media communication, and polarization in Latin America.
Jennifer Hickey
Jennifer is pursuing a PhD of Political Science and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia. She is an attorney and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative at Emory Law. Jennifer is a former software engineer with an MS in Software Engineering.
Katherine Kountz
Katherine Kountz is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University and a presidential fellow in the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative (TCV). She uses semi-automated machine learning methods to analyze rhetorical environments and their influence on political polarization, radicalization, and how political extremists mobilize media for recruitment.
Yuehan (Jessie) Liu
Yuehan (Jessie) Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. Her dissertation focuses on people's motivations to give social support on social media. Before coming to the Ph.D. program, Jessie studied Journalism at Michigan State University and earned her bachelor's and master's degrees.
Eliza Oak
Eliza Oak is a second-year political science PhD student, also pursuing an MA in Statistics & Data Science, at Yale University. Her work broadly spans comparative politics, international political economy, and quantitative methods. Specifically, she's interested in questions related to the politics of blockchain and other emerging technologies, particularly in developing markets. She has used a variety of methods in her research, including applying machine learning techniques to collect and analyze text and image data, or analyzing original survey and experimental data. Prior to Yale, Eliza worked as a research associate at MIT’s Political Methodology Lab, and she holds a BA in political science from BYU.
Heather Offutt
Heather Offutt is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University Cognitive Sciences program, and an associate member of the Neuroscience Institute. Her research focus is memory and decision-making in the legal context. She consults with trial attorneys in eyewitness identification cases and serves as an expert witness.
Risa Palm
Risa Palm is a Professor of Urban Studies at Georgia State University and was provost from 2009-2019. Her Ph.D. is in geography, and she does research on science communication. She has three recent books on the impact of visual information about sea-level rise on the housing market in South Florida, and the use of various messages to affect vaccine hesitancy.
Hanna Schleihauf
Hanna Schleihauf is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Berkeley, California. She studies how people across the world transmit behaviors and beliefs between one another and hopes to investigate the influences of direct and indirect exchange on the spread of knowledge and beliefs within the online environment in the future.
Beth Stevens
Beth Stevens is a doctoral student at Georgia State University in the Cognitive Psychology department. Her research interests focus on the intersection of psychology and the law. Currently, her work applies non-conventional data techniques to analyzing how system and estimator variables influence eyewitness identification and legal decision-making.
Chris Thayer
Chris Thayer is a Data Scientist with the Georgia Policy Labs specializing in data preparation, sensitive data de-identification, and policy communication. Their research interests include administrative data linkage and housing programs. Chris holds master’s degrees in public policy and city & regional planning from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Lauren Williams
Lauren Williams is a MS candidate for Business Analytics at Mercer University. Her research areas of interest include natural language processing, process optimization & logistics. Previously, she was a research assistant at The University of Alabama, where she obtained her BS in marketing. The research was primarily operations based and focused on designing an equitable and effective food distribution system for Feeding America.
Ben Wills
Ben Curran Wills is a MS candidate in the School of History and Sociology under a Kranzberg Fellowship. He is interested in equity implications of telehealth and aligned business models, masculinities, financialization; and labor/future of work. Previously he was a (senior) project manager and research assistant at The Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in New York, where he worked on ethics of public deliberation over wild release of genetically modified organisms, the impacts of returning genetic test results about autism, and public opinion of human-animal chimera research, among other projects.
Burak Kazim Yilmaz
Burak is a PhD student in political science at Emory University. His research interests include civil wars, terrorism, and ethnic politics. Before starting the doctoral program at Emory, he earned a BA and an MA from Bilkent University in Turkey.
Wendy Zhou
Wendy Weile Zhou is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication at Georgia State University (GSU). Her research focuses on Chinese political discourse, digital journalism and transnational/diaspora media. She is also interested in applying mixed methods, e.g., qualitative discourse and quantitative sentiment/topic modeling/network analysis, for social media analysis. Before joining GSU, she served as the Chinese editor of Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) and research assistant at the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong, where she earned a master’s degree in Journalism.
Olga Churkina
Olga Churkina is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy jointly at Georgia State University and Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include experimental and quasi-experimental methods for education and labor market policies, microeconomics models of human behavior, and applications of big data. Her background is in Quantitative Economics and she is currently involved in the Smart Cities project as a member of the Data Science and Policy Lab at Georgia Tech. Furthermore, she is working on a prosocial behavior research at GSU ExCEN as well as a labor market field experiment for her dissertation.Bologna
All Participants
Filippo Andreatta
Filippo Andreatta teaches International Politics and Strategic Studies at the University of Bologna, where he is currently chair of the Department of Political and Social Science.
Giampiero Giacomello
Giampiero Giacomello is Associate Professor of Political Science. His research interests include strategic theory (mostly Clausewitz), cybersecurity and wargaming and simulation. He has extensively published on all of these topics.
Marco Albertini
Marco Albertini is Full Professor at the University of Bologna. His research interests focus on intergenerational relations; the consequences of separation and divorce; the comparative study of income inequality and social stratification; the consequences of childlessness; long-term care policies and ageing.
Matthew Loveless
Matthew Loveless is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He investigates how individuals make sense of politics in Europe, focusing on public opinion, media use, and perceptions.
Chiara Binelli
Chiara Binelli received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University College London. She is Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna and Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Research and Social Progress (cersp.org). Her early research focused on returns to schooling, quality of education, informal labor markets, social inequality, employment and earnings’ expectations. More recently, she has been working on using data science to address policy-relevant questions such as climate change. She has published in several international journals such as the Review of Economic Dynamics, Social Indicators Research, Economics of Education Review, and World Development.
Luca Pinto
Luca Pinto is an assistant professor (tenure track) in Political Science at the University of Bologna. He completed his PhD and his undergraduate studies at the University of Milan. His research interests include party competition, governments and legislative studies, with particular attention to methodological aspects of political research. He has published on these topics several contributions in books and international journals.
Oltion Preka
Oltion Preka is adjunct professor in Big Data for the Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He has been Research Associate at the UCD - University College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland), and has completed his PhD at the University of Bologna. He has been Consultant to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for various projects for several years. His interests focus on applying the most advanced techniques of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) (Natural Language Processing (NLP) in general and text analytics in particular) in the social sciences.
Elena Esposito
Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology at the University Bielefeld and the University of Bologna. She has published extensively on the theory of society, media theory, memory theory and the sociology of financial markets. Her current research on algorithmic prediction is supported by a five-year Advanced Grant from the European Research Council.
Andrea Knapp
Andrea Knapp is a PhD student in Political and Social Sciences (International Relations) at the University of Bologna with a background in Communication Sciences and IR. Her research interests focus on human rights protection in wars, the contribution of international organizations to the conflict management as well as the conditions of civilians during these crises. Her doctoral dissertation investigates motives for a presumed intervention selectivity into conflicts by the United Nations under the doctrine of the “Responsibility to Protect” (2005) in a mixed-methods research design.
Antonis Kalogeropoulos
Antonis Kalogeropoulos is an assistant professor of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. His current work looks at the rise of digital and distributed sources for news, such as social media and messaging applications, its implications for the information environment and the news media industry. His research interests further include news avoidance, inequalities in news use, learning from news and trust in the news media. He has published in journals such as New Media & Society, Public Opinion Quarterly, Digital Journalism, among others. In 2021 he was awarded the Kaid-Sanders award by the International Communication Association for the best paper published in the field of Political Communication during 2020.
Bo Wang
Bo Wang is a third-year PhD candidate in Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He studies the HEXACO personality traits (Honesty-Humility in particular) and their relations to work-related outcomes, including impostor phenomenon, organizational culture preference, and work motivation. Specifically, he (with his colleagues and supervisors) has validated a short Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale. As another part of his PhD project, he has developed and validated the Hazardous Organization Tool (HOT), as a tool to measure people’s willingness to work for hazardous organizations (that has been confirmed to be more attractive for people low rather than high in HEXACO Honesty-Humility) and the extent to which people perceive an organization as hazardous. He has also conducted a study examining the relations of peer- and self-report HEXACO personality traits to workplace advancement motive.
Chiara Boldrini
Chiara Boldrini is a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. Her main research interests include international security and warfare studies, foreign policy, and terrorism. Chiara’s PhD research focuses on the impact of hybrid warfare on cross-domain coercion in the contemporary era. Before starting the PhD, she obtained a MSc in International Security and Law at the University of Southern Denmark, and worked at the NATO Defense College, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, and the International Institute for Counterterrorism.
Gaetano Giancaspro
Gaetano Giancaspro is a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. His main interests include Political and Media Discourse Analysis, Critical Migration Studies and Sociolinguistics. His research project focuses on the textual and visual representation of migrants in Information (or Awareness) Campaigns targeting potential migrants, by means of computational tools and content analysis. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Foreign Languages, Cultures and Literature from “L’Orientale” University of Naples and a Master’s in English Applied Linguistics from ELTE University of Budapest.
Giulio Tani Raffaelli
Giulio Tani Raffaelli grew up and studied in Rome. He graduated in Physics of complex systems with a thesis investigating the dynamics of human creativity. During his PhD research at the Sapienza University of Rome, he studied the application of stochastic processes to Authorship Attribution. He is now working on the privacy concerns related to Authorship Attribution technologies and their potential impact on people.
Hannah Decker
Hannah Decker works as a research assistant and is PhD candidate at the chair of Social Psychology, Media and Communication at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She holds a master’s degree in Applied Cognitive and Media Sciences from the University Duisburg-Essen and joined the chair in 2021. Her research focuses on online political microtargeting (OPM) and the processes of political reasoning.
Shudipta Sharma
Shudipta Sharma is a doctoral student at the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. He is also an Assistant Professor (on study leave) at the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Chittagong. After completing BA and MSS degrees in Communication and Journalism at the University of Chittagong, he earned his MPhil in Government and Politics from Jahangirnagar University. He writes and presents on issues of new media and society, social movements, violent extremism, political communication, and critical communication studies.
Valeria Rainero
Valeria Rainero is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento. Her research focuses on the contemporary secularization debate and she is particularly interested in the role of researchers’ beliefs and analytical strategies in explaining outcome variability in the scientific controversy of religious change. She holds a double MA degree in Sociology from the University of Trento and the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg.
Yi (Melissa) Liu
Yi Liu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her main interests are in social emotions and prosocial behavior. In the current project, she mainly focuses on exploring the development and characteristics of interpersonal hate and tests the psychological functions (e.g., trust, stress) when people are under interpersonal hate through both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Saba Rebecca Brause
Saba Rebecca Brause is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Department of Communication and Media Research (IKMZ), University of Zurich. She holds an MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford, and a master's in communication from Sciences Po Paris. She previously worked as a research assistant at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, Germany. Her doctoral research focuses on imaginaries of artificial intelligence.
Rishabh Kausha
Rishabh Kaushal is Assistant Professor at Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women (IGDTUW). He applies data science and machine learning to solve problems in the domain of online social media. Currently he is working on problems of fake content, polarization, coordinated campaigns on the digital media platforms. He has completed his Ph.D. from IIIT, Delhi. During his PhD, he worked at the Precog Research Lab with Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru (PK) as his PhD advisor. His core PhD thesis focussed on the problem of identifying user accounts belonging to the same person across different social media platforms. His team won the best summer school project award at 3rd Summer School on Computational Social Science in 2019 organized by GESIS at Berlin, Germany. He enjoys working with undergraduate (B.Tech.) and postgraduate (M.S./M.Tech.) in numerous research projects solving problems in online social media using computational methods.
Aidar Zinnatullin
Aidar Zinnatullin is a PhD student in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He studies how political discussions evolve in the context of authoritarian politics. In the research project, Aidar uses quantitative text analysis techniques and causal inference identification strategies.
Riccardo Omenti
Riccardo Omenti is a first-year PhD student in Statistics at the University of Bologna. His research interests concern the study of quantitative methods for the social sciences as well as the implementation of statistical techniques that allow to turn the traces people leave on social media and on the internet into data suitable for demographic research. During his PhD, Riccardo will develop statistical techniques to study the evolution of fertility, mortality and migration in family networks using internet-based genealogies as part of the ERC project “Genes, genealogies and the evolution of demographic change and social inequality.
Giulio Cantone
Giulio Giacomo Cantone is a PhD. Student in Complex Systems at University of Catania. He also spent 8 month at Indiana University in the NaN [https://cnets.indiana.edu/groups/nan/people/] Research Group on Disinformation. His research background is in quantitative and simulation studies regarding commercial and political disinformation in online reviews (Review Bomb). His current interests are in Metascience and Sociology of Science, about disinformation and epistemic crises in scientific literature. In particular, his technical interests are in the sensitivity to data dredging in mainstream models of statistical regression.Covenant
All Participants
Emmanuel Olamijuwon
Emmanuel Olamijuwon is a CHERISH Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, UK. His research interest lies at the intersection of technology, sexuality, & population health in low-and-middle-income countries. His recent projects (SouthScieX, FaMeLynk, SHYad.NET) combine data from traditional data sources (such as the DHS), with digital traces (Facebook and Twitter) and Online surveys to illuminate the complexity of a number of social and health issues such as knowledge inequality, suicide ideation, as well as sexual and reproductive health.
Fidelia Dake
Fidelia Dake is a Senior Lecturer at the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS), University of Ghana. Her research focuses broadly on population health and international development. Her research interests include nutrition and physical activity, obesity and non-communicable diseases, socio-environmental determinants of health, urban health, health statistics, health-financing and population ageing. She is also interested in using methods in computational social science to study health and lifestyle behaviours including dietary practices, physical activity and travel behaviours.
Evans Osabuohien
Evans Osabuohien is a Professor of Economics and the Head of the Department of Economics & Development Studies at Covenant University, Nigeria. He a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation(AvH) and Swedish Institute. He coordinates the Research Linkage Programme between Witten/Herdecke University, Germany and Covenant University, Nigeria with funding from AvH. His primary research interest centres around development, institutional economics, and agricultural/land economics.
Obindah Gershon
Obindah Gershon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics and Development Studies at Covenant University. He is also the Chair at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR), Covenant University and a visiting professor at Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique, St. Jerome University, Cameroon and Emerald Energy Institute, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. His research interest covers energy, sustainable development, climate change and the environment.
Vissého Adjiwanou
Vissého Adjiwanou is a professor of demography and quantitative and computational methods in the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and adjunct professor at the Department of Demography (Université de Montréal). He directs the lab on quantitative and computational social science, aiming to use computational approaches and methods in population studies in sub-Saharan Africa. His primary research focuses on population issues in sub-Saharan Africa and Canada, including family dynamics, gender inequality and reproductive health, and integration of immigrants from SSA in Canada. His recent research focuses on understanding the African’s government response to Covid-19 in sub-Saharan Africa through the channel of Facebook data. He led the first SICSS in Africa in 2018 and 2019.
Diego Alburez-Gutierrez
Diego Alburez-Gutierrez (PhD in Demography, London School of Economics 2018) is Head of the Research Group “Kinship Inequalities” at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany. He specialises in inter-generational demography. His work integrates non-traditional data (e.g., from digital or computational sources) with established demographic sources (e.g. censuses and population registers).
Lateef Amusa
Lateef Amusa is a Statistician and Data Scientist with a PhD in Applied Statistics from the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. He is a faculty member in the Department of Statistics, University of Ilorin, and currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre for Applied Data Science at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Lateef is a tech enthusiast and is mainly interested in big data analytics and machine learning. He attended the second SICSS held at the Unversity of Capetown in 2019.
Laurie Baker
Laurie is a disease ecologist and marine biologist by training. She earned her BSc and MSc in marine biology at the University of St. Andrews and Dalhousie University (MSc) respectively, and her doctorate in epidemiology at the University of Glasgow. Laurie is a certified RStudio Instructor with a keen interest in programming, data science, and the use of novel data sources in research. The core of her research focuses on spatial and temporal patterns in human and biological systems including disease spread, animal movement, and fisheries management.
Édith Darin
Édith Darin has been mapping and estimating population for the WorldPop research group at the University of Southampton since 2018. She developed tailored advanced statistical models to tackle outdated or incomplete population count mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. She led collaborations with the Burkina Faso and the Mali Statistics offices to fill the gaps in their census (2020 and 2022) caused by security challenges. To ensure open knowledge transfer she developed a one-week course on Bayesian population model for census support in close partnership with UNFPA and the Brazilian Statistics Office. Her work has been featured in several peer-reviewed publications (Remote Sensing, Nature Communications, Gates Open Research) and relayed by different institutions (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GRID3, French Institute for Demography, UNFPA). Her background is in Statistics (Paris Graduate School of Economics, Statistics, and Finance), social sciences (École Normale Supérieure) and geographic systems (University of Southampton).
Robert Yao Djogbenou
Robert Djogbenou is a PhD candidate in Demography at the Université de Montréal. He has a Post Graduate Program in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. His research uses computational approaches to study immigrants’ socio-cultural integration in Canada. His other interests include reproductive health and family dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa. He is affiliated with the Lab on quantitative and computational social science at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Andrea Gilardi
Andrea Gilardi is a Research Fellow in Statistics at the University of Milano - Bicocca, Department of Economics, Management and Statistics. He works mainly on spatial and spatio-temporal models for data on street networks (e.g. car crashes and ambulance interventions). He is a passionate R user and author of two R packages that ease the management of spatial data in R: osmextract and sfnetworks.
Stephane Helleringer
Stéphane Helleringer is a demographer with interests in a) the development of new methods to measure demographic trends in countries with limited data, and b) measuring the impact of epidemics on population health and mortality. He has conducted several trials of innovative approaches to collecting demographic data (e.g., computer vision). He has also worked extensively on the impact of HIV/AIDS, Polio, and Ebola in several African countries. Helleringer is currently the principal investigator of a multi-country study on adolescent and adult mortality in Malawi, Uganda, Guinea-Bissau, and Bangladesh. He recently initiated a panel study of behavioral change during the COVID-19 pandemic in Malawi. He is a member of the expert group advising the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID-19 mortality assessment.
Biandri Joubert
Biandri is a researcher in the field of international trade law and has recently submitted her PhD thesis for marking. She will defend her thesis later in the year. She started her research with a purely legal (doctrinal) research background before transitioning to a mixed methodology PhD research project which included a content analysis using R programming. The difficulty in finding resources that were relatable to a legal academic background prompted the design of her Open Life Sciences (OLS) project. She is currently based in Johannesburg where she conducts both academic research and research/consulting in the private sector. When not writing/researching, she is most likely fly fishing or talking about fly fishing.
Sena Okuboyejo
Sena Okuboyejo holds a PhD in Management Information System; and is currently with the Nova Scotia Health Authority, Canada, on the One Person One Record (OPOR) project. Her research interest lies in the intersection of technology, population health, and health behaviour modification. She works with textual and unstructured data to understand perceptions and attitudes towards health issues.
Olufunke Oladipupo
Olufunke Oyejoke Oladipupo is a professor of Computer Science (Artificial intelligence and Data Management), Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State with reputable high-impact publications and 18 years university teaching experience. She holds B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Ilorin, Kwara State, M.Sc Computer Science from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria. Her research interests include Data mining, Machine Learning, Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), intelligent systems and Perceptual Computing in Education and Medical domains. She is professionally certified in IBM Predictive Analytic Modelling. She is a member of the Computer Professional Registration Council of Nigeria. She is also a member of research bodies such as Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), and SMCS TC on Soft Computing. She is a member of the Editorial Board of a number of local and international journals. She is happily married with Children.
Victor Osamor
Victor C. Osamor is a Full Professor of Computer Science, former HOD, Computer and Information Sciences and past Coordinator/ Director of Covenant University Center for Information Technology (CU CIT). His research interests revolve around bioinformatics, and artificial intelligence, among others. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and a Post-Doctoral fellowship as Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Warsaw. Among other several successful awards, he is currently the Applied Research Coordinator for World bank-6 million dollar funded Covenant Applied Information and Communication - African Center of Excellence (CApIC-ACE) research grant project. He is also a co-author of Fundamentals of Computer Applications, a textbook widely used by University students.
Suhem Parack
Suhem Parack is a Staff Developer Advocate at Twitter. He helps students and academic researchers with their research using the Twitter API. Before joining Twitter, he was a Solutions Architect at Amazon.
Tim Riffe
Tim Riffe is a demographer, with a research focus in data, formal methods, mortality, population health, data visualization, and open science. He is currently an Ikerbasque Research Fellow and Visiting Professor at the University of the Basque Country. In 2020 he founded the COVerAGE Database, a global demographic database of COVID-19 cases, deaths, tests, and vaccinations, which has underpinned efforts to monitor the pandemic at the WHO, UN-DESA, UNICEF, and in the global health literature. He also serve on the WHO / UN-DESA Technical Advisory Group for COVID-19 Excess Mortality, where his primary contribution aims to characterize age patterns of COVID-19 direct mortality and all-cause excess mortality for 2020, based on combining various global datasets. He regularly teach short workshops on R programming, demography, and data visualization in programs such as BSSD, EDSD, PHDS, and others.
Lebogang Ramafoko
Lebogang is currently the Executive Director of Oxfam South Africa. Lebogang is an outspoken feminist thinker and strategist, a sought-after speaker, facilitator, and trainer who is passionate about social justice particularly for young women and girls. Lebogang combines her own life experience as a black woman who grew up in Apartheid South Africa, thrust into activism at an early age and the skills she acquired through her training to speak out against injustice wherever she goes. She is one of the prominent media commentators and advocates on various social issues facing women in South Africa.
Maëlle Salmon
Maëlle Salmon is a R(esearch) Software Engineer, part-time with rOpenSci where she, among other things, maintains the guide rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review . She also created the R-hub blog and co-wrote the online book HTTP testing in R with Scott Chamberlain. She regularly contracts for various organizations, including research institutions, for developing or strengthening R packages. Maëlle has a PhD in Statistics. She lives in Nancy, France. Maëlle on GitHub, Twitter, Website
Yudhvir Seetharam
Yudhvir Seetharam is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Economics and Finance; and the Head of Analytics, Insights and Research for FNB Business. He holds a Ph.D from the University of the Witwatersrand in the field of behavioural finance and is extensively involved in both academia and practice, as evidenced by regular media engagements, memberships in societies and awards.
Yudhvir's area of focus is on the application of empirical (analytical) techniques to finance (broadly defined as both investments and corporate finance), with an emphasis on incorporating investor psychology/biases into these techniques. Interest in this field is relatively scarce in South Africa, but there has been growth over the past decade. While this area may seem broad, the underlying theme is on applying inter-disciplinary approaches in solving traditional problems in the financial field. As such, there are neighbouring applications in the field of Financial Technology (such as “big data” and “data science”) and in risk management.
He has published extensively in local and international journals, such as the Investment Analysts Journal, International Journal of Emerging Markets, Eurasian Business Review, inter alia. Yudhvir is an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Business Analytics; an Editor for Cogent Economics and Finance and Springer Nature: Business and Economics. He is also the Managing Editor for the South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences.
Anelda van der Walt
Anelda has a background in Bioinformatics but transitioned into transdisciplinary work over the last few years. In 2015 she founded a South African-based consultancy, Talarify, to support digital and computational capacity and community development within research settings in Africa. Her work focuses on open science, open educational resources, reproducible research, and communities of practice.
Precious Adebola
Precious holds a Master of Public Health degree and is currently a Master's student in Bioinformatics at Covenant University. Her research interest lies at the nexus of technology and computation with biological and health data for improved health outcomes. Her current research focuses on the development of computational tools for the analysis of genomic data.
Julius Ajayi
Julius Ajayi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Transport Management at the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Nigeria. He is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR), Nigeria. His research interests include Transport Equity, Policy Development and Sustainability. His Doctoral thesis focuses on the disparities in access to public transportation among population groups in a sub-Sahara African urban centre. Between 2016 and 2019, Julius led data-driven education advocacy across three geopolitical zones in Nigeria.
Joshua Akinyemi
Joshua Akinyemi is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology and Medical Statistics, College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His expertise spans statistical demography and applied biostatistics with additional interests in the burgeoning discipline of data science and allied topics such as statistical and machine learning. He has extensive experience in advanced statistical modelling and multi-country analysis of complex nationally-representative household surveys.
Christiana Alex-Ojei
Christiana Alex-Ojei is a social demographer and statistician with interests in adolescent, maternal, child and family health. She is also interested in mixed methods and interdisciplinary research.
Joseph David
Joseph David is a Masters student in Economics at the Umaru Musa Yar’adua University, Katsina. His primary research interests include poverty and inequality, public finance, corruption, development economics and money laundering. Joseph’s current research focuses on the response of the level of poverty to different thresholds of debt stocks and debt burden in several African countries.
Michael Ehinmowo
Michael Ehinmowo is a master's student in the department of psychology at the University of Ibadan. His current research interest is at the nexus of mental health, collective behaviour, bioethics, and social policy. He is interested in employing emerging tools of computation in science.
Victoria Okafor
Victoria Okafor is a PhD candidate at Covenant University. Her research interest includes financial/monetary economics and development economics. She is also a research associate at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research. Her research involves understanding the dynamics of income distribution toward the sustainable development of Africa.
Oluwaseyi Olopade
Oluwaseyi Olopade is an early career researcher and a recent graduate of Financial Economics at the University of Johannesburg. Oluwaseyi’s current research aims to address the impact of out-of-pocket health expenditure and the state of well-being in Nigerian households. She holds an Honours Bachelor’s degree in Econometrics from the University of Johannesburg, and an undergraduate degree from Ajayi Crowther University.
Samuel Olumide
Samuel Olumide is a master student and research assistant at the Department of Agricultural Economics at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology. Samuel is joining Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the Fall of 2022 to continue his masters studies.
Marvellous Ngundu
Marvellous Ngundu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in economics at the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN) in South Africa, a Research Assistant at the UKZN's Macroeconomics Research Unit (MRU), and a Research Fellow at Covenant University's Center for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR) in Nigeria. His primary research interests include China-Africa economic engagement, and international and development economics.
Mary Muyonga
Mary Muyonga is a PhD candidate at the Population Institute at the Department of Geography, Population and Environmental Studies at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. Prior to her doctoral studies, Mary obtained a Master's degree from the same Institute. Her research interests are migration and urbanisation and their interplay with development, and more recently, the use of alternative, emergent research methods in social science research.
Augustine Ogbaji Otobi
Augustine Ogbaji Otobi is an avid researcher who loves to use computational tools to investigate the WHY, WHEN, WHERE and HOW of events, patterns and systems represented by numbers. He bagged his first degree in Computer Science from the University of Calabar, Nigeria. He is a Master's Student, and his research area is Data Science/Machine Learning. His research spans climate-related issues, fraud and risk prediction in insurance, expert systems and distributed databases. He is looking forward to research collaborations to solve real-world problems and make human existence on earth hitch-free.
Ridwan Shittu
Ridwan Shittu is a Master’s student in Medical Demography at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the founder of IgnitePeak Advanced Professional Consult. He is interested in exploring how big data and computational demographic techniques can be used to advance the study of behavioural and health inequality. His thesis work explores the pattern and rural-urban differential of maternal health care practice and childhood respiratory infection symptoms. Ridwan holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Demography and Social Statistics from Federal University Oye-Ekiti, Nigeria.
Damian Kalu Ude
Ude Damian Kalu is a lecturer in the Department of Economics, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike, Nigeria. He holds a PhD from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He has a research interest in Econometrics, Finance and Public Sector Economics. He is a member of the Econometric Society and also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR), Covenant University.
Oluwatosin Deborah Edafe
Oluwatosin Deborah Edafe is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Economics and Development Studies at Covenant University, Nigeria. She is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR), Covenant University. Her primary research interest involves Development Economics, Land and Agricultural Economics. She uses mixed methods analysis (quantitative and qualitative techniques) to study the gendered impact of land investments on household livelihood and food security. She has over a decade of work experience with the Ondo State Ministry of Education, supervising education activities.
Theresa Okediya
Theresa Okediya is a Technical Tutor in different I.T institutions. She is a Masters degree holder in computer Science and her research areas include, data science and machine learning. She enjoys using data science skills to solve problem in different sectors but most especially the health sector. She is a passionate teacher. Her driving objective as a technical Tutor is that 'Technology is the new universal language and every one both young and old should learn how to speak this language'
Delhi
All Participants
Sharon Barnhardt
Sharon Barnhardt is the Director – Research at the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change at Ashoka University. She is an applied development economist and behavioural scientist who uses experiments to study policy-relevant topics in India. Her behavioural research focuses on sanitation and malnutrition. Sharon is also active in Executive Education for the policy sector, having taught Behavioural Economics at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration and program evaluation with J-PAL South Asia and CLEAR. She is a Faculty Affiliate at the Jameel Abdul Latif Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Bonn). Her experience includes positions at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (Nuffield College’s lab in India), the Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad, IFMR Business School (at Krea University), the World Bank, and J.P. Morgan. Sharon’s academic record comprises a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.P.A. from Princeton University, and a Bachelor's from NYU. Sharon earned her PhD from Harvard University and also holds an MPA from Princeton University.
Rishemjit Kaur
Dr. Rishemjit Kaur is working as a Principal Scientist at CSIR-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, India and as an Associate Professor at the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research. Her research interests include modeling and prediction of collective behaviours using machine learning, and NLP and leveraging it for solving engineering problems. Her work involves tailoring NLP techniques to a variety of languages, integrating a different sources of information, etc. She is currently working on developing NLP techniques for linking local cuisines and nutrition databases. She holds a PhD degree on collective intelligence and optimisation techniques. She was also a Japanese Govt. MEXT scholar at Nagoya University, Japan.
Pavan Mamidi
Pavan Mamidi is the Director of the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change (CSBC), Ashoka University. Previously, he was the director (founding) of the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) Nuffield – FLAME University. Pavan is interested in investigating social norms, trust, prosocial behaviour and behavioural ethics using lab and lab-in-the-field experiments. Pavan has also been a faculty member at IIM-Ahmedabad in the Business Policy area. He has taught courses on empirical research methods in the doctoral program along with law and negotiations, and dispute resolution in several public policy programs for the Government. He has also taught in policy programs for senior government officers, including the IPS at the National Police Academy and IAS at LBSNAA in Mussoorie. He has held positions at IIM Bangalore, MIT (Sloan), the University of Michigan Law School, and Harvard Law School where he is an affiliated faculty at the Center on the Legal Profession. Pavan has an LL.M. from Harvard Law School and a Doctorate (D.Phil) in Sociology from the University of Oxford.
Ritesh Kumar
Ritesh Kumar is Principal Scientist with CSIR-Central Scientific Instrumentation Organisation, Chandigarh, India . He is also a Royal Society-Newton Fellow at University of Hertfordshire, UK. He has worked extensively on crowd-sourcing and deriving meaningful conclusions using the data gathered from noisy and varied sources. His prime research interests and projects revolve around three categories- Crowd-sourcing the smell loss using smell-kits and home tests, Understanding Chemical space of odorants using machine learning and Designing optimisation algorithms for Odor Source Localisation. He has published more than 35 papers in reputed journals like Science, Nature Scientific Reports, PloS One, Nature communications and, IEEE transaction on Cybernetics. He has worked on various govt and industry sponsored projects and consulted some exciting startups like Rymo Technologies, FoodPairing NV etc.. He has also worked with companies like TATA consumer Products Ltd. in order to provide scientific consultancies in the area of modelling taste and smell.
Maneet Singh
Maneet Singh is a PhD Scholar in Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India. He has more than six years of teaching experience in reputed universities/institutes. His research interests include opinion mining, social network analysis, computational social science and machine learning. His PhD thesis focuses on understanding different aspects of public opinion and developing models of opinion dynamics to study various social phenomena.
Tirtha Patel
Tirtha Patel is currently a MPA candidate at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Columbia University, concentrating in Economics and Political Development, with a dual specialization in Data Analytics and Quantitative Analysis and International Organizations/ The UN System. Prior to joining SIPA, she worked as an Experimental Research Specialist at the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change (CSBC), Ashoka University in India. She has also previously worked at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS), Nuffield College - FLAME University and The Graduate Institute of Geneva. Tirtha holds a B.Sc. with double majors in Applied Mathematics and Environmental Studies from FLAME University.
Sudarshan Iyengar
Dr. Sudarshan Iyengar, Associate Professor at the CSE at IIT Ropar has a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). An exemplary teacher who has delivered over 350 popular science talks to students of high school and advanced graduate programmes. Dr. Sudarshan has offered more than 100 hours of online lectures with novel teaching methodologies that have reached lakhs of Students. His research interests include Data Sciences, Social Computing, Social Networks, Collective Intelligence, Crowdsourced Technologies and Secure Computation.
Kazutoshi Sasahara
Kazutoshi Sasahara received his Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo in 2005. From 2012 to 2020, he was an Assistant Professor in Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University. Since 2020, he is an Associate Professor in the School of Environment and Society, Tokyo Institute of Technology. His research interests are in computational social science and social innovation.
Valentina Parma
Valentina Parma is an Assistant Director at Monell Chemical Senses Center. She is a psychologist interested in human olfaction across the lifespan. Both her basic and translational work aims at finding ways to use smell as an opportunity to improve health. She uses behavioral and physiological methods to understand how odors influence typical and atypical behavior. Recently, she has been chairing the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research (GCCR) to understand how smell, taste and chemesthesis are affected by COVID-19 and other respiratory disorders.
Shagata Mukherjee
Shagata Mukherjee is the Lead - Behavioural Insights Unit of India, NITI Aayog and a Deputy Director at the Centre for Social and Behavioural Change at Ashoka University. Prior to this position, Shagata was an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics. He was also a Visiting Fellow at the Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Mumbai and an Affiliated Faculty at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) Nuffield -FLAME. He is the recipient of the Vernon L. Smith Young Talent Award in Experimental Finance for his research on gender and microfinance and is a co-founder of the Mumbai Behavioural Network. Shagata holds a PhD in Behavioural and Experimental Economics from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, a Masters degree in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a B.Sc. in Economics from Presidency College.
Nicolo Cavalli
Nicolo Cavalli is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences. He teaches Applications for Management and Computational Social Science. He holds an MSc in Economic and Social Sciences from Bocconi University and a BA in Political Sciences from the University of Bologna. During this time, He was a visiting student at Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics. He conducted his doctoral studies in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. His research area includes social and political attitudes, intergroup attitudes, technological and demographic change, and research methods for the digital society.
Subhashis Banerjee
Subhashis Banerjee is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, where he currently holds the Ministry of Urban Development Chair. Previously he has held the Microsoft and Naren Gupta chair professorships at IIT Delhi. His primary areas of research are computer vision and machine learning, with a special emphasis on geometric algorithms. He has also worked extensively on design of computing and networking infrastructure and IT services. Recently he has started examining policy issues in digital identity, data and privacy protection, and fairness and reliability of machine learning algorithms.
Narges Hajimoladarvish
Narges Hajimoladarvish is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change. Narges is a trained economist with an interest in Behavioural and Experimental Economics. She runs experiments to investigate decision-making under risk and uncertainty and has expertise in eliciting risk and time preferences. Narges has a PhD in Economics from the University of Leicester. She has 11 years of experience in teaching a variety of courses at the University of Leicester and Alzahra University. Prior to Joining CSBC, Narges was an Assistant Professor at Alzahra University where she wrote an introductory book about Behavioural Economics in Farsi and established a laboratory for Experimental Economics. She has also contributed to Financial Tribune, an Iranian English Economic Daily.
James A. Evans
James Evans is Director of Knowledge Lab, Professor of Sociology, Faculty Director of the Computational Social Science program, and member of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. I am also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement (and dispute), accumulation of certainty (and doubt), and the texture–novelty, ambiguity, topology–of human understanding. He is especially interested in innovation–how new ideas and technologies emerge–and the role that social and technical institutions (e.g., the Internet, markets, collaborations) play in collective cognition and discovery. Much of his work has focused on areas of modern science and technology, but he is also interested in other domains of knowledge–news, law, religion, gossip, hunches and historical modes of thinking and knowing.
Madhavi Devaraj
Dr. Madhavi is the Deputy Director, Data Science at Uttar Pradesh Technical Support Unit (UP TSU), where she provides technical and strategic assistance to Data Science initiatives to support the overarching goal of UP TSU. Her role focuses on implementing data-driven Artificial Intelligence that can catalyze interventions aimed at reducing neonatal mortality and improve women and child health across the state. Madhavi has eight years of experience as an AI specialist and fifteen years of experience as an educator, working in reputed international universities. Her areas of expertise include data mining, predictive analytics, machine learning & deep learning. Prior to joining IHAT, she held the position of Senior Data Scientist at Accenture, Manila, Philippines, followed by Associate Professor at Asian Institute of Management, Manila, Philippines. Her industry experience has helped her develop the ability to handle Big Data. She enjoys knowledge sharing and has published 29 publications related to data science techniques in reputed journals. Her research interests lie in the fields of BlockChain, Cancer Classification, Predictive Analytics & Model Manager. Madhavi has earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow. She also holds other in-demand career certifications, R Programming for Data Science & Implementing Predictive Analytics with Spark in Azure HDInsight from Microsoft.
Sneha Shashidhara
Sneha Shashidhara is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change, with a teaching position at the Psychology Department of Ashoka University. She is a cognitive neuroscientist by training working as a researcher studying mechanisms of the brain underlying higher-order cognition and decision making, with an interest in the interaction between cognition and social psychology. A Gates-Cambridge scholar, she did her PhD, studying the multiple demand network in the brain, at the University of Cambridge. This network is active in different demands, be it language, memory, math etc and handles many types of task difficulty. Prior to that, she did her Masters in Neuroscience at International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS), Goettingen, Germany.
Kapil Gupta
Kapil is a Decision Sciences PhD student at IIM Bangalore. He graduated with a master's degree in mathematics from IIT Delhi and a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from IIITDM Chennai. Kapil worked as a Senior Data Analyst at Indxx Capital Management in Gurgaon before joining IIM Bangalore. His research interests include housing market dynamics analysis, spatio-temporal modeling, sports analytics, and the use of variable selection methods.
Shikhar Shiromani
Shikhar Shiromani is a Software Engineer II at NVIDIA Graphics. His work majorly involves working on ADAS software and building end-to-end solutions for the autonomous driving industry. He also spends his time researching Deep Learning solutions for problems in the social science sector. Before working at NVIDIA, he earned a B.E.(Honors) in Electrical & Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani.
Manish Ratna
Manish is an Associate at Clinton Health Access Initiative, where he collaborates with governments to strengthen the public health system with the aim to deliver better care to the beneficiaries. Before CHAI, he was with the Tata Strategic Management Group advising large industrial clients. He's a graduate from IIT Bombay.
Prashansa Srivastava
Prashansa Srivastava is an incoming student at Harvard Kennedy School for the Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID). Prior to this, she worked as a Senior Research Associate at The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL South Asia) on a project studying the impact of cash transfers on the health and nutrition of women and children in the state of Jharkhand as a part of the Payments and Governance Research Program. She is passionate about social protection programs, gender and nutrition and bridging the gap in research, policy, and practice.
Shahid Shafi
Shahid Shafi is a doctoral student in the Computer Science department at Indian Institute of Technology Ropar and is associated with Social Computing and Collective Intelligence Group. He has broad interests in Community detection, information dissemination between overlapping communities and spammer detection in social networks. Previously, he worked on finding spread blockers in social networks and their applications in various domains at University of Kashmir.
Rohit Sharma
Rohit Sharma is currently State Legal Head for MRC Initiative at Jansahas and law graduate from WBNUJS, Kolkata. His interest lies in usage of data while analysing social issues. He is a conceptualizer of NUJS Diversity Report 2019, and MP Migrant Report, 2022 and Report on the Difficulties Faced by the Visually Impaired Students in law schools.
Akash Pal
Akash is a Ph.D. Economics student at IIT Roorkee. Consumer Demand, Poverty, and Inequality are three of my research interests. He formerly worked at the Delhi-based Institute for Studies in Industrial Development.
Trisha Chaudhuri
Trisha Chaudhuri is a Program Officer/Data Scientist at Population Council, India. She has completed her Masters in Economics from University of Calcutta. Prior to working at the Council, Trisha was as an Assistant Manager at Genpact where she was introduced to data science and had developed predictive models for both US and UK insurance carriers. At the Council, Trisha has been actively working on handling and analyzing health data, both survey and administrative. She enjoys working with data, in finding innovative insights and in creating dashboards for visualization.
Bhavye Jain
Bhavye is an undergraduate student in Computer Science and Mathematics at Ashoka University. His current interdisciplinary research is focused on the application of machine learning, artificial neural networks, data mining to other fields such as healthcare and visual-arts. One of most recent work involves researching triple-negative-breast-cancer biopsy images and trying to employ AI-ML to reduce pathological bias and identify markers to find a directed therapy as treatment.
Anukriti Choubey
Anukriti Choubey holds masters from the Symbiosis International University in Economics specialization in Development Economics and is currently a Consultant in FICCI. In the prior engagement with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), she was part of the CII’s BRICS international department, particularly focusing on Russia. She has also worked with NITI Aayog, Pranab Mukherjee Foundation, and the Bureau of Research on Industry & Economic Fundamentals (BRIEF India). During these engagements, she had the opportunity to undertake a field-based (RCT) project appraisal of Tata Trust’s ‘Water-ATM’ in Haryana, this was part of the SmarTgram project, Environmental impact assessment of vehicle emissions in NCR region, extend research support to NITI Aayog’s SDG North-Eastern Index and SDG India-Dashboard Index, and appraised the Compulsory Registration Order scheme of Ministry of Electronics and Information technology.
Anurag Verma
Anurag Verma is a post graduate student with Master of Public Policy programme at the National Law School of India University. His dissertation project traces the evolution of election system in India in context of technological interventions. He is interested in application of computational methods in political science.
Ashwin Ramaswamy
Ashwin Ramaswamy is a freelance educator and independent researcher with a range of interests. He is currently working on projects related to Indian public opinion and Agent-Based modeling of political polarization. My other major interest is the role of motivation and emotional states in learning. He is also curious about the potential of computational methods such as Agent-Based Modeling to inform and improve pedagogy in the classroom.
Bijoyetri Samaddar
Bijoyetri Samaddar is a Senior Associate (Research) at the Centre for Social and Behaviour Change (Ashoka University). Her research interests lie in gender, social policy and quantitative methods. She holds a MA in Women’s Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai (India).
Nivedita Roy
Nivedita Roy is a Senior Researcher at Sambodhi Research and Communications Pvt Ltd and she is also currently pursuing her PhD in Public Health from OP Jindal University, India. She has 7 years of social research work experience along with membership with various associations like Population Association of America, Share-Net International and Southern Association of History of Medicinal Science. Her area of interest lies in Monitoring Learning and Evaluation, Health Systems Strengthening and social determinants of health.
Dighbijoy Samaddar
Dighbijoy is a Research Associate at J-PAL where he is working on a project which is related to energy and environment. He is interested in learning how analytics can help shape better policies. He is also interested in agent based modelling and social networks.
Maharaj Brahma
Maharaj Brahma is a M.Tech. student at the Central Institute of Technology Kokrajhar. His current research interest lies in NLP and machine learning. Currently, he is building machine translation system from 17 Indian languages to Bodo. He is also actively building dataset for NLP tasks specially focused on low-resource languages.
Purohit Ridhi
Ridhi Purohit is an incoming student at the Harris School of Public Policy for the MS in Computational Analysis and Public Policy program. Currently, she works as a Regulatory Compliance Consultant at Deloitte. In 2021, Ridhi completed a Graduate Certificate in Public Policy with the Takshashila Institution. Her interests include technology policy, spread of misinformation/disinformation in social media networks and human behaviour in socio-technical systems.
Sanya Srivastava
Sanya Srivastava is a policy professional with an undergraduate degree in Economics and is currently a graduate student in the field of international development and public policy. She is passionate about strengthening governance structures and solving sustainable developmental challenges. Her current research interests lie in understanding the intersection between economic development, social progress and commercial growth through quantitative evidence and experience-based policies.
Balaraju Battu
Balaraju Battu have a PhD in cognitive science. He try to understand human machine interactions in the context of trust and cooperation using evolutionary game theory and experimental economics.
Manoranjan Ghosh
Manoranjan Ghosh, currently working as India Smart Cities Fellow (Fellowship of Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs) at National Institute of Urban Affairs and hold a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. He is a Climate Change Studies researcher at heart and by training and have expertise on spatial data analytics, machine learning tools, and PRA.
Pooja Sarin
Pooja Sarin is a Data Science Researcher (Doctorate Research Scholar) at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, working in the space of applied machine learning for Social Media Challenges. She loves to explore and work with several use-cases and applications related to Big Data from the business/industry perspective, also keeping Sustainability, Innovation, and AI for Social Good in her mind. Before joining the Ph.D. program, she has worked as Research Associate and explored the domain of Big Data and its applications (Air Pollution & Computer Vision Applications) at IIT Delhi. She also has Research Experience as an M.Tech trainee at Central Scientific Instrumentation Organization (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Chandigarh, in the domain of Earthquake Data Analytics. She is B.Tech and M.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering.
Ramit Das
Ramit Das is a PhD Student @ The Institute of Mathematical, Sciences, Chennai. He works on ideas spanning across theoretical computer science, mathematical logic, formal game theory. He wants to explore the connections from theory to practise for ideas in Game Theory. The fascinating ideas of designing human systems that will be able last as long as a good software design truly occupy his mind. He also, just like most traditional Computer Science researchers, find ideas in complexity theory - p vs np problem, decentralised decision problem, fascinating and has this general love for puzzles and games!
Poonam Adhikari
She is a Ph.D. Scholar in Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India. She demonstrated a history of working as a Full-stack developer with experience in developing scalable web applications. She also serves as a TA in NPTEL course Discrete mathematics. Her research interest includes food and nutritional data science, dietetics, natural language processing, and machine learning. Her Ph.D. thesis focuses on understanding food consumption, and its association with health and culture.Duke University
All Participants
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.
Suhem Parack
Suhem Parack is a Staff Developer Advocate at Twitter. He helps students and academic researchers with their research using the Twitter API. Before joining Twitter, he was a Solutions Architect at Amazon.
Justin Grimmer
Justin Grimmer is a Professor of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He co-directs the Democracy and Polarization Lab. His work examines how representation occurs in American democracy developing and using new statistical and machine learning tools. Along with Molly Roberts and Brandon Stewart, he is the author of the recently released book 'Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning in the Social Sciences.'
Brandon Stewart
Brandon Stewart is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. His work develops new statistical tools for the social sciences. He developed the Structural Topic Model—a popular approach for unsupervised text analysis—in collaboration with Molly Roberts, Dustin Tingley and Edo Airoldi. His new book with Justin Grimmer and Molly Roberts, "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning in the Social Sciences", was recently published by Princeton University Press.
Casey Fiesler
Casey Fiesler is an assistant professor in Information Science (and Computer Science by courtesy) at University of Colorado Boulder. She researches and teaches in the areas of technology ethics, internet law and policy, and online communities. Her work on research ethics for data science, ethics education in computing, and broadening participation in computing is supported by the National Science Foundation, and she is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. Also a public scholar, she is a frequent commentator and speaker on topics of technology ethics and policy, and her research has been covered everywhere from The New York Times to Teen Vogue, but she's most proud of her TikToks. She holds a PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech and a JD from Vanderbilt Law School.
Lisa Argyle
Lisa Argyle is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, and, in 2022-23, a visiting junior faculty fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. She uses computational methods to study political psychology and public opinion in the United States. Her primary research focuses on understanding how and why people talk about politics in their daily lives, and how conversations and persuasion affect polarization.
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is associate professor of social demography at the University of Oxford and professorial fellow at Nuffield College. At Oxford, she also leads the strand on digital and computational demography within the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. Her research covers questions linked to mortality and health, gender inequality, marriage and family, and migration, and the implications of digital transformations on demographic and development outcomes. Beyond these substantive interests, she is also methodologically interested in the applications of new sources of data, such as those generated by the use of the internet and mobile technologies, and computational methods for population research.
Luiza Almeida Santos
Luiza is a 4th year Psychology PhD student at the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. She is interested in the psychological mechanisms underlying political polarization, intergroup conflict, and attitude moralization. Her research centers on how to address empathic failures toward dissimilar others and how group memberships can influence people’s moral convictions.
Katie Spoon
Katie is a 2nd-year PhD student in Computer Science at University of Colorado Boulder and a Master’s student in Education Policy. Her research focuses on quantifying social inequalities, particularly by gender, race and socioeconomic status, in access to and retention within highly-educated jobs, such as those in academia, in the U.S.
Isabelle Langrock
Isabelle Langrock is a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation project identifies how trenchant gender inequalities complicate the central values of digital open knowledge projects like Wikipedia and Open Source Software and assesses the work of feminist efforts in alleviating bias in these knowledge systems.
Jack LaViolette
Jack is a PhD student in Sociology at Columbia University. He is currently working on a a disparate set of projects related to UFO sightings in the US, masculinist conspiracy theories, the history of statistical reasoning in professional basketball, and the spread of Romantic Nationalism in the long 19th century. He is particularly interested in NLP, networks, spatial analysis, and (despite currently knowing very little about it) Bayesian inference.
Sang Won Han
Sang Won Han is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Columbia University. He is broadly interested in social networks, culture and cognition, and computational social sciences, and now works on his dissertation on mechanisms of political polarization among U.S. elites. He holds B.A. in Sociology and B.S. in Statistics from Korea University.
Samuel Donahue
Sam is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Columbia University. He is currently working on an array of projects that explore how broad cultural frameworks influence the behavior of bureaucrats and the administration of social services. He is interested in networks, and natural language processing, though he is admittedly an NLP novice.
Irina Valenzuela Ramirez
Irina Valenzuela is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is an applied microeconomist with research experience in education, political economy, gender, and health economics. Her research interest is learning how information - contained in, for example, surveys, protests, and news media - can affect people's attitudes and behavior. In her current research, she is looking into the effects of a monitoring program on student performance, the impact of political corruption on political attitudes, and the impact of women's protests on gender violence.
Jack Lipei Tang
Jack Lipei Tang is a Ph.D. student (ABD) at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. His research interests include computational social science, digital activism, and political communication. He earned Bachelor degrees and M.Phil. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Joao Souto Maior
Joao is a PhD candidate in the Sociology of Education program at the New York University. His research investigates the formation of unequal access to educational resources, particularly along dimensions of race and class. His current work concentrates on inequalities which arise within educational institutions, with a focus on advanced enrollment disparities. His work applies different computational methods, with an emphasis on agent-based modeling techniques, to investigate the mechanisms behind the emergence of these inequalities.
Katherine Thomas
Katherine (Kate) Thomas is a PhD student in Sociology at NYU. Kate’s research interests are in urban, racial, and spatial inequality, environmental sociology, and quantitative methods, especially computational methods and causal inference. She holds a BA in Statistics and Sociology from Rice University and previously worked at the Urban Institute.
Sijia Qian
Sijia Qian (M.A., University of Utah) is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at University California, Davis. Her research interests broadly center around computational social science, misinformation, and persuasion in health and political contexts. Her current research focuses on developing and examining the effects of digital media literacy intervention on combating multimodal misinformation.
Sze Yuh Nina Wang
Nina is a PhD candidate in Social Psychology at the University of Toronto. Her work leverages techniques from natural language processing to study the ways in which moral language is deployed surrounding political and social issues.
Zhang Zhang
Zhang Zhang is pursuing a PhD in Health Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her current research focuses on technology innovation for behavior change and innovative approaches to improve health service delivery. She is also interested in using quantitative modeling and applied economics for policy evaluation. She received her MSc in Health policy, Planning, and Financing from LSE & LSHTM, and dual bachelor's degrees from Peking University.
Angel Mendiola Ross
Ángel Mendiola Ross is currently a PhD student in sociology with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. He conducts research at the intersection of (sub)urban sociology, race and inequality, housing, and policing. They draw on computational and qualitative methods to explore contemporary mechanisms of residential segregation.
Marcelo Silva Oliveira Goncalves
Marcelo received his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree from the University of Brasilia (Political Science). He has also received a Master’s Degree from UCSD (Development). Marcelo has served in various branches of the Brazilian government. At Duke, he plans to study social policies and their impacts on development.
Rafael Ventura
Rafael Ventura is currently a MindCORE-sponsored postdoctoral scholar in the Social and Cultural Evolution Working (SCEW) group at the University of Pennsylvania. From Fall 2018 to Fall 2019, he was Assistant Professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He completed his PhD at Duke University in Fall 2018.
Xinran Zhu
Xinran Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in Learning Technologies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include computer-supported collaborative learning, learning analytics, and network analysis. She designs technology innovations that support learning in various contexts, and applies computational methods to explore the socio-cognitive interactions in collaborative learning activities. Xinran received her MA in Educational Psychology from the University of Connecticut.
Miruna Cotet
Miruna is a PhD student in Decision Psychology at the Ohio State University. She has BSc in Psychology and Economics from University of Vienna and holds a MSc in Neuroeconomics from Maastricht University. Her research uses computational models and process data such as response times and eye movements to study social decision making. One of her current projects investigates the role of response times in bargaining using eBay data.
Mukesh Adhikari
Mukesh Adhikari is a Ph.D. student in Health Economics at the University of North Carolina. His research interests comprise exploring health insurance and health care quality in low and middle-income countries. He is keenly interested in exploring new methods of data collection and analysis in health. He received his Master of Public Health from Yale University, US, and Master of Public Administration from Purbanchal University, Nepal. He worked in the government health system of Nepal for more than seven years.
Parker Bach
Parker Bach is a Ph.D. student in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism, and an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Parker’s research interests include internet culture, social media and politics, humor, and the American Right.
Stephanie Jordan
Stephanie Jordan is a PhD student in Sociology and Public Policy. She focuses on computational social science, and is involved with the Polarization Lab and the Sociology Department’s Computational Social Science group. At Duke, she also serves as a student government representative for the Sociology Department.Edinburgh
All Participants
Christopher Barrie
Christopher Barrie is Lecturer in Computational Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He specializes in the study of protest, conflict, and communication. He is particularly interested in advancing the use of use digital trace, news, and communications data to study populations that have traditionally been 'hard-to-reach' in the empirical social sciences.
Karen Gregory
Karen Gregory is a digital sociologist, ethnographer, and lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of Edinburgh and Programme Director of the MSc in Digital Society. She is currently at work on a research project that examines the possibilities for solidarity in a digital economy, conducting interviews among Deliveroo riders in Scotland. She is also interested in new and emerging digital research methods and research ethics in digital scholarship.
Tod Van Gunten
Tod Van Gunten is a comparative economic and political sociologist with interests in social networks, development, organizations, globalization, the sociology of knowledge and professions, and sociological theory. His empirical research centers on elite political networks and the economic sociology of financial institutions, particularly in Latin America.
Walid Magdy
Walid Magdy is a faculty member at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC), part of the School of Informatics, the Univeristy of Edinburgh. He is also a faculty fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. His main expertise is in computational social science, data mining, and natural language processing. He holds a PhD degree from the School of Computing, Dublin City University (DCU). He has a large industrial background from working earlier for Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), Microsoft, and IBM.
Björn Ross
Björn Ross is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computational Social Science at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation. In his research, he primarily uses computational methods from agent-based modelling, natural language processing and social network analysis to study social media and related technologies. A key focus of his research is to explore different aspects of social media, such as misinformation, hate speech, and the malicious use of automation (bots), as well as how social media can be used effectively for social good, such as in crisis communication.
Benjamin Bach
Dr Benjamin Bach is a Lecturer in Design Informatics and Visualization at the University of Edinburgh. His research designs and investigates interactive information visualization interfaces to help people explore, communicate, and understand data. Before joining the University of Edinburgh in 2017, Benjamin worked as a postdoc at Harvard University (Visual Computing Group), Monash University, as well as the Microsoft-Research Inria Joint Centre. Benjamin was visiting researcher at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research in 2015. He obtained his PhD in 2014 from the Université Paris Sud where he worked at the Aviz Group at Inria. The PhD thesis entitled Connections, Changes, and Cubes: Unfolding Dynamic Networks for Visual Exploration got awarded an honorable mention as the Best Thesis by the IEEE Visualization Committee.
Anita Gohdes
Prof. Dr. Anita Gohdes is Professor of International and Cyber Security at the Hertie School. Her research focuses on contentious politics in the cyber realm, with a current emphasis on large-scale quantitative analyses of state behaviour. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Zurich, and postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center International Security Program. Since 2009, she has worked for the California-based non-profit organisation Human Rights Data Analysis Group. She currently advises the German Federal Foreign Office, and has consulted for the World Bank and the United Nations on security and state fragility.
Clare Llewellyn
Dr Clare Llewellyn is Lecturer in Governance, Technology, and Data, at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Her research uses large scale text and social media data to analyze trends in public opinion as well as online mis and disinformation campaigns. She has have extensive experience in working in a trans-disciplinary environment and has produced co-authored papers with academics from informatics, politics, information studies, and social work. She has have developed novel data analysis techniques, underpinned by data science technologies such as natural language processing, supervised and unsupervised machine learning and statistical analysis.
Carolina Scarton
Dr Carolina Scarton is Lecturer in Natural Language Processing, University of Sheffield, UK where she is also a member of the Natural Language Processing group and part of the GATE team. Dr Scarton is particularly interested in text adaptation, machine translation, online misinformation detection and verification, evaluation of NLP task outputs, NLP applied to healthcare and robotics, and dialog systems.
Maria Wolters
Dr Maria Wolters is Reader in Design Informatics, School of Informatics, and Academic Associate, School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science. Her research focuses on supporting people with chronic illness to live rich and meaningful lives. Maria has published over 80 peer reviewed papers and has been PI or Researcher Co-I on grants funded by the EPSRC, European Union, and Leverhulme Trust. She is Programme Director of the MSc and Advanced MSc in Design Informatics.
Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd
Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd is a PhD student in political science at the University of Cambridge. His research investigates the confluence of culture, nationalism, and legitimation processes in non-democracies. On field research in Saudi Arabia, he conducted interviews, digitized previously untapped archival sources for quantitative analysis, and collected Twitter data.
Joseph Van Matre
Joseph Van Matre is a doctoral candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Center for Philanthropic Studies. His research interests on the civic and social development of university students and of queer youth and adolescents. Prior to his doctoral work he held staff research positions at Stanford GSE and University of California Office of the President. He holds an MA in Economics from Vanderbilt University and a BS in International Business from the University of Arkansas.
Sarah Jewett
Sarah Jewett is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science, specializing in quantitative text analysis. Her research focuses on the mechanisms and processes of perpetration of mass violence and what we can learn about these through international criminal justice.
Alessio Scopelliti
Alessio is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Bristol where he explores the ideological flexibility of established radical right parties with regards to the new transnational cleavage. His main research interests are Right-Wing Parties, European Politics and Populism. Alessio is also a Doctoral Fellow at CARR.
Isabel Krakoff
Isabel is a doctoral student in sociology at York University. Her current research explores the intersection of human rights and the global rise of populism through a focus on the ongoing clash between the religious freedom and LGBTQ+ rights movements in the United States.
Alisha Kelkar
Alisha Kelkar is an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she is majoring in Computer Science and Psychology. Her research interests focus on the intersection of computer science, psychology and linguistics. In particular, she wants to use machine learning and NLP tools to study cognition and language usage.
Alexander Wuttke
Alexander is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Mannheim. In his research he explores democratic backsliding from the perspective of ordinary citizens. Moreover, he is engaged in disciplinary debates on transparent and inclusive research.
Esther Gonzalez Hernando
Esther is currently pursuing a PhD in Population Health at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on examining discourses and practices of public involvement in the governance of digital health technologies. She is also broadly interested in exploring how computational social science can be used to study global health governance and health policy. She holds hold an MSc in Global Health Policy from the University of Edinburgh and a BSc in Biotechnology from Universidad Politecnica of Madrid. Before beginning her PhD, she worked on public health emergency response for the World Health Organisation.
Arpita Tripathi
Arpita Tripathi is a first year PhD student at the School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh. Her broad research goal is to leverage technology for designing effective tobacco and smoking prevention interventions. She is currently using social media data to examine emerging tobacco trends in the US. She uses mixed, computational social science, and community-based participatory research methods in her work.
Katharina Baum
Katharina Baum is a Ph.D. student at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin and the University of Potsdam. She holds a Master’s degree in Economics and Management Science. Her research examines the effects of social media use on well-being (e.g. self-esteem) and societal outcomes (e.g., inequality perceptions).
Nicolette Dakin
Nicolette is PhD student in Critical Social/Personality and Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. She also holds a Master's in Social Work from NYU. Her research interests are focused on the roles of ideology, social identity, and discourse in emergent social issues, such as climate change and political polarization. She is particularly interested in utilizing mixed methods approaches to policy-oriented research.
Francois t'Serstevens
François t’Serstevens is a PhD candidate in the department of Data analytics and Digitalisation at Maastricht University. His research leverages machine learning to better understand and prevent the spread of fake news through social media.
Fabio Votta
Fabio Votta is pursuing a PhD in Political Communication at the University of Amsterdam. In his dissertation, he researches the practice of political microtargeting, specifically in regards to the affordances provided by social media platforms and how advertisers make use of the technique. He is very enthusiastic about teaching statistics and computational methods, both introductory and more advanced topics.
Stefanie Klein
Stefanie Klein is a PhD student in the Everyday Media lab at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien in Tübingen, Germany. Using experimental and computational methods, she investigates the impact of conversational features of chatbots on user acceptance and company image. She holds a B.A. and a M.A. in Social Sciences with a focus on empirical research from the University of Stuttgart.
Christina Viehmann
Christina Viehmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication at the University of Mainz, Germany. In her research, she is concerned with questions from the field of political communication, especially how media debates and discourses on social media drive societal polarization or contribute to establishing cohesion.
Daniel Malmer
Dan Malmer is a PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill. He studies online radicalization, extremism, and conspiracy theories. He is a Silicon Valley veteran, having worked at a number of technology startups include Netscape Communications. Dan holds computer science degrees from The University of Illinois and Stanford University.
Lucie Wang
Lucie Wang is a master’s student in Data Science and an incoming student in Quantitative Sociology and Demography, both at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris. She has a background in Mathematics and Computer Science, and aspires to apply her computational skills for Social Studies. Her research interests span digital sociology, media literacy, and political sociology.
Huichao Huang
Huichao Huang is a postgraduate student in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on cultural consumption, by analyzing large datasets of song lyrics and music tastes over time. She holds a BA in Linguistics and Literature from Zhejiang University of Technology.
Nouran Khallaf
Nouran Khallaf is a PhD researcher in computational linguistics at University of Leeds. She is investigating the Arabic text simplification task in light of teaching Arabic as a second language and language disabilities. Her research explores text complexity and how to simplify the text to make it easy-to-read and accessible by people with different intellectual levels. Prior to starting her doctoral studies, Nouran holds MA in computational linguistics from faculty of arts - University of Alexandria, Egypt. Nouran is particularly interested in Arabic natural language processing, data mining, and software development.
Sophia Knight
Sophia is the Programme Representative for MSc Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. She holds a BA in English and Philosophy from the University of Sheffield, has a background in STEM, and is a published poet. Her research integrates computational social science techniques into mixed-methods analyses of large-scale cultural phenomena, such as podcasting.
Yumeng Guo
Yumeng Guo is a doctoral student at the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield. Her doctoral thesis explores how governmental social media accounts discuss Covid-19 during the pandemic. Her research interests include qualitative studies on social media, cross-platform studies, and digital methods. Before entering Sociology, she held both her BA and MA in journalism.
Aleksander Bielinski
Aleksander Bielinski is PhD researcher at Edinburgh Napier University. In his doctoral study, he investigates how machine learning can be used to enhance the provision of labour market intelligence in Scotland. He is associated with the Centre for Social Informatics research institute, where together with his colleagues works towards a better and more inclusive digital future.
Ernesto de León
Ernesto de León is a Phd Student at the University of Bern, in Switzerland. His research focusses on political information flows in a digital age and its effects on political attitudes. To do so, he makes use of computational methodologies to explore web behaviour, social media use, and to conduct large-scale automated content analyses through text-as-data approaches.
Aybuke Atalay
Aybuke Atalay is a PhD student based in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. She is particularly interested in the role of automated accounts (i.e. bots) in social media manipulation and online disinformation in hybrid regimes. She is currently investigating bots in the Turkish Twittersphere.
Ibrahim Abu Farha
Ibrahim Abu Farha is a PhD student at the School of Informatics, the University of Edinburgh. He is working under the supervision of Walid Magdy and Bonnie Webber. He is also a member of the SMASH research group. His general research interests are Natural Language Processing (NLP), Arabic NLP, Computational Social Science and Machine Learning. His current research interest is sarcasm detection and figurative language anlaysis and detection in the context of Arabic.
Youssef Al Hariri
Youssef AL Hariri is a PhD student at ILCC, School of Informatics, the University of Edinburgh. He received his BSc (Honors) in Computer Engineering from Qatar University in 2017, and MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 2018. He is interested in studies related to social computing, social network analysis and NLP.FGV/DAPP Brazil
All Participants
Tiago Ventura
Tiago Ventura is a Ph.D. Candidate in Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), and an alumni of SICSS Princeton in 2019. Tiago is a researcher on comparative politics and computational social science, with a particular focus on political violence in Latin America and political communication. During the Winter and Spring of 2021, He will be the Young Talent fellow in Computational Social Science at FGV Rio de Janeiro. Tiago is also a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Computational Social Science at UMD.
Amaro Grassi
Amaro Grassi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at IESP-UERJ, and Chief Researcher at The Department of Public Policy Analysis of Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV/DAPP)
Daniel Trielli
Daniel Trielli is a Ph.D. Candidate in Media, Technology and Society at Northwestern University. He researches how news reaches the public in our increasingly algorithmically-defined world and how journalists can cover algorithms. He participated in SICSS 2018 as a student, SICSS 2019 as a TA, and SICSS 2021 as a speaker.
Lucas Roberto
Lucas Roberto is a Master student in Informatics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), where he researches natural language processing. He is a data scientist at the Department of Public Policy Analysis of Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil), where he works with machine learning for developing tools and procedures for social media analysis.
Polyana Barbosa
Polyana Barbosa is a researcher at the Department of Public Policy Analysis of Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil), where she works with data extraction and analysis from social media. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics by Getulio Vargas Foundation and is a Master student in Informatics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Her research interests are social network analysis in digital media and multi-agent systems in software engineering
Alexandra Siegel
Alexandra Siegel is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a nonresident fellow at Brookings in the Center for Middle East Policy and the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, as well as a faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) and New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP). Dr. Siegel's research uses original datasets of hundreds of millions of social media posts, text and network analysis, machine learning methods, and experiments to study mass and elite political behavior in the Arab World and other comparative contexts.
Fernando Meirelles
Fernando Meireles is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at CEBRAP, where he studies Brazilian and Latin American political institutions, legislative behavior, and political representation. Methodologically, he specializes in data science, causal inference, and computational and survey methods. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science (UFMG/Brazil) and was previously the Research Director at the Brazilian polling company Quaest.
Leonardo Nascimento
Leonardo F. Nascimento is a professor at the Federal University of Bahia where he coordinates the Digital Humanities Laboratory (LABHDUFBA). His research interests include digital sociology, digital humanities and computational social science. He is the author of the book Sociologia Digital: uma breve introdução - EDUFBA - 2020
Pablo Boczkowski
Pablo J. Boczkowski (he / él) is Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor at Northwestern University. He is Founder and Director of the Center for Latinx Digital Media, and Faculty Director of the Master of Science in Leadership for Creative Enterprises program, both at Northwestern; Co-Founder and Co- Director of the Center for the Study of Media and Society in Argentina, a joint initiative between Northwestern and Universidad de San Andrés, in Buenos Aires; and Senior Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Germany. In 2020 he was named Fellow of the International Communication Association. He is the author or coauthor of six books, co-editor of four volumes, and has written over fifty journal articles. His current book projects include Social Media Studies: Comparative Perspectives (with Mora Matassi, under contract with MIT Press) and The Patina of Distrust: Misinformation in a Context of Generalized Skepticism (with Eugenia Mitchelstein, María Celeste Wagner and Facundo Suenzo).
Alejandra Josiowicz
Alejandra Josiowicz is Professora Adjunta (Assistant Professor) and Coordinator of Internationalization at the Institute of Languages and Literatures of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). She is also Prociencia Fellow (2021-2024) at UERJ. She was a Researcher at the National Council for Science and Technological Research of Argentina (CONICET). She was Post-doctoral Fellow at the Digital Humanities Laboratory in the School of Social Sciences of the Getulio Vargas Foundation. She is currently studying feminist and antiracist activism on Twitter in Latin America. She has published on Latin American Studies, Gender, Literature and Childhood Studies.
Alexsander Dugno Chiodi
Alexsander Dugno Chiodi is a master's student in Political Science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, and holds a B.A. in Social Sciences from UFRGS. His research interests include new agents of political socialization, political values of Brazilian youth and social network analysis.
Alisson Soares
Alisson Soares is a PhD in sociology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais - Brazil, his traditional interest are sociological theory and epistemology and now is focussing on Computational Text Analysis/ NLP in R language as approaches to misinformation, conspiracy theories and stability of beliefs. He is also building a manual of Text Analysis with R in Portuguese.
Ana Julia Bonzanini Bernardi
Associate Professor at School of Sociology and Politics Foundation of São Paulo (FESPSP-Brazil) and researcher at the Latin America Research Center (NUPESAL-UFRGS). She holds a PhD in Political Science by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS-Brazil). Her work is focussed on the linkage between social network analysis and political culture to understand the impact of misinformation regarding politics in different scenarios. She is also broadly interested in studying public policies for civic empowerment, specially the ones related to youth and education.
Diego Nunes da Rocha
Diego Nunes da Rocha is a PhD sociology student at Institute of Political and Social Studies of State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ) and he is a member of Center for the Study of Wealth and Social Stratification (Ceres/UERJ). He is currently researching the causal effect of changing the school management in the student's perfomance in Brazil. Diego holds a masters .
Felipe Roquete
Felipe Roquete is the current Head of Intelligence Unity of Cade (since 2015), and was the Deputy Head of Bid Rigging Unit of Cade (2009-2014). He has a degree in Law (UFMG) and holds a Master’s degree in Political Science (UnB). He is also a PhD Candidate of Regulation Law at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). His research interests include AI regulation and antitrust.Gabriel Madeira
Guilherme Nicolau
PhD in Political Science by the University of São Paulo. Works with mixed methods: ethnography and machine learning. Specialized in Natural Language Processing. Working at Americanas s.a.
Gustavo Alasino
Gustavo Alasino is Ph.D. Candidate at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and he has been teaching International Finance at different graduate’s schools. His bachelor and Master of Sciences on international relations. Actually he drives his Consultancy Company oriented to global business and data science development services while preparing thesis requirements at Di Tella. His research focus is on applying computational science methods (mostly numeric based) in international relations studies. He recently published a research on how to use time series model based con Bayesian methods to estimate emerging markets financial risk index behavior.
Heloísa Traiano
Heloísa Traiano is a graduate student specialising in Culture and Politics at Leiden University. She works as a research assistant and project coordinator at Netlab, a multidisciplinary laboratory from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) investigating digital disinformation on political and environmental issues through qualitative and quantitative methods.
Lucas Gelape
Lucas Gelape has a PhD in Political Science from the University of São Paulo. Currently, he works at Fundação Seade (São Paulo State Statistical Bureau), developing computational social science projects to produce official statistics. Previously, he worked for news organizations on topics such as elections and social media.
Lucy Oliveira
Lucy Oliveira is Associate Professor of Political Science at Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. She was post-doctoral fellow at Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP/FAPESP). She received her PhD from Political Science at UFSCar. Currently she researchs about democracy in Brazil, rhetorical presidency, going public, political jornalism, Text as Data and Computational Social Science methods.
Murilo Junqueira
Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of Pará. Enthusiast of Computational Social Sciences, Philosophy, History, Economics and Other Intellectual Random Walks ...
Natália Moreira
Natália Moreira is a researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of São Paulo. She holds a BA in social science and an MA and Ph.D. in political science from the University of São Paulo. Her research addresses questions related to public opinion, political methodology, and public policy.
Pedro Seguel
Pedro is a Ph.D. student in Management of Information Systems at McGill University. He is working on topics related to developer communities, collaborative technologies, and the fair impact of Artificial Intelligence. His research focuses on the role of expertise and professions in shaping technological and institutional change and how such changes are reshaping expertise and work.
Priscila Medeiros
Priscila Medeiros is an Assistant Professor at Ufal and a postdoctoral fellow at Netlab (UFRJ). She received her PhD in Communication at UFPE. Her research focuses on environmental communication, and she is currently interested in the use of digital methods to study the environmental debate in Brazilian social media.
Rafael Richter
Rafael Richter is a Researcher at Codeplan and a PhD candidate in Economics at Insper.
Raquel Jorge de Oliveira
Raquel Jorge de Oliveira is a recent MA graduate from the International Relations Institute at the University of Brasília. While applying for PhD programs, she developed a strong interest in R programming and computational social science. With SICSS, she is excited about learning more on how quantitative methods can elicit interesting findings in her future PhD research. A mixed methods enthusiast, Raquel is especially intrigued by cybersecurity, technological illiberalism and democratic backsliding, particularly how microtargeting in disinformation campaigns can influence political outcomes.
Rodrigo Mahlmeister
Rodrigo Mahlmeister is an economist with a Master’s degree in Political Science. He is currently a researcher in Centro de Estudos da Metrópole and a political cosultant. His research topics are political behavior, income inequality, and preferences for redistribution.
Silvio da Rosa Paula
Research Incentive Scholarship at the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA), PhD candidate at the Postgraduate Program in Organizations and Markets at the Federal University of Pelotas (PPGOM/UFPel). Master in Applied Economics PPGOM / UFPel. Postgraduate in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence from Faculdade Anhanguera. Graduated in Economic Sciences from the Federal University of Pelotas UFPEL. Member of the research groups: Laboratory of Studies in Regional Economics (LabReg) and Group for the Evaluation of Public Policies and Social Programs (GAPPS)
Vanessa Lira
Vanessa Lira is a doctoral student in Political Science at Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). Her current research examines affective polarization on social media using experimental methods with text analysis in Brazil. She is also studying effects of political conspiracy theories on democracy.
Victor Siqueira
Victor Siqueira is pursuing an M.A in Political Science at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil. His interests lie in Climate Change Communication, Public Opinion, and Survey Methods. In particular, he researches the political correlates between climate change opinion, partisanship, and ideology, and the links between attitudes and behavior towards climate and environmental issues.
Virginia Silva
Virginia Rocha is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. She was a Visiting Doctoral Student at Oxford (2018-2019), where she worked on her Ph.D. dissertation, examing how political dynasties affect transparency in Brazilian municipalities. Her research focuses on political institutions and public policy.
Yago Paiva
Yago Paiva is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Institute of Social and Political Studies of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Iesp-Uerj). He holds a Master's degree in Political Science from the same institution. He studies the relationship between political institutions and digital technologies, state capabilities, and the use of digital media in elections. He is interested in how quantitative and computational methods can be applied to causal inference. His current research is on the process of state digitalization, the effects of political systems structures on digitalization, and the determinants of digital electoral strategies.
Yuri Barreto
Yuri Barreto is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the Federal University of Pernambuco, where he is also affiliated with the Group of Evaluation of Public and Economic Policies (GAPPE). His current research examines the long-run effects of slavery on the labor market. He holds a B.A. in economics from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and an M.Sc. in applied economics from the Federal University of Pernambuco.Haifa
All Participants
Baruch Eitam
Baruch Is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Haifa. His lab studies interactions between cognitive processes and reward/motivation in general. Key lines of research involve reinforcement from sensorimotor predictability and the mental prioritization of information by its relevance to the task at hand, as well as conscious perception. Before joining Haifa in mid-2011, Baruch attained his PhD at the Hebrew University (2009) and was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University (with Tory Higgins).
Mor Peleg
Mor Peleg is Full Professor of information systems, Chair of the BSc Data Science program and head of the University of Haifa’s Data Science Center, former Chair of the Department of Information Systems. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Editorial Board Member of Methods of Information in Medicine and is International Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics.
Pavel Goldstein
Pavel Goldstein is the Head of Integrative Pain (iPain) Laboratory, Head of MPH Biostatistics track at the School of Public Health, Social Welfare & Health Sciences Faculty, The University of Haifa.Pavel has completed Master's in Biostatistics and Ph.D. in Pain Neuroscience. In 2019 he founded the Integrative Pain Laboratory at the University of Haifa to gather a novel understanding of chronic pain conditions, developing new ways of measuring, preventing, and treating chronic pain. Pavel's research is essential for more than pure knowledge. Ultimately, his future research is driven by the need to integrate the academy and the industry. Providing data science consultations for medical device companies, academic researchers from multiple fields, and doctors, helped him to acquire a “common ground” between academic investigators, business representatives, and healthcare providers. When all parties see the advantage of combining the industrial drive to ‘get things done’ with clinical insights and the academic urge to ‘understand how it works’, the final outcomes improve significantly.
Tali Kristal
Tali Kristal is Professor of Sociology at University of Haifa. The central focus of her research is on how and why positions in the economy such as organizations, industries, occupations, classes, and the relations between them, shape the evolution of economic inequality, and how these vary across time and countries.
Tamir Gadot
Tamir is the Administrative Manager of SICSS Haifa program and he is the Administrative Manager of DSRC – The University of Haifa’s Data Science Research Center and of CRI - Caesarea Rothschild Institute for Interdisciplinary Applications of Computer Science.
Netta Palez
Netta is part of the administrative team of SICSS Haifa program and the Data Curator and Project Manager of DSRC – The University of Haifa’s Data Science Research Center.
Amit Donner
I am currently completing my master’s degree in statistics at Haifa University. I have vast experience as a teaching assistant for a dozen courses in the university’s statistics department. These have varied from courses in probability and statistical theory to machine learning, statistical modeling and programming in Python and R. I also have experience helping social scientists to conceptualize, collect and analyze the data they need for their research.
Eitan Hemed
I am a Senior PhD candidate in experimental Psychology, studying how the human mind evaluates the effect of motor actions on the environment. I will be taking part in the SICSS as a project tutor. I gained my programming experience during my graduate studies, following several years of working with multiple researchers in academia on developing behavioral experiments and pipelines for data processing and analysis. Additionally, I taught Python to graduate students on academic courses and workshops.
Igor Kleion
Research Areas: Queuing theory, Image processing.
Tomer Sidi
Research Areas: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Computational Structural Biology.
Noga Aviad
I completed B.Sc. studies at BIU in computer science and neuroscience. I then worked for several years as a software developer in the high-tech industry, and returned to academia due to my curiosity about consciousness broadly and mindfulness in particular. My M.A. thesis used machine learning to analyze EEG data of meditators. Currently, I am extending this line of research in my Ph.D., using Complex Dynamical Systems approach to study mindfulness mechanisms.
Dan Feldman
Director of the Robotics and Big Data Lab, and Senior Lecturer at the Computer Science Department University of Haifa.
Michael Friedman
I am an assistant professor (lecturer) in political science at the University of Haifa. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University. I have a PhD in political science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2019). I study religion and conflict in Israel and the Muslim world. My work combines big data approaches with experiments and in-depth interviews. My research has been published in multiple outlets including the American Sociological Review, Political Behavior, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Ofra Amir
Ofra Amir is an Assistant Prof. at the faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion. Her research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.
Aial Sobeh
Upcoming Ph.D candidate at the Department of Psychology, University of Haifa. Research domains- Social and cognitive neuroscience, network neuroscience, Neuroeconomics. My current research examines the emergence of collective morality through the dynamic and adaptive interaction of brains
Alina Rozenfeld
Dr. Alina Rozenfeld-Kiner Post-doctoral fellow, Department of Sociology, Hebrew University.My research interest lies in the patterns of stratification and inequality generated in the labor market. In my Ph.D. thesis, I analyzed the role of human resource management practices in shaping wage inequality, within and between work establishments, by gender, class, and education. Currently, I am interested in the role of organizations, managers, and working environment in shaping the skills and task composition of jobs.
Ameed Saabneh
Ameed Saabneh is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Haifa with interest in social stratification, health inequality and demographic research. His current research focuses on income inequality in Israeli society in general and the Arab-Palestinian society in particular. He also explores how spatial and residential segregation explains the health inequalities between Palestinians and Jews in Israel, including those related to the covid-19 pandemic.
Amneh Shmali Asly
Amneh Shmali Asly – Master student in Public Health (MPH), Biostatistics track. Amneh completed her Bachelor’s in Audiology and Speech Language Pathology (SLP) at the University of Haifa in 2015. Works as Speech Language Pathologists and is a researcher in the iPainLab with Dr. Pavel Goldstein. Amneh joined the Integrative Pain Laboratory in September – 2021 and will take part in the Pain Story Project, the project aims to develop a digital platform for pain detection, based on facial expressions, voice and inferred language content. Her master’s research focuses on predicting pain based on the patient’s recorded narratives.
Avishai Zacharia
Avishai Zacharia is a psychology Ph.D. candidate and a member of the IDIT multidisciplinary program at the University of Haifa. He completed his Bachelor's degrees (psychology and economics) and master's degree (clinical psychology) at California State University, Northridge. He continued his education at the Florida Institute of Technology in the field of applied behavior analysis and is a certified Board Certified Behavior Analyst. His research interests include the functional categorization of interpersonal verbal behavior and the use of behavioral interventions to facilitate cooperation and reduce maladaptive behaviors between groups in conflict.
Barak Zur
Dalit Ken-Dror Feldman
Dr. Dalit Ken-Dror Feldman holds LL.B. (Summa Cum Laude) and B.Sc., Computer Science (Magna Cum Laude) Haifa University (2001); LL.M. in Commercial Law (Magna Cum Laude), Tel-Aviv University (2008); Ph.D. in Law, Haifa University (2018). Dalit's research interests focus on Law & Technology: Data and Cyber Security, AI including Deep Fake, Intellectual Property, Software Law, Open Access and Information Law; Legal Ethics. Dalit Ken-Dror Feldman is the legal supervisor of the Law, Technology and Cyber Clinic, Faculty of Law, University of Haifa.
Mariana Ribolhos Agostinho
Mariana Agostinho is a PhD student in Cognitive Science in Portuguese Catholic University and a PhD student in Nursing at the University of Haifa. Her research interests are centered in pain perception and cognitive factors that modulate pain experience and underlying physiological processes. Currently is investigating the mechanisms underlying the change in pain sensitivity following the manipulation of expectation and possible role of with within-subject variability of pain reports as a modulator of these top-down mechanisms (e.g. past experience) on changes in pain perception.
Mario Francis
I am a Ph.D student at Sans lab, University of Haifa, my research field is cognitive neuroscience and its implications in psychology, my work is focused on investigating Neurofeedback and its potential in the clinical field. To achieve that, I am currently working on Neurofeedback-Synchrony project that aims to develop an empathy training method, by taking advantage of the association between inter-brain synchrony and empathy while using EEG and fNIRS hyperscanning based Neurofeedback.
Shani Zohar
Shani is currently a doctoral candidate in the department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Haifa Shani is also an Idit Ph.D. fellowship starting her 3rd year. The focus of her graduate research is the therapeutic effects and mechanisms of a web-based mobile-supported mental health intervention program, "Mindfulness-SOS for Refugees", designed to promote trauma recovery and mental health among those who have been forcibly displaced. Additionally, she is interested in the possible application of computational social science to the study of mental health generally and specifically among forcibly displaced persons. She holds an MA in Clinical Child Psychology from Bar Ilan University and a BA in Psychology and Education from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel).
Stav Ophir
Stav Ophir is an MA student in Clinical Neuropsychology at Haifa University. She holds a BSc in Biology and Psychology from Ben-Gurion University. In her research, she concentrates on personal medicine. Her research focuses on identifying epigenetic biomarkers for PTSD susceptibility and treatment response using NGS.
Tal Feder
Tal Feder is a post-doctoral fellow at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He is a sociologist with interests in cultural policy, sociology of art and culture, inequality, consumption, and quantitative research methods. His current research studies cultural justice and cultural (in)equality from a spatial perspective.
Vanessa Cywiak
Vanessa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychiatry at the Israel Institute of Technology "Technion". She is a Clinical and Scholar Psychologist and her research focuses on preventing Postpartum Depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder through the analysis of cognitive biases during pregnancy.
Yaniv Shapira
I'm a Ph.D. student in the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa. My research focuses on studying political behavior, voting patterns among the public, parties and voters' political ideology. In my Ph.D. dissertation, I examine voting patterns and their determinants in Israel's political system in the 21st century. I pursued my B.A in economics and political science from the University of Haifa.Helsinki
All Participants
Matti Nelimarkka
Matti Nelimarkka leads the Helsinki Social Computing Group, an interdisciplinary group examining both computers and society. They explore digital democracy and politics in the digital era as well as computational techniques in social sciences, especially workflows and connections between social science theories and code. He is affiliated with the Faculty of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Aalto University and Futurice, a Finnish software consultancy. He is about to publish a new computational social science text book Computational Thinking and Social Science: Combining Programming, Methodologies and Fundamental Concepts via SAGE Publishing.
Leila Gharavi
Leila Gharavi is a doctoral researcher in Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. In her PhD journey, Leila will mainly detect human disposition towards natural and biophysical environment, based on a social psychological theory, taking humans’ textual footprints over the years as data.
Faeze Ghorbanpour
Faeze Ghorbanpour is a research assistant at Sharif University of Technology, Iran. Her research focuses on analyzing social media and detecting fake news. Faeze's research interests include natural language processing, computational social sciences, and digital humanities. She received her master's degree from Sharif University in computer engineering and currently works for an artificial intelligence company in Iran as a machine learning specialist.
Armin Sauermann
Armin Sauermann is a researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He recently completed his Sociology Masters at the University of Potsdam and will pursue his PhD. Armin analyzes large-scale observational data and is learning to collect and analyze internet-based data to study group processes and political extremism.
Jan Sodoge
Jan Sodoge is a doctoral researcher at the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research working on the socio-economic dimensions of drought through text mining and participatory modeling
Elida Izani
Elida Izani is a doctoral student in the Sociology department at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on the alignment between ideological beliefs and lifestyle preferences. She investigates this topic by using a combination of qualitative and computational methods.
Jon Järviniemi
Jon Järviniemi is a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on analyzing the development of populist political communication across party lines and on different political arenas. Furthermore, he is interested in what may have triggered the usage of populist communication among political actors.
Chaewon Yun
Chaewon Yun is a master’s student in Computational Social Systems in RWTH Aachen. She worked as a software engineer in Samsung Electronics after studying Political Science and International Relations at Yonsei University. Current research interests include the impact of learning algorithms and building democratic community in digital space.
Maria Litova
Maria Litova is a research assistant at the Centre for Social Data Science, University of Helsinki, Finland. She got her first Master’s degree in Sociology and currently is a Master’s student at the University of Helsinki with major in Social Data Science. Maria is interested in natural language processing, machine learning, healthcare and medical data analysis, youth research and well-being issues.
Antero Olakivi
Antero Olakivi, D. Soc.Sc., is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, in the Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care. Olakivi’s research interests deal with intersecting inequalities in everyday life, especially in the context of care and care work, and with the methodology of social sciences.
Brooke Molokach
Brooke Molokach is a PhD student at the University of Delaware, researching the narrative features of political communication and societal fragmentation. Her interests include network dynamics, agent-based modeling, and natural language processing. Brooke holds an MA in International Affairs from American University and a BA from Yale University.
Iuliia Smirnova
Iuliia Smirnova just completed her master's degree and holds a BA in political science from the St. Petersburg State University. She uses qualitative research methods such as comparative analysis, traditional document analysis and case study method to explore civil and political education, political culture, public policy and Russian politics.
Katri Sarkio
Katri Sarkio is a doctoral researcher in Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki. Her dissertation focuses on educational leadership, organizational culture, and innovative learning environments. She holds LSc in Digital Economy and MSc in Computer Science. Before, she worked inter alia in EIT Digital innovation ecosystem on educational development.
Xin Zhou
Xin Zhou is a master's student in Political Communication at the University of Gothenburg. After receiving his Bachelor's in Journalism in China, he had several years working in a business media as a journalist. His current research interests are propaganda, censorship, and political polarization. He usually prefers to explore this field mainly using quantitative research and computational methods.
Rachel Bryant
Rachel has a Master of Public Administration and Nonprofit Management, and is currently pursuing a second Master's in Social Data Science at the University of Helskinki. She has worked for several international organizations and NGOs in the US, Germany, and Finland. She's interested in using data to help organizations solve different problems in the public sector.
Craig Ryder
Craig Ryder is a digital anthropologist interested in startup and digital cultures, and the platformisation of information, especially in a Global South context. His PhD research at SOAS, University of London, is an ethnographic study into the information disorder in Sri Lanka. By investigating the influence of platform affordances on the dissemination of information and how information influencers reappropriate these affordances into their everyday practices, the project looks to disentangle the digital in a nation beleaguered by ethnic conflict, fake news and censorship. Craig is on a six month research exchange at University of Helsinki to develop skills in computational social sciences and digital methods.
Sippo Rossi
Sippo Rossi is a doctoral researcher at Copenhagen Business School’s Department of Digitalization. His research focuses on misinformation and the negative societal effects of social media and he has recently been working on projects related to social bots and AI-generated social media content.Hong Kong
All Participants
Jaemin Lee
Jaemin Lee is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at Duke University in 2018. His research aims to understand various substantive topics including political polarization, product diffusion, friendship segregation, and intergroup relations. Methodologically, he uses agent-based modeling, field experiments, and longitudinal network analysis.
Han Zhang
Han Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at Princeton University in 2020, under the supervision of Matthew Salganik. He obtained His B.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in History, 2013, from Peking University. His research spans computational social science, social movements, and quantitative methods.
Haohan Chen
Haohan Chen is an Assistant Professor in Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in Political Science and MS in Statistical Science from Duke University in December 2019. His substantive research focuses on political behavior and political communication under both authoritarian and democratic contexts. His methodological research focuses on machine learning methods for text and network data from social media.
Abdullah Almaatouq
Abdullah Almaatouq is an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He obtained a PhD in Computational Science and Engineering and a dual master’s from MIT. Abdullah’s research lies at the intersection of computer science and human behavior, and focuses on collective intelligence and large-scale experimentation. His current work centers on questions related to whether and, if so, under what conditions groups exhibit superior performance outcomes relative to individuals.
Tarani Chandola
Tarani is a professor of medical sociology and the director of the Methods Hub in the Faculty of the Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. He obtained his DPhil in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research is primarily on the social determinants of health, focusing on health inequalities and psychosocial factors, and the analysis of longitudinal cohort studies.
Thomas R. Davidson
Tom Davidson is an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University—New Brunswick. He received his PhD in sociology from Cornell University. His research and teaching interests include political sociology and social movements, culture, and social networks. He specializes in using computational methods including natural language processing and machine-learning to analyze data collected from social media platforms.
King-wa Fu
King-wa FU is an Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of The University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD in journalism and media studies from the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include China’s information governance, media and political participation, computational social sciences, health and the media, and media use by the younger generation. He is the Principle Investigator of Weiboscope, WeChatscope, and ANTIELAB Research Data Archive.
Ashley Gromis
Ashley Gromis is a postdoctoral research associate at the Eviction Lab of Princeton University. She completed her PhD in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on how social networks and local communities provide the social context for individual decisions and events that aggregate to form macro-level patterns across space and time.
David Hagmann
David Hagmann is an assistant professor at the Department of Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his PhD from the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. His research draws on experimental tools from psychology and economics to study how people engage with information and how this affects the decisions they make.
Bo Huang
Bo Huang is a professor in the Department of Geography and Resource Management, Associate Director of Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, and a co-director of the Computational Social Science Laboratory at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He uses geospatial big data to address urban environmental problems.
Ka-Yuet Liu
Ka-Yuet Liu is an associate professor of sociology at UCLA. She received her D.Phil in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her research applies data science methods and social network analysis to epidemiological questions. Her major test cases are the diffusion of health conditions that people don't typically associate with network processes.
Christopher Lucas
Christopher Lucas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a faculty affiliate with the Division of Computational & Data Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. Lucas studies methodology, political communication, and the media. His research develops and applies computational models for the statistical analysis of speech audio.
Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld
Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld is an assistant professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He received his Ph.D. in political science from UC San Diego. Steinert-Threlkeld’s work focuses on protest dynamics using natural language processing, computer vision, and large-scale simulations. He has studied protests around the world, including Arab Spring, protests in East Asia, and South America.
Huanyu BAO
Huanyu BAO is a PhD Candidate at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests are health technology and public health communication. Specifically, how health technology can be used to benefit different social groups in both physical and mental health, and how to bridge inequalities in the field of health technology and big data. Currently, she is working on projects on (a) health apps and wearables use among the unprivileged in Singapore, (b) data absenteeism and data chauvinism on different social media platforms.Yun-Tzu CHANG
Yun-Tzu CHANG is a first-year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Before she joined HKU, she completed her Bachelor’s and M.Phil. degree in Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her current research interest and the focus of her PhD thesis is on the diasporic politics of overseas Chinese new migrants. Specifically, she intends to incorporate the extent to which and how technology is a mechanism that facilitates long-distance nationalism among overseas Chinese new migrants.
Seong Hah CHO
Seong is a final year PhD student at the Psychology department at the University of Hong Kong. His current research relates to using network analyses to predict the long term outcomes of stroke. His research interests are applying network analyses in order to understand misinformation and translate such research into actionable outcomes.
Guo (Jerry) CHENG
Guo (Jerry) CHENG is a newly admitted student in UChicago’s Master program of Computational Social Science – Economics Track. He obtained his bachelor degree at the City University of Hong Kong, majoring in Finance, minoring in Mathematics and Computing. He has a keen interest in both empirical and theoretical research in economics, finance, public policy, sociology, etc., with cutting-edge computational techniques. Specific topics include CBDC, virtual banking, anti-money laundering, labor economics, innovation, etc.
Tianwen DU
Tianwen Du is currently an Academic Master student of Economics at Wuhan University. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in economics at Wuhan University and a double degree in Computer Science and Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include digital economy, information system, and using machine learning to make predictions or help with causal inference. His past research has focused on quantitative investment strategies and international financial markets.
Naikang FENG
Naikang FENG is a PhD student in the the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. She studies policy implementation and adaption with a focus on the policy role of street-level organizations (SLO) and bureaucrats (SLB). She is now working on a project on China’s food safety regulatory reform where she uses text-as-data methods to analyze the varieties and dynamics of instrument mix employed in frontline policy implementation.
Yiqing GAN
Yiqing Gan is a postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology Department and the Centre for Population Research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests lie primarily in the fields of family demography and migration. Specific topics include (a) the construction and change of people’s childbearing desire in the current era of low fertility, and (b) the impact of migration trajectories on people’s subjective well-being. She is keen to apply computational methods to explore the two classic research fields above.
Jing GUO
Jing GUO is a doctoral student of communication studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her current research interests focus on political communication and social media, mainly with quantitative methods. Before rejoining the academia, she had 6-year working experiences in government and financial industries.
Sean GUO
Sean GUO is a current PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests are uncovering mechanisms behind misinformation spread as well as neuropsychological investigations into misinformation learning and correction. He is currently doing EEG research into how misinformation memory changes over time and is interested in diversifying his methodologies to include real world data such as social media activity and text analysis.
Xiaohui JIANG
Xiaohui JIANG is currently a Mphil student of public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is also an incoming PhD at the department of geography at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on smart city, innovation policies, and technology development.
Meng JIN
Meng JIN is a MSc student at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), majoring in development studies. Her current research focuses on informal sector and social protection, studying different social protection approaches in China. She has also conducted sustainability-related studies including climate-induced poverty, climate securitization and environmental governance. She gained her bachelor’s degree at Peking University majoring in public policy.
Siqin KANG
Siqin KANG is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong. He has obtained the degree of Mphil in Social Science from HKUST. His research interest includes politics of China, state capacity and public opinion.
Qing LAN
Qing LAN is currently a PhD student at the University of Macau. Her research interests include family and ageing, data mining and household dynamics. She is now working on a project about the influence of household structure on municipal solid waste (MSW) generation.
Zhengyi LIANG
Zhengyi LIANG is an incoming Phd student at the department of communication at UC Davis. She has great interests in computational social science and political communication. She is currently investigating the relationships between ideology and reading through large-scale data.
Baiqi LI
Baiqi LI is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests center around online incivility in Hong Kong. She is also fascinated by other information disorder behaviors such as misinformation and aggression, currently focusing on machine learning, computational communication, and quantitative methods.
Han LI
Han LI is an incoming postdoctoral researcher at the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in the School of Journalism at Fudan University. She also holds dual M.A. in Communication from Simon Fraser University and Communication University of China. Her dissertation research studied how community platform influences the exchanges of social support in online mental health communities. She is particular interested in understanding how communication technologies can be designed and used to enhance social relationships and promote health and well-being.
Jia (Jessica) LI
Jia (Jessica) LI is currently working as a scientific officer in the School of Public Health and Primary Care at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include social determinants of health, preventive intervention, and gerontechnology. She is keen to learn the methods to incorporate data science into social science and population health research.
Sinan LI
Sinan is a Master of Public Administration candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She studies climate policy, development economics and international political economy.
Wenyu LI
Wenyu LI is a PhD student in Geography and Resource Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Wenyu is funded by the Computational Social Science PhD Fellowship Scheme of CUHK. She has a background in geography monitoring and geoinformation science. Her research interest includes resilience and sustainable development of cities. She currently applies quantitative and computational methods to evaluate the process of cities and generate their optimal pathways toward achieving SDGs.
Xiaotong LI
Xiaotong LI is a Ph.D. student in the Division of Public Policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests broadly lie in health economics, primary healthcare and health policy. Currently, she is working on projects related to how various changes in policy and industry environment affect physician behaviors and how these behaviors, in turn, impact patient outcomes.
Haixin MU
Haixin MU is a Ph.D. student in School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Apart from computational social science, she is also interested in gender and women's studies. Currently she is exploring perceived authenticity following the approach of computer-mediated communication.
Hakimeh NASIRI
Hakimeh NASIRI is PhD candidate at HK PolyU, the School of Hotel & Tourism Management. She conducted a mixed-method research exploring how beauty in the context of society may become a double-edged sword. During her PhD, Hakimeh developed a data collection platform (IranQuestion.com). She is interested in using computational social method to move forward the field of Tourism Aesthetic Experience research. Also, she is active in spreading her takeaway from her learnings to under-represented intellectual community of students and non-elite community of tourism and hospitality business directors in Iran. Hakimeh ranked the Top and the First among 3449 applicants of Nationwide Master Entrance Exam in the field of Tourism Management in Iran. Before pursuing PhD, she had 10 years’ industry experience in tourism and hospitality, including social media marketing director of two nationwide tourism festivals. Moreover, Hakimeh is founder and ex-CEO of a travel business (GoToYazd.com).Marianne von Blomberg
Marianne is a Research Associate at Cologne University's Chair for Chinese Legal Culture. She examines how social credit systems strengthen, undermine, and transform the law and legal institutions in China. Currently, she is a visiting researcher at City University of Hong Kong's School of Law.
Shengbin WEI
Shengbin WEI is an MPhil student in the HKUST Social Science division. I am interested in quantitative history. I use historical multi-generational population datasets to study demographic behaviors in late imperial China. Besides traditional methods, I like exploring other approaches to study historical longitudinal datasets. I apply social network analysis to study personnel spatial mobility among officials in late imperial China with a government employee database.
Samson YUEN
Samson Yuen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He researches contentious politics, civil conflicts, public opinion, health and food politics, focusing particularly on East Asia. He holds a DPhil in Politics from Oxford University.
Xiaoqian YUE
Xiaoqian YUE is a PhD candidate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on the use of computational methods in the study of human behaviour. She uses various computational methods, including social network analysis, computational textual analysis, and machine learning. She is currently studying the diffusion of innovations in government behaviour in social media.
Zhaojin ZENG
Zhaojin ZENG is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Arts and Humanities at Duke Kunshan University (DKU). He also holds the positions of Senior Research Scientist at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and Faculty Fellow at the Data Science Research Center at DKU. His research draws on archives, quantitative data, and digital sources to examine the economic, business, and industrial history of modern China and the world. His teams are currently developing digital humanities projects on China's factory history and on global data governance practices.
Yujie LI
Yujie Li is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include computational social science, political communication, and social networks. Currently, he is working on some projects that mainly use agent-based modeling and longitudinal network analysis method.
Li LIAO
Li Liao is a PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong. He studies authoritarianism and public administration. He’s interested in data visualization and text as data.Howard/Mathematica
All Participants
Terri Adams, Ph.D.
Terri Adams, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University, and she currently serves as the Associate Dean for Research with the Graduate School. Additionally, she serves as the Deputy Director of the NOAA Cooperative Science Center for Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology (NCAS-M) at the university. In addition to her administrative duties, Dr. Adams’ conducts research that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examine issues that have both theoretical and practical implications. Her specific research interests include emergency management, policing, violence, and the impact of trauma and disasters on individuals and organizations. Her most recent work centers on the decision-making processes of both individuals and organizations in the face of crisis events. Her most recent publication, Policing in Disasters: Stress, Resilience, and the Challenges of Emergency Management is co-authored with Dr. Leigh Anderson.
Naniette H. Coleman
Naniette H. Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and a UC-National Lab In-Residence Graduate Fellow at Los Alamos National Lab. Since 2016, Naniette has directed the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy at Berkeley. Naniette is an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Center for Long-term Cybersecurity, and the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at Berkeley as well as the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. Naniette’s research sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically Naniette’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as work for two international organizations, and two universities.
Nicole Jenkins, Ph.D.
Nicole is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University. She received her Doctoral degree from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in the Department of Sociology in 2020. She obtained an M.A. in Sociology in 2017 and B.A. in Sociology in 2015 from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. In 2013, she received an A.A. in Criminal Justice after serving six years of active duty in the United States Air Force as Military Police. She is a proud advocate for social justice and is committed to teaching with such emphasis in topics such as race and ethnic studies, sociology of poverty, problems of the black community, and research methods.
Amy Yeboah Quarkume, Ph.D.
Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume, affectionately known as Dr. A, is a daughter of Africa, scholar, filmmaker, data scientist and Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. She holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies, two Masters of Arts in Sociology and African American Studies, and a forthcoming Masters of Science degree in Data Science. Dr. Quarkume is an Andrew Mellon New Direction Fellow, Mellon Just Futures Initiative invited Social Justice Consortium partner, invited presenter for Scribe Video Center’s Storyville series by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Center for Atmospheric Research Innovator Fellow, and a White House Initiative HBCU All-Star Campus Mentor. Her work as a data scientist, centers around AI Bias, data inequality and environmental justice. Currently, she employs an Africana Studies framework to examine the intersections of race and technology. Dr. A is presently, co-facilitating the creation of the Center for Applied Data Science and Analytics (CADSA) advancing Howard University’s first major effort in becoming a hub for data science social impact research and training for the next generation of data scientists. She has published in the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color; Mosaic Magazine; Black Scholar; CLA Journal and is currently working on her second book project Data Pollution and Savage Algorithms. She has also contributed to and been an invited guest on BET News, PBS NewsHour, Direct TV, American Radio Works, Al Jazeera America’s The Stream, Philadelphia Community Access Media, Roland Martin TV One News Show, and Mother Jones.
Anthony K. Wutoh, Ph.D., R.Ph.
Anthony K. Wutoh, Ph.D., R.Ph. is the Provost of Howard University. He previously served in various roles at the University including as Dean of the College of Pharmacy and Assistant Provost for International Programs. Dr. Wutoh has also served as Director for the Center for Minority Health Services Research, and the Center of Excellence. Dr. Wutoh received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1987. He then completed a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy, and Doctor of Philosophy in Pharmacy Administration (Pharmacoepidemiology) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore School of Pharmacy. Dr. Wutoh has varied research interests including pharmacoepidemiology, international health, health services/outcomes research, and evaluation of large population databases, particularly in the area of AIDS and HIV infection in older patients. Dr. Wutoh has received over $50 million dollars in grant funding from several sources including; NIH, CDC, USAID, HRSA, AHRQ and foundations, and has published numerous research articles on HIV disease, medication adherence, disease state management, and various other topics in respected research journals, including; the Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Services Research, AIDS & Behavior, the Journal of the National Medical Association, and the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association.
Paula Moreno
Paula Moreno founded and directs Manos Visibles, a non-profit foundation established to promote social inclusion and peace building in Colombia. Moreno served on the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees. From 2007 to 2010, she served as the Minister of Culture in Colombia—the first Afro-Colombian woman and the youngest person to lead a cabinet-level ministry in the history of the country. In 2010, Moreno was selected by the Council of the Americas as one of the most influential young leaders in the region. The same year, she received the Order of Saint Charles for her work in government. In 2011, she was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by Mexico’s President Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa for contributing to the improvement of Mexico-Colombia relations. She was a Yale World Fellow and has been a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow for Urban and Regional Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Moreno holds a degree in Italian language and culture from the Italian Institute of Culture and a bachelor of science in industrial engineering from the Autonomous University of Colombia. Studying the sustainable use of biodiversity by local communities in Colombia, Moreno earned a master of philosophy in management studies at the University of Cambridge.
Safiya Umoja Noble, Ph.D.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble is an internet studies scholar and Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she serves as the Co-Founder and Faculty Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She holds affiliations in the School of Education & Information Studies, and is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she is a Commissioner on the Oxford Commission on AI & Good Governance (OxCAIGG). In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (also known as the "Genius Award") for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient. Dr. Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment, and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the nation’s oldest Black think tank. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications.
LaVerne H. Council
LaVerne H. Council began her career as an "intrapreneur" over 35 years ago, developing a name as a transformational leader; focusing people over product, outcomes over activity. She is a global operations and information technology strategist and change agent, and her experience as a global executive provides her a unique perspective as an influencer, advisor, and coach. She is a founder and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Emerald One and a member of the board of directors for ConMed, Mathematica, March of Dimes, Concentrix, and GirlUp. LaVerne’s work as a global executive leader with organizations like Grant Thornton, Johnson & Johnson; Dell, Inc.; and Ernst & Young, LLC give her a unique perspective on the opportunities and challenges faced by both CxO executives and their employees. In her role as the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Information and Technology and Chief Information Officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, LaVerne not only created the technology strategy, investment, and implementation for the largest civilian agency in the federal government, she transformed the executive leadership team to the most culturally diverse in the federal government. LaVerne focuses on the health of an organization, the cohesion of the team, and the strength of the individual, weaving the professional path with personal development. A volunteer since the age of 5, LaVerne advises leaders and teams on servant leadership, spotlighting the unique gifts each person brings to the team and using oneself to improve the lives of others.
Shawndra B. Hill, Ph.D.
Dr. Shawndra Hill joined the Marketing Division at Columbia Business School as a part-time senior lecturer in September 2020. She received her PhD and MPhil in Information Systems from NYU's Stern School of Business in 2007 and 2003 respectively, and her BS in Mathematics from Spelman College and her BEE in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1995. Presently, Shawndra Hill is also a Principal Scientist and Manager in Tech. Prior to joining industry, she was a professor in the Operations and Information Management Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Broadly, she studies data mining, machine learning and statistical relational learning and their alignment with business problems. Specifically, she researches the value to companies of mining data on how consumers interact with each other on online platforms — for targeted marketing, advertising, health and fraud detection purposes. Her current research focuses on cross channel advertising and the resulting interactions between TV content and online (ad click) behaviors.
Karen Levy, Ph.D., J.D.
Karen Levy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, and associate member of the faculty of Cornell Law School. She researches how law and technology interact to regulate social life, with particular focus on social and organizational aspects of surveillance. Much of Dr. Levy's research analyzes the uses of monitoring for social control in various contexts, from long-haul trucking to intimate relationships. She is also interested in how data collection uniquely impacts, and is contested by, marginalized populations. Dr. Levy is also a fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute in New York City. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University and a J.D. from Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Dr. Levy previously served as a law clerk in the United States Federal Courts.
Brandeis Marshall, Ph.D.
Brandeis teaches, speaks and writes about the impact of data practices on technology and society. Her work contributes to the data engineering, data science, and data/computer science education fields. Through Dr. Marshall’s data education firm DataedX, she guides current tech workers in building data equity skills. Her first book, Data Conscience: Algorithmic Siege on our Humanity, is expected to be released later in 2022. It unearths the interlocking computational and civic implications of data on digital processes, structures and institutions. Dr. Marshall holds a Ph.D. and Master of Science in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Rochester. She is on sabbatical leave from Spelman College, where she is a Full Professor of Computer Science.
Kyla McMullen, Ph.D.
Dr. Kyla McMullen earned her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where she was also a Meyerhoff Scholar. She earned her Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan (2007-2012). While earning her Ph.D. she was also a faculty member at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. At Wayne State University she taught computer literacy courses to over 2,000 students. Dr. McMullen is the first (and currently the only) woman of color to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. She is currently a tenured faculty member in the University of Florida’s Computer & Information Sciences & Engineering Department. Dr. McMullen has a personal commitment to encouraging women and minorities to pursue careers in computing and other STEM fields. She is the author of "Beautiful, Black, and Brainy" and "Brilliant is the New Black" which showcase hundreds of exceptional young African Americans who excel in STEM fields and don’t fit the typical "scientist" stereotype.
Randal Pinkett, Ph.D.
Randal Pinkett, Ph.D., MBA, has established himself as an entrepreneur, speaker, author and scholar. He is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of BCT Partners, a global, multimillion-dollar research, training, consulting, technology, and data analytics firm. BCT’s mission is to provide insights about diverse people that lead to equity. The company has been recognized by Forbes as one of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms, Ernst & Young as EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Manage HR Magazine as a Top 10 Firm for Diversity & Inclusion, the Black Enterprise BE100s list of the nation’s largest African American-owned businesses, and the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. Dr. Pinkett is an expert in several areas relating to emerging technologies, "big data" analytics, social innovation, culture, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and is a regular contributor on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox Business News. An international public speaker, he is the author and co-author of several books including Data-Driven DEI: The Tools and Metrics You Need to Analyze, Measure and Improve Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Black Faces in White Places: 10 Game-Changing Strategies to Achieve Success and Find Greatness, Black Faces in High Places: 10 Strategic Actions for Black Professionals to Reach the Top and Stay There, Campus CEO: The Student Entrepreneur’s Guide to Launching a Multimillion-Dollar Business, and No-Money Down CEO: How to Start Your Dream Business with Little or No Cash. He holds five degrees including: a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rutgers University; a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oxford in England; and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering, MBA, and Ph.D. from MIT. Most notably, he was the first and only African-American to receive the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship at Rutgers University; he was inducted to the Academic All-America Hall of Fame, as a former high jumper, long jumper, sprinter and captain of the men’s track and field team; and he was the winner of NBC’s hit reality television show, "The Apprentice." A lifetime member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated, he is happily married to Natasha Williams-Pinkett and the proud father of two daughters, Amira and Aniyah, and two sons, Jaz and Marquis.
Jeffrey Robinson, Ph.D.
Jeffrey A. Robinson, Ph.D. is an award-winning business school professor, international speaker and entrepreneur. Since 2008, he has been a leading faculty member at Rutgers Business School where he is an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship and the Academic Director of The Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development and research fellow of the Rutgers Advanced Institute for the Study of Entrepreneurship and Development. Through his research, business leadership and community activities he makes direct impacts corporate workplaces, entrepreneurs and economic development policy in the state of New Jersey and beyond. Emerging from his pioneering research, the New Jersey Social Entrepreneurship Institute and the CUEED Pipeline to Inclusive Innovation are national and international models for economic development and social problem solving using entrepreneurial approaches. He leads research on four National Science Foundation funded research projects related to inclusive innovation including the GEM Inclusion in Innovation Initiative (GEM i4). Dr. Robinson is the author of many articles and books on the topics of management, entrepreneurship and workforce diversity. He is the co-author along with Dr. Randal Pinkett of Black Faces in White Places: 10 Game-Changing Strategies to Achieve Success and Find Greatness (published by Harper Collins Leadership). In 2022, he and Dr. Pinkett will release Black Faces in High Places: 10 Strategic Actions for Black Professionals to Reach the Top and Stay There (also to be published by Harper Collins Leadership).
Andre Brock, Ph.D.
André Brock is an Associate Professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, Black technoculture, and digital media. His scholarship examines Black and white representations in social media, videogames, weblogs, and other digital media. He has also published influential research on digital research methods. His award-winning book, "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures", theorizes Black everyday lives as Black joy, mediated by networked digital technologies.
Courtney D. Cogburn, Ph.D.
Associate Professor Courtney D. Cogburn employs a transdisciplinary research strategy to improve the characterization and measurement of racism and in examining the role of racism in the production of racial inequities in health. She is also conducting research exploring the use of emerging technologies, including computational social science to examine patterns and psychosocial effects of cultural racism and how virtual reality experiences can lead to changes in attitudes, social perception and engagement (empathy, racial bias, structural competence and behavior). Dr. Cogburn is the lead creator of 1000 Cut Journey, an immersive virtual reality racism experience that was developed in collaboration with the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University and which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018. She is on the faculty of the Columbia Population Research Center and a core member of the Data Science Institute where she also co-chairs the Computational Social Science working group. Dr. Cogburn is also a faculty affiliate of the Center on African American Politics and Society. She directs the Cogburn Research Group and co-directs the Justice Equity + Tech (JE+T) Laboratory at Columbia University. Dr. Cogburn completed postdoctoral training at Harvard University in the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar Program and at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in Education and Psychology, and MSW from the University of Michigan and her BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia. She is also a board member of the International Center Advocates Against Discrimination.
Susana Edjang
Susana Edjang is a peace and security, international development, global health and policy expert who recently served as Minister Counselor on Security Council Affairs, at the Permanent Mission of Equatorial Guinea to the United Nations (UN), in New York. Previously, she was a Policy & Advocacy Specialist at the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) Liaison Office to the African Union and the Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; was Economic, Social and Development Affairs Officer and as Project Manager for his signature movement Every Woman Every Child at the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. Before that, Susana was H4+ (UNAIDS, UNICEF, UNFPA, UN Women, WHO and the World Bank) Coordinator at the UNFPA to advance the health-related Millennium Development Goals by 2015, parliamentary advisor on global health and climate change at the UK Parliament, and promoted the institutional partnership between UK health institutions and their counterparts in Africa and Asia at THET, a UK NGO. Originally from Equatorial Guinea, Susana has co-founded and participates in various initiatives on global health and African Diaspora community innovation in Africa, Europe and Latin America. Susana is co-author of "Working in International Health" (OUP).
Kyla McMullen, Ph.D.
Dr. Kyla McMullen earned her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where she was also a Meyerhoff Scholar. She earned her Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan (2007-2012). While earning her Ph.D. she was also a faculty member at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. At Wayne State University she taught computer literacy courses to over 2,000 students. Dr. McMullen is the first (and currently the only) woman of color to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. She is currently a tenured faculty member in the University of Florida’s Computer & Information Sciences & Engineering Department. Dr. McMullen has a personal commitment to encouraging women and minorities to pursue careers in computing and other STEM fields. She is the author of "Beautiful, Black, and Brainy" and "Brilliant is the New Black" which showcase hundreds of exceptional young African Americans who excel in STEM fields and don’t fit the typical \"scientist\" stereotype.
Bhaso Ndzendze, Ph.D.
Dr Bhaso Ndzendze is a Senior Lecturer and Head of Department: Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg. Dr Ndzendze is also founder and head of the 4IR and Digital Policy Research Unit at the University of Johannesburg, and a digital policy fellow at the Berlin-based African Policy Research Institute. He is author of two books on artificial intelligence and international relations and is editor in chief of the journal Digital Policy Studies. His scholarship and opinion on technology, society and digital policy has appeared in numerous edited books and the press.
Danielle Olson, Ph.D.
Dr. Danielle M. Olson is an AI/ML Human Factors Researcher at Apple based in Seattle, WA. She collaborates with technical and creative partners to inform how machine learning-powered products are built at Apple. She leads research to better understand the infinite ways human experiences with technologies can vary so that she can advocate for humans throughout the design and development process.
Evans Osabuohien, Ph.D.
Evans Osabuohien is a Professor of Economics and the Head of the Department of Economics & Development Studies at Covenant University, Nigeria. He is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation(AvH) and Swedish Institute. He coordinates the Research Linkage Programme between Witten/Herdecke University, Germany and Covenant University, Nigeria with funding from AvH. His primary research interest centres around development, institutional economics, and agricultural/land economics.
Lebogang Ramafoko
Lebogang is currently the Executive Director of Oxfam South Africa. Lebogang is an outspoken feminist thinker and strategist, a sought-after speaker, facilitator, and trainer who is passionate about social justice particularly for young women and girls. Lebogang combines her own life experience as a black woman who grew up in Apartheid South Africa, thrust into activism at an early age and the skills she acquired through her training to speak out against injustice wherever she goes. She is one of the prominent media commentators and advocates on various social issues facing women in South Africa.
Yahya Shaikh, M.D.
Dr. Yahya Shaikh is a physician specializing in primary care and public health. His public health practice and training includes human rights and humanitarian assistance. His research has focused on the application of decolonizing methodologies in research. He previously served on a federal Task Force where he was focused on ensuring that the future of technology and health is equitably distributed. He is currently at MITRE where he is helping shape participatory methodologies for research and policy development.
Howard University
Howard University has long held a commitment to the study of disadvantaged persons in American society and throughout the world. The goal is the elimination of inequities related to race, color, social, economic and political circumstances. As the only truly comprehensive predominantly Black university, Howard is one of the major engineers of change in our society. Through its traditional and cutting-edge academic programs, the University seeks to improve the circumstances of all people in the search for peace and justice on earth.
Mathematica
Mathematica is the insight partner that illuminates the path to progress for public- and private-sector changemakers. We apply expertise at the intersection of data, methods, policy, and practice, translating big questions into deep insights that weather the toughest tests. Driven by our mission to improve public well-being, we collaborate closely with our clients to improve programs, refine strategies, and enhance understanding.
SICSS-Howard/Mathematica
The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS) were created to provide free training to the next generation of researchers at the intersection of social science and data science— and to incubate cutting-edge research across disciplinary boundaries. Participants at each institute a) hear lectures by leading scholars in the field on a range of subjects from automated text analysis to experiments on social media platforms; b) participate in group training exercises; and c) launch interdisciplinary research projects. SICSS thus aims to provide open, high-quality training in computational social science to researchers around the world in order to accelerate the growth of the field and ensure that it develops practices that are in the long-term interests of science and society. Lectures are live-streamed to all SICSS sites from a central location and supported via a vibrant online community that includes open-source education materials that can be used for further self-study or as a model for computational social science courses within other organizations.
Africa Center for Strategic Studies
Since its inception in 1999, the Africa Center has served as a forum for research, academic programs, and the exchange of ideas with the aim of enhancing citizen security by strengthening the effectiveness and accountability of African institutions.
BCT Partners
At BCT Partners, our greatest strength is our people. We care passionately about creating a diverse and equitable society. We combine this commitment with specialized expertise around topics such as unconscious bias and inclusive management and use insights from big data, machine learning, and precision analytics to develop solutions that lead to societal change.
Campus-wide Institutional Survey Research and Data Collection (Graduate Division UC Berkeley)
The Graduate Division is committed to expanding the diversity of Berkeley’s student body, and supporting students from all backgrounds, especially those from underrepresented groups, in their academic, personal and professional journeys.
Cite Black Women
It's simple: Cite Black Women. We have been producing knowledge since we blessed this earth. We theorize, we innovate, we revolutionize the world. We do not need mediators. We do not need interpreters. It's time to disrupt the canon. It's time to upturn the erasures of history. It's time to give credit where credit is due. We must reconfigure the politics of knowledge production by engaging in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women’s transnational intellectual production.
Just Tech program (SSRC)
The Just Tech program foregrounds questions of power, justice, and the public impact of new technologies, investigating evidence of bias and harms while imagining and creating more just technological futures. Through the Just Tech Fellowship and digital platform, the program creates a new ecosystem of research and social engagement, one that enriches public discourse, informs public policy, and radically imagines just futures where social and public interests drive technological change, instead of the other way around.
MITRE
At MITRE, we solve problems for a safer world. Through our federally funded R&D centers and public-private partnerships, we work across government to tackle challenges to the safety, stability, and well-being of our nation.
Research Data Management Team, UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley's Research Data Management Program is a collaborative campus-wide program led jointly by Research IT and the Library to help faculty, staff, and students manage research data throughout the research process. With our partners across campus, we offer a discipline-agnostic service that supports researchers as they find, generate, store, share, and archive their data.
vary CSS
Computational Social Science is an exciting new field of research, and we think it should be diverse and inclusive as it grows. To this end, we provide links to resources, which are intended to support new and emerging CSS scholars currently underrepresented in the field. We also maintain a database of these scholars, which can be used for collaboration and networking, or for finding new voices to speak at conferences, on panels, and in workshop tutorials. These resources are compiled and updated by the CSS community.
Andrea Adams
Andrea Adams, Ph.D., J.D., M.B.A., is an Assistant Professor at University of the District of Columbia whose research is focused on data privacy, crowdsourcing, and gender-based violence. Andrea teaches ethics in the Criminal Justice Bachelors/Homeland Security Master’s program. Andrea is a Board Advisor for Red Dot Foundation, a crowdsourcing smartphone app that maps gender-based violence.
Nayantara Biswas
Nayantara Biswas is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Economics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her research examines the impact of public policies on maternal and child health and labor outcomes in developing countries. She uses data-driven techniques in evidence-based policy research with a focus on equity.
Renee Clarke
Renee Clarke is a clinical public health professional at University of California, Berkeley. She is passionate about improving the healthcare system in the United States, globally and hopes to combat the many healthcare disparities many systems encounter. She loves connecting with like minded individuals of all disciplines.
Rumeysanur Erikli Dogan
Rumeysanur Erikli Dogan is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at the Marmara University. She received a double major in the Departments of Political Science and International Relations, and History at the Bogazici University, and earned her M.A in the Sociology and Social Anthropology Department at the Central European University.
Grace Flores-Robles
Grace Flores-Robles is a fourth year Psychology Ph.D. student at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her research examines how people see and sanction system-level injustice.
Erica Goto
Erica Goto is a human geographer who uses quantitative and qualitative data to understand the vulnerability, risk, and adaptive capacity of communities living in hazard-prone areas, and stakeholders' co-production of actionable knowledge.
Rebecca Hsu
Rebecca Hsu is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Howard University and their research interests are focused on crime and especially intimate partner violence.
Kristina Lee
Kristina E. Lee is a Ph.D. student in sociology at Northwestern University. Her research explores questions surrounding the utility of the state for addressing inequity through a focus on political sociology, race, transnationalism, and Blackness in Latin America. Her dissertation analyzes Mexican and Peruvian state strategies for Afro-descendant inclusion.
Daniel Lobo
Daniel Lobo is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley. As a cultural sociologist, he is interested in understanding the cultural processes of schools and firms that lead to the reproduction of inequality in education and the labor market.
Amber Mackey
Amber Mackey is pursuing a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work examines policy, protest, and race and ethnic politics. In addition to working in the academy, Amber is dedicated to learning and teaching about data collection and advocacy work to others within her community.
Imani Munyaka
Imani Munyaka is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Her research focuses on social equity in the areas of security, privacy and usability.
Getamesay Shiwenzu Nigussie
Getamesay Nigussie is an environmentalist and development practitioner with extensive research and development experience in agriculture, natural resources, and development studies. Getamesay is currently a Ph.D. student in Environmental science at Addis Ababa University, College of Natural and Computational Sciences with research interests in sustainable groundwater and land management. Getamesay also has expertise in development studies, agricultural policy, and agrarian transformations.
Susana Quiros
Susana Quiros, has a Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from Pennsylvania State University. As an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Missouri in the Department of Public Health, she investigates how legal status influences immigrant health, and how anti-immigrant policies may have multigenerational effects.
Asha Yadav
Asha Yadav is a doctoral candidate in Special Education and Clinical Sciences at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on policies and practices that influence the abilities of families with children with disabilities from underprivileged and marginalized communities to attain adequate access and use of services in early childhood.
Bing-Jie Yen
Bing-Jie’s scholarly niche is at the intersection of public health, economics, and data science. Her research applies quantitative method to healthcare accessibility and equity for vulnerable populations. In her ongoing dissertation at Indiana University Bloomington, she makes longitudinal assessments of mental healthcare utilization and the risk of suicidal behaviors with causal inference methods.
Naniette H. Coleman
Naniette H. Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and a multi-year UC-National Laboratory Graduate Fellow (Los Alamos). She is the only social scientist selected for this distinction in the history of the program. Since 2016, Naniette has directed the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy (Coleman Research Lab) at Berkeley. Naniette is an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Center for Long-term Cybersecurity, and the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at Berkeley as well as the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. Naniette’s work sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically, Naniette’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as work for two international organizations, and two universities.
Akira Bell
Akira Bell is Mathematica’s Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. She oversees technology infrastructure and governance and leads strategy for delivering innovation in support of client and internal business function needs. Before joining Mathematica in 2018, Bell led the IT function for Aramark’s higher education business unit. Previously, she served as a divisional Chief Information Officer within the Hess Corporation and held various program management, application development, and technology consulting roles with UnitedHealth, IBM Global Services, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. While at Hess, she guided IT strategy during the acquisition of its retail division by Marathon Speedway and was part of the team recognized by CIO magazine with a CIO100 Award for delivering innovative IT solutions during Hurricane Sandy recovery. Bell earned a B.S.E. in Operations Research from Princeton University, where she serves as an alumni mentor for women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Calvin Hadley
Calvin J. Hadley serves as the Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the President at Howard University. Hadley works to broker strategic partnerships that advance the University's mission: Truth and Service. Since joining Howard in 2014, he's negotiated numerous partnerships along several student programs. The most notable of these include: Howard's partnership with Google and Amazon Studios to create the Howard West Campus in Silicon Valley and the Howard Entertainment Campus in Hollywood, a partnership with the District of Columbia Public Schools which led to the creation of a dual-enrollment program that allows high school juniors and seniors to earn college credit at Howard University, and a lecture series with Congressman Elijah Cummings, former Director of the FBI James Comey, former Mayor of Washington, D.C. Vincent Gray, and others.India
All Participants
Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
IIIT Hyderabad
Dr. Kiran Garimella
Rutgers University
Dr. Hemank Lamba
Dataminr
Prof. Rajiv Ratn Shah
IIIT Delhi
Ms. Megha Arora
Palantir Technologies
Prof. Jisun AN
Singapore Management University
Ms. Megha Arora
Palantir Technologies
Dr. Monojit Choudhary
Microsoft Research
Dr. Kiran Garimella
Rutgers University
Prof. Srijan Kumar
Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Hemank Lamba
Dataminr
Prof. Aditya Medury
IIT Kanpur
Dr. Niharika Sachdeva
Naukri.com
Prof. Rajiv Ratn Shah
IIIT DelhiJIAS/IPATC
All Participants
malebo sephodi
malebo sephodi (she/they) is a South African Feminist writer and interdisciplinary scholar. She is a doctoral candidate in the Information Systems Department at the University of Cape Town. She is interested in the intersections of society and digital technology.
Zimasa Ndamase
Zimasa is an IS Professional with 14 years of work experience. She has expertise in software development, Business Intelligence, Data Analytics, Data Management and Data Governance. Zimasa is an Information Systems PhD Candidate at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on the challenges of implementing Data Governance Programmes in organizations. Her other research interests are in ICT4D and e-Government.
Geci Karuri-Sebina
Dr Geci Karuri-Sebina is a scholar-practitioner based in Johannesburg working in the intersection between people, place and technological change. She is a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Witwatersrand’s School of Governance where she is hosting the Civic Tech Innovation Network and coordinating the establishment of a new African Centre of Excellence in Digital Governance. Geci is also associated with the UCT African Centre for Cities, South African Cities Network, and Singularity University’s Global Faculty on the future of cities and governance. Geci holds Bachelors’ degrees in Computer Science and Sociology (Iowa); Masters’ degrees in Urban Planning and Architecture from UCLA (Los Angeles); and a PhD from the Wits University (Joburg). Geci has a diverse background, spanning a range of foresight, policy, innovation and practice topics, and has worked extensively in R&D, government and civic organisations with a focus in Africa and the global South. She currently serves as the Vice-Chair of AfricaLICS (the community of innovation scholars in Africa) and Regional Advisor of the Africa Innovation Summit. Geci is also a curator in The Emergence Network, and is involved in editorial boards of: the African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation & Development (AJSTID; Taylor & Francis), the African Journal of Information and Communication (AJIC; Wits), and foresight journal (Emerald). Geci currently lectures on innovation systems policy for developing countries, and innovation systems for social purposes at Wits.
Sibongiseni Thotsejane Tunzelana
Dr Sibongiseni Thotsejane Tunzelana is a founding member of multi-award-winning FlavaLite Innovations. She completed her Ph.D in Information Systems at the University of Cape Town (UCT) on the topic of “Web Analytics strategy: a model for adopting and implementing advanced Web Analytics” in conjunction with Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. She has more than 21 years of experience in ICT of which more than 16 years have been in ICT Management, System Development, Innovation and Analysis in large organisations and in start-up companies. She has been a Board Member of listed companies and non-profit companies (NPCs). She served in the Social and Ethics Committee. She has led ICT strategic planning and development, project management and policy development for the public and private sector. She has experience of leading small to medium-sized service development ICT projects. She was a Commissioner in the South African Presidential Commission on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0 / 4IR). She is one of the 2019 Mail & Guardian Women Changing South Africa in Science, Technology, Engineering and Innovation (STEMI). She is the 2019 GovTech SITA ICT Public Service ICT Awards: Digital Leadership and Digital Woman Gold Award Winner. She is a winner of the 2019 South African Women in Science Awards (SAWiSA) Distinguished Young Woman Researcher Award for Research and Innovation. She pioneered a Research Forum at the WSU Buffalo City Campus (BCC), Potsdam. She is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at UCT. She is also co-supervising Ph.D. Students at UCT. She is a frequent keynote speaker nationally and internationally in leaders’ conferences on big data analytics, cybersecurity and other fourth industrial revolution (4IR) related themes.
Chenai Chair
Chenai Chair is the Special Advisor on Africa Mradi Innovation at Mozilla Foundation. She is an expert on the intersection of digital technology and gender. She has built her expertise with extensive experience in work that is focused on understanding the impact of technology in society through research and public policy assessment. Her work draws on principles of feminism in assessing digital technology. She has developed projects focused on privacy, data protection and AI as Mozilla 2019/2020 fellow - available on mydatarights.africa. She also led the research on Women's Rights Online as the Web Foundation's gender and digital rights research manager. She has worked on issues of access within the digital divide as a Researcher at Research ICT Africa (RIA). She also works as a consultant on research projects focused on digital rights, including assessing the state of digital identity in Zimbabwe and developed recommendations for digital rights literacy in Southern Africa. Chenai holds a Masters in Social Science degree focused on Global Studies from the University of Cape Town.
Bhaso Ndzendze
Dr Bhaso Ndzendze is a Senior Lecturer and Head of Department: Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg. Dr Ndzendze is also founder and head of the 4IR and Digital Policy Research Unit at the University of Johannesburg, and a digital policy fellow at the Berlin-based African Policy Research Institute. He is author of two books on artificial intelligence and international relations and is editor in chief of the journal Digital Policy Studies. His scholarship and opinion on technology, society and digital policy has appeared in numerous edited books and the press.
Tendani Mulanga Chimboza
Tendani Mulanga Chimboza is studying towards a PhD in information systems (IS). She holds a Masters in Communications from the University of the Western Cape. Her research activities revolve around digital ethics, ICTs for Social Justice, ICT Policy, and Dimension 2 of the CMM [Cybersecurity Culture and Society].
Vukosi Marivate
Prof. Vukosi Marivate is the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science. Vukosi works on developing Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of his work over the last few years has been in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Vukosi's work in this area focuses on techniques to improve tools for and availability of data for local languages or low resource languages. Vukosi is a co-founder of Deep Learning Indaba (https://deeplearningindaba.com/). He currently serves as a chief investigator on the Masakhane NLP project (https://www.masakhane.io/) and on the steering committee of the Lacuna Fund (https://lacunafund.org/). As part of his vision for Data Science, Vukosi is interested in Data Science for Social Impact (https://dsfsi.github.io/), using local challenges as a springboard for research. In this area, Vukosi has worked on projects in science, energy, public safety and utilities. Vukosi is a co-founder of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning.
Lindiwe Matlali
Lindiwe Matlali is the Founder and CEO of Africa Teen Geeks; the largest computer science non-profit organization in Africa which aims to educate, inspire and equip young people with skills, resources and experience to pursue STEM careers and close the opportunity gap through quality education. Lindiwe is also the founder and CEO of Apodytes(Pty)Ltd, an award winning software development company which specializes in Software development and VR/AR/MR game development, 3D animations, simulations for training in defense, transportation, mining and aerospace and education sectors.
Sabelo Mhlambi
Sabelo Mhlambi is a founder at Bantucracy and his work focuses on Decolonial AI and the use of African Indigenous Philosophy in shaping Ethical AI Policy and the production of Ethical AI in Sub-Saharan Africa
Adriana Marais
Dr Adriana Marais has a background in research, her award-winning PhD and postdoctoral work in quantum biology focused on photosynthesis and the origins of the building blocks of life in space. She is an internationally renowned advocate for off-world exploration, and has given hundreds of talks to audiences on all seven continents of this planet, as well as been featured in documentaries including AOL’s ‘Citizen Mars’, and CNN’s ‘Africa’s Space Race’. Adriana is currently a Director at the Foundation for Space Development Africa, developing Africa’s first mission to the Moon, the Africa2Moon Project. She is Scientific Moderator on Space Resources with the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator, and Chair of Space Sciences at Tod'Aérs Aeronautics and Space Research. She is also Faculty at the Singularity University and Duke Corporate Education. In 2019, Adriana founded Proudly Human, and she is currently leading the organisation’s Off-World Project: a series of off-grid habitation experiments in the most extreme environments on the planet, in preparation for life on the Moon, Mars and beyond, as well as a sustainable future on Earth.
Tapiwa Chagonda
Tapiwa Chagonda completed his doctoral studies in 2011 which were focusing on the survival strategies of workers in Harare, Zimbabwe during the 2000s – Zimbabwe’s turbulent decade of hyperinflation and political crisis. In January 2013, Prof Chagonda was appointed a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. In 2017, he was promoted to Associate Professor. He is the Head of the Centre for Data Ethics (CDE) under the Institute of Intelligent Systems (IIS) at the University of Johannesburg and is also the Vice-Chair of UJ’s Senate Research Ethics Committee. Prof Tapiwa Chagonda is a passionate teacher and in 2020, he was awarded the Faculty of Humanities Innovation in Teaching Award.
Franklin Tchakounte
Franklin Tchakounte is an Associate Professor and researcher in computer science with more than 10 years of experience in cybersecurity and data science with a strong background in distributed systems. He received his M.Sc. in Computer engineering from the University of Ngaoundere (Cameroon, 2010) and then his PhD Degree in Mobile Security from the University of Bremen (Germany, 2015). He authored books, book chapters and several research papers in the area of cyber security. He is the founder of the Cybersecurity with Computational and Artificial Intelligence (CyComAI, www.cycomai.com) company. He is fellow of DAAD Staff Exchange in Sub-Saharan Africa, Research Mobility grants in Ministry of Higher Education in Cameroon, and WebWeWant F.A.S.T project. Devoted to volunteering in reviewing and conference involvement, he is currently (senior) member of EAI, ISOC SIG Cybersecurity, and ISO SIG CyberSecurity Training and Education. He is currently Cameroonian representative of Responsibility in AI in Africa (RAIN) and his interests include cyber security and artificial intelligence. For now, he proposes strategies for digital governance and transformations and is active to design responsible AI security tools relying on collective intelligence from social technologies around people.
Suhem Parack
Suhem Parack is a Staff Developer Advocate for Academic Research at Twitter and helps students and researchers understand how to get Twitter data for their research.
Sarah Mulombo Mulaji
Sarah Mulombo Mulaji is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, Department of Information Systems. Sarah is also a Senior Teaching and Research Assistant in the same department since 22020. Sarah's research interests involve information & cybersecurity management and distributed systems, like Blockchain, appplications in organisations and society. Sarah has co-authored some journal articles and conference papers.
Timothy Khan Aikins
Timothy Khan Aikins is a PhD candidate in Conservation Biology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Timothy is also Lecturer at the Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Management, University for Development Studies, Ghana. He is an Ecologist and work mainly on the interaction between animals, plants and soil. Timothy has an interest in ornithology and currently researching on the costs and benefits to trees hosting sociable weaver nest in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa.
Sisanda Nkoala
Dr Sisanda Nkoala is an interdisciplinary scholar with interests in language, rhetoric, media studies, and multlingualism. She is a senior lecturer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and holds a PhD in rhetoric studies from the University of Cape Town. Dr Nkoala is a former award winning broadcast journalist.
Aubrey Mpungose
Aubrey Mpungose is a PhD student at the University of KwaZulu Natal. He is interested in social/political theory, political participation, neighbourhood contexts and behaviour/outcomes, and the broader field of political economy.
Phelokazi Mkungeka
Phelokazi Mkungeka is a second year Master of Social Science with specialisation in Sociology student at the University of the Free State. I work at Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Future at UFS we work in collaboration with the National Department of Health to provide weekly updates of COVID-19. We are part of the social listening teams that deal with COVID-19 to provide weekly updates.
Samson Olaoluwa Faboye
Samson Faboye is pursing a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Johannesburg. His research investigates and portends the future relevance of traditional governance systems within the context of South African Urbanity.
Zintathu Mazamane
Zintathu Mazamane is a managing director and development Specialist at Nzeru Development Solutions - a consulting firm that provides advisory services related to business and project development. She is also a candidate for a master of urban studies in urban management at Witwatersrand University. Her interests lie in promoting inclusive growth and equality by addressing structural biases embed in institutions and processes.
Barbara N Kayondo
Barbara N Kayondo is PhD student at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research investigates how a mobile application can be used to enhance Electronic Health Information System's compliance with Ugandan privacy regulations. She is also a lecturer of Information Systems.
LOIC ELNATHAN TIOKOU FANGANG
Elnathan Tiokou is a Junior researcher who holds an MSc degree in Data Science from AFRICAN INSTITUTE FOR MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES (AIMS-CAMEROON). He is interested in the application of Data Science to improve social goods. Aside from Mathematical Sciences, he inspires people with his tales, experiences, and accomplishments on a daily basis (LinkedIn and YouTube). He considers himself an experimenter and is open to options both within and outside of his field of studies, such as scholarships, internships, mentorships, and a variety of other opportunities.
Angela Chukunzira
Angela is affiliated to the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. Her research is focused on the interface of Zoom and WhatsApp and how social movement activists are engaged. Her other research interests include: food security, seed sovereignty and social movements engaging with big data.
Nonkululeko Manyika
I am a qualified professional with more than 10 years of experience in the private sector namely; Construction, Financial Services (Banking and Insurance), Logistics and heading up a Non-Profit Organization. Through my directorships I have gained a lot of knowledge in the petroleum industry around legislative and governance in enabling a successful investment vehicle benefiting the broader historically disadvantaged African communities. My interests include computational science and healthcare with a focus on marginalized communities.
Stuart Scott Morrison
Stuart Morrison is an MA E-Science candidate at the University of Witwatersrand. He has a background in International Relations, Political Science and Development Studies, with a research interest in African conflict and governance. In his spare time Stuart works for Africa Matters Initiative which is a youth-led African NGO.
Lesedi Senamele Matlala
Lesedi is a presently a Researcher at JET Education Service. He holds a Master’s in Public Policy, Monitoring and Evaluation; Postgraduate Diploma in Labour Law from the University of Johannesburg (UJ). He is also a Doctorate candidate at the University of Johannesburg. His main research areas are Evaluations of Educational/Learnership Programmes, Policy Impact Assessment Studies; Socio-Economic Research and Surveys; Programme Monitoring and Evaluations (M&E), Feasibility Studies. He has authored, and co-authored a few number of publications, including academic journals, and conference papers and has presented at many conferences.
Sandra Okonofua
Sandra Okonofua is a doctoral student in Sociology at Yale University. She is interested in interrogating patterns of educational inequality using critical computational social science and qualitative methods to better understand the challenges Black (African & African-American) girls face in obtaining STEM credentials and embarking on STEM careers. Before Yale, Sandra was a licensed school counselor and teacher. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.
Olaide Olawumi Ojoniyi
Olaide Ojoniyi is a doctoral student at the Statistics and Population studies department, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town. She is also a Statistical Coach with the Division for Postgraduate Studies at the university. Her current research is on adolescents' and young women's sexual and reproductive health.
Thabang Richard Motswaledi
Thabang Richard Motswaledi is an emerging scholar at the North West University. Recently graduated at the North West University his junior degree (Bachelor of social sciences Hon in political studies) and currently pursuing a MA degree in political studies in the school of governance at the North West University Vaal campus. He is actively involved in academia with specific attention given to both political science and African philosophy related research.
Neo Sematlane
Neo Sematlane is a researcher affiliated with the School of Public Health, at the University of the Western Cape and the Centre for Population, Family & Health, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Antwerp. Her current research examines the concept of illness identity in HIV, using experimental and computational methods.
Bongani Ngqulunga
Dr Bongani Ngqulunga, who is the director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, is an academic, public sector administrator and author. Prior to joining JIAS, he worked in the South African Presidency for more than a decade. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Brown University in the United States and three degrees from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His appointment at JIAS became effective in June 2018. In the same month, Dr Ngqulunga won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction for his book The Man Who Found the ANC: A Biography of Pixley ka Isaka Seme (Penguin, 2018).
Siphamandla Zondi
Siphamandla Zondi (him/they) is acting director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation and acting co-director of the Institute for Global African Affairs at University of Johannesburg. He is also with Department of Politics and International Relations at the same university teaching introduction to politics at undergraduate level and research methodology at postgraduate level. He is a commissioner on the National Planning Commission of South Africa and a chair of the SA BRICS Think Tank. His broad research interest is decolonising power, being and ways of knowing.
Xolani Makhubele
Xolani Makhubele is an actuarial specialist by profession and currently works as a data scientist at Telkom. He has special interest in Banking, Insurance, Healthcare and Telecommunication industries. Xolani believes in the rising of leaders who are technologically equipped and prepared for the fourth industrial revolution.
Siphesihle Sithungu
Siphesihle Sithungu is a Computer Science lecturer and doctoral candidate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also an author and has published articles in international conferences and journals. His research interests are Intelligent Agents, Machine Learning and Nature Inspired Artificial Intelligence.Jogja
All Participants
Firman M. Firmansyah
Firman is a graduate researcher at Stony Brook University. He combines mathematical, computational, and statistical approaches with social and psychological theories to study friendship, diversity, social media, and digital technology. Firman defended his dissertation examining how Facebook failed to catalyze diverse friendships in December 2021.
Ahmad R. Pratama
Ahmad is an Assistant Professor at Universitas Islam Indonesia where he also serves as Secretary of the Department of Informatics. He earned his Ph.D. in Technology, Policy, and Innovation with the Fulbright scholarship. He enjoys combining traditional research methods with computational and data science approaches in order to bridge the gap between computer science/information technology and the social sciences.
Steven S. Skiena
Steven is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. He was co-founder and the Chief Science Officer of General Sentiment, a social media and news analytics company. His research interests include algorithm design, data science and their applications to biology. Skiena is the author of several popular books in the fields of algorithms, programming, and data science. The Algorithm Design Manual is widely used as an undergraduate text in algorithms and within the tech industry for job interview preparation.
Jason J. Jones
Jason is an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University, Department of Sociology with a doctorate in Psychology, post-doctorate work in Political Science and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. He tries to embody the best of what it means to be interdisciplinary in academia. In his work, he takes advantage of massive datasets to re-examine what we think we know about human behavior. For example, he had collaborated with Facebook to conduct experiments regarding social norms around voting - each experiment generating data from millions of participants. In another collaboration, he and his colleagues re-imagine and redefine Granovetter's "strength of weak ties" hypothesis by taking into account the work histories and social networks of millions of people around the world. Broadly, his research interests involve the application of computational social science to predict political, health, and other social behaviors.
Alëna Aksënova
Alëna is a linguist at Google, where she works on topics related to speech processing and automatic speech recognition. Prior to joining Google, she focused on formal language theory and its applications. She received her Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Stony Brook University.
Ismail Fahmi
Ismail is an information scientist with experiences in developing digital library software, building digital library community, semantic web application, automatic terminology extraction from text, and building ontologies. He is also the founder of Drone Emprit, a software for social media monitoring and analytics, and Media Kernels Indonesia, a company that focuses on harnessing Natural Language Processing technologies to provide innovative solutions in text mining and insight discovery for knowledge-based institutions.
Arie Wahyu Wijayanto
Arie is an Assistant Professor at Politeknik Statistika STIS Indonesia. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Tokyo Institute of Technology where he was a member of Murata Laboratory, which specializes in research on artificial intelligence, especially network science, machine learning, and web mining. He has been investigating some topics related to massive scale graph analytics and graph protection strategies involving fundamental linear algebra, reinforcement learning, and deep learning.
Dhomas Hatta Fudholi
Dhomas is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics, Universitas Islam Indonesia where he is serving as the Secretary of the Undergraduate Program and Head of Center of Data Science. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science and IT in 2016 from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia with a full postgraduate scholarship from La Trobe University. Previously, he earned his Master’s degree from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Thailand, and his Bachelor’s degree from Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia in 2008. His research interests are mainly related to ontology, data science, natural language processing, deep learning, and big data. He explores data science and deep learning methods to support knowledge base development and various useful applications.
Nurvirta Monarizqa
Mona is a Data Scientist, working for Microsoft and currently residing in Bellevue, across the lake from Seattle. She is an alumna of Urban Science + Progress at New York University and Information Technology at Gadjah Mada University. She loves playing with data and visualization, especially when it comes to data for greater good. Besides data analytics, sometimes she does web design and digital illustrations and she likes to share her work on Medium.
Claudia Flores-Saviaga
Claudia Flores-Saviaga is a Fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Citizen AI Lab at Northeastern University. Her research involves the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Crowdsourcing, and Social Computing. She is interested in understanding how "bad actors" organize disinformation and propaganda messages, and how other citizens organize to debunk those manipulative campaigns. She uses this knowledge to then design intelligent systems that can fight disinformation at scale. She started her exploration of online spaces analyzing how political trolls were organizing during the 2016 US presidential elections. Her research has been covered by the Associated Press, Newsweek, Buzzfeed, El País and Slate.
Sandy Ritchie
Sandy is a linguist working on internationalization for speech technology at Google. His research interests are in morphosyntax, linguistic typology and scaling language technology to a more diverse range of languages all around the world. Before joining Google, he received a PhD and conducted postdoctoral research at SOAS, University of London.
Acniah Damayanti
Acniah Damayanti is a junior lecturer at the Department of Communication Science, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta. She earned her Master’s degree from the University of Twente, the Netherlands, majoring in corporate and organizational communication. Her research interests include crisis communication, innovation in organization, technology in organization and society, and communication for social change.
Ajeng Rahastri Indah Pinawati
Ajeng Rahastri is a post-graduate student at Gadjah Mada University. She focuses on public health science, specifically environmental health. She is starting to learn about statistical computing by using R Studio. Her research interests are related to planetary health. She plans to learn more about data science.
Alvi Syahrina
Alvi is a lecturer at the Department of Management & Public Policy, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Previously, she was a lecturer in information systems at Universitas Telkom and a product designer focused on research at Sale Stock Indonesia (now Sorabel). She holds a master's degree from Universite Paris-Sud majoring in Human-Computer Interaction with a minor in Entrepreneurship. This career track switch, from Software Engineering to Data, from private-sector-focused to public-sector-focused, made her sign up for SICSS 2022.
Ardee Joy Ocampo
Ardee Joy Ocampo is an Assistant Professor at the College of Computer Studies and Engineering, LORMA Colleges, and the Program Head of Masters in Information Systems. She received her B.S. degree in Information Technology from Lorma Colleges in 2005, her Master's degree in Information Technology in 2010 and her PhD degree in Information Technology from the University of the Cordilleras last March 2022. Her research entails integrating Mobile AR and Open Data on Tourism, analyzing feedback on citizen participation systems for disaster preparedness, and evaluating user experience and learning behaviors in gamified learning environments. She co-authored several research papers on technology in viticulture and sericulture, the development of smart blind canes, AR and VR technologies for tourism, and gamified applications such as Iloko translationary. Currently, she is interested in research on computational social sciences, data visualization, and machine learning in agriculture, technology, health, and e-learning. She is currently working with her students on a meat quality detection device using CNN.
Arwan Ahmad Khoiruddin
Arwan is a former lecturer in the Department of Informatics at Universitas Islam Indonesia. Since 2015, he has been a researcher at the Indonesia Institute of Sciences (now Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional - BRIN). His majors are big data analytics and image analysis. He is working on optimizing the Hadoop Distributed File System for faster big data processing. He is starting research work on privacy-preserving machine learning.
Chanifah Indah Ratnasari
Chanifah Indah Ratnasari is a lecturer and junior researcher at the Department of Informatics, Universitas Islam Indonesia. She earned her undergraduate and master's degrees in informatics from Universitas Islam Indonesia. Her research interests are primarily related to Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction, Medical Informatics, and Information Systems. However, she began to develop an interest in computational social science.
Elvira Sukma Wahyuni
Elvira is a junior lecturer in the Electrical Engineering Department, Universitas Islam Indonesia. She is also a member of the biomedical research group within the electrical engineering department. Her master's thesis project was mainly focused on data mining for medical data. She analyzed the effect of reducing the dimension of data through feature selection on the classification algorithm performance. Her current research is focused on home care monitoring systems and image classification.
Frisca Rahmadina
Frisca is currently a master of public health student at Gadjah Mada University. She earned her Bachelor's degree from University of Indonesia. She is interested in conducting research in computational social science, particularly human behavior related to air pollution, using data from social media platforms. She is currently conducting research on the relationship between air pollution and COVID-19, which she is analyzing using R.
Hanif Akhtar
Hanif is a PhD student at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest. He is broadly interested in psychometrics, test-taking behavior, and individual differences in intelligence and personality. In his PhD thesis, he will develop a new computerized adaptive test (CAT) to measure fluid reasoning. He is currently a distance instructor for psychology students at the University of Muhammadiyah Malang.
Hestutomo Restu Kuncoro
Hestutomo Kuncoro is a junior lecturer in International Relations at Universitas Pembangunan "Nasional" Veteran Yogyakarta whose research focuses are discourse, democracy, and humanitarian diplomacy. He obtained his Master’s Degree in Political Science from The University of Manchester with a dissertation on Southeast Asian Democracy. Currently, he pursues expanding the research agenda of International Relations scholars in Indonesia by incorporating computational analysis. His current research involves examining social media to map discourses pertaining to the repatriation of ex-isis jihadist. In the future, he plans to pursue a doctorate that advances the use of data-science in studying international affairs.
Indra Prawira
Indra is a faculty member at Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, Indonesia. He earned his Ph.D in media and social studies from Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. His research interests are in journalism, mass communication, and broadcasting. He also developed a virtual media learning for broadcasting course for vocational education.
Khuswatun Hasanah
Khuswatun Hasanah is a junior lecturer in Communication Studies at Universitas Pembangunan Nasional "Veteran" Yogyakarta. She used to work in the media as a journalist and researcher, utilizing data-driven journalism. This experience makes her very passionate about working with data, especially in creating captivating visualizations. She is also keen on identifying outliers that can be used as angles in data-driven reporting. Currently, she is active in writing scientific articles regarding new media and journalism as well as utilizing data in journalism. Her latest and ongoing research project aims to produce commentary analysis on the social media of influential political actors in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Having obtained her Master's degree in Political Science from Universitas Indonesia, she plans to pursue a doctorate that examines the role of new media in journalism or in fields related to data journalism.
Libasut Taqwa
Libasut Taqwa pursued his bachelor's degree from the Faculty of Sharia Law, State Islamic University of Sunan Ampel Surabaya on Politics and Islamic Law. After completing a postgraduate program in Political Studies and Middle East International Relations at the University of Indonesia's School of Strategic and Global Studies, he joined the Wahid Foundation in 2017, and has been actively working in the fields of research and policy advocacy to promote Peaceful Islam and counter narratives against intolerance groups and violent extremism. During his experience, Libasut Taqwa was also involved in Wahid Foundation’s yearly report on Freedom of Religion and Belief and regularly engaged with a number of CSO’s to promote the revision of the Indonesian Penal Code, especially in the context of blasphemy law and religious articles, and also discriminatory laws based on religion and belief in Indonesia. In 2021, he will continue his MA in political science at the Indonesian International Islamic University (IIIU).
M. Zaenul Muttaqin
M. Zaenul Muttaqin is a lecturer in the Department of Public Administration at Cenderawasih University, Papua, Indonesia. His research interests and areas of expertise are mainly in public policy and policy communication. One of his published works is "Cyberbullying and Women's Oppression."
Muhammad Noor Fakhruzzaman
Fakhruzzaman was born and raised in Surabaya. He holds an interdisciplinary master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction and Journalism & Mass Communication from Iowa State University. His current research interests fall between Data Science and Mass Communication, mainly automated media monitoring using Natural Language Processing. He is currently an assistant lecturer at the Data Science Technology Study Program in Universitas Airlangga. He holds an interdisciplinary master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction and Journalism & Mass Communication from Iowa State University. His research includes Brain-Computer Interface, Indonesian Natural Language Processing, and Media Monitoring. He is a member of Kappa Tau Alpha, an honor society of Journalism and Mass Communication studies.
Nur Hayatin
Nur Hayatin is a faculty member at the Department of Informatics, Faculty of Engineering at University of Muhammadiyah Malang (UMM), Indonesia. She is also a member of the Center of Women and Children's Study and Empowerment at UMM. She received her Bachelor's degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Surabaya and her Master's degree from Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember Surabaya, Indonesia, both in Electronics Engineering. She is currently enrolled in a doctoral program at Universiti Malaysia Sabah's Faculty of Computer and Informatics through the Graduate Research Assistant scheme. Her research interests include data science, natural language processing, text mining, social media analysis, and information retrieval, with papers published in a variety of journals.
Pramudika R. Hapsari
Pramudika is a clinical psychologist and a human resource analyst at the Directorate General of Taxes in the Ministry of Finance, Republic of Indonesia. She obtained her bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology from Gadjah Mada University. During her university years, Pramudika had participated in exchange programs at Fukuoka Women’s University (Japan), the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), and Nagoya University (Japan). Her research interests are in mental health promotion in the workplace and sexual abuse prevention.
Ria Dhea Layla Nur Karisma
Ria is a statistician with an interest in machine learning and data visualization. She received her Master's degree from Surabaya's Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology. In 2014, she was given the opportunity to study in the Health Care department at Tallinn University of Technology. She is becoming increasingly interested in computational health and the social sciences. She is currently employed as a Statistics lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang.
Suatmi Murnani
Suatmi Murnani is a junior lecturer at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Universitas Islam Indonesia where she is a member of the biomedical research group. Her general topics of interest are signal processing and machine learning. Her current research focuses on signal processing for assistive technology. She is also interested in using machine learning to process bio-signal. Previously, she was a research assistant at Universitas Gadjah Mada’s Department of Electrical and Information Engineering. Her research centered on creating a public display that uses the human gaze to control its content.
Tiara Saputri Darlis
Tiara Saputri Darlis is a linguist and faculty member for the Department of Japanese Language and Literature at Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia. She is also a Ph.D candidate in Applied Linguistics at Universitas Negeri Jakarta. Her research interests include digital literature development, human interaction on social media, and pedagogical methods in the digital era.
Vittalis Ayu
Vittalis Ayu is a Junior Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at Sanata Dharma University. She is currently involved in the Networks Laboratory and works mostly on distributed mobile networks, especially Opportunistic Mobile Networks (OMNs). Her current research interests include exploiting human social attributes and mobility characteristics to enhance resource-aware routing performances in OMNs.
Vynska Amalia Permadi
Vynska Amalia Permadi is an Assistant Professor in the Informatics Department at Universitas Pembangunan Nasional "Veteran" Yogyakarta. She received her Master's degree from Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember. Her current research interests are in data science in economics and business. Since 2021, Vynska has been an active member of her university's research group on the economic, financial, and digital industries. She has been asked to help Bank Indonesia Yogyakarta representatives make analytical tools and a dashboard for predicting inflation.
Wasisto Raharjo Jati
Wasisto Raharjo Jati is a researcher at the Research Center for Politics—Indonesian National Research and Innovation Agency/Pusat Riset Politik—Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (PRP-BRIN) and a research fellow on governance, public policy, and development studies at the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID). His main research interests have been focused on the politics of the middle class, political participation, religion & politics, and voting behavior.
Widi Astuti
Widi is a junior lecturer at the School of Computing at Telkom University, where she is also a member of the Natural Language Processing and Text Mining Laboratory. Her research focused on data science, especially text mining. She teaches Automata and Language Theory, which is the basis for understanding formal language and helps with understanding how human language is formed.
Arrie Kurniawardhani
Arrie directs the Basic Programming Laboratory at Department of Informatics, Universitas Islam Indonesia. She is also affiliated with the Center of Data Science, Universitas Islam Indonesia and regularly attends the Digital Talent Scholarship program conducted by the Ministry of Communication and Information of the Republic of Indonesia as an instructor. Machine learning, data science, and computer vision are among her research interests. Her prior work included developing computer-assisted diagnosis applications to investigate Mycobacterium Tuberculosis, the causative agent of Tuberculosis, through digital microscopic images. She is currently working on a research project involving the development of a decision support system to analyze the condition of a person's facial skin using computer vision techniques.
Septia Rani
Septia is a junior lecturer at the Department of Informatics Universitas Islam Indonesia. Her research interests are mainly related to artificial intelligence and data science. Currently, she is working on a research project related to the development of a smart application for travel itinerary planning using artificial intelligence techniques. The methods include optimization and the use of recommendation systems. She is also working on several data science projects in the domains of computer vision and social science.Korea
All Participants
Lanu Kim
Lanu Kim is an assistant professor in the school of humanities and social sciences and a joint professor in the school of computing at KAIST. After finishing her sociology PhD at the University of Washington, she was a postdoctoral fellow and data science scholar at Stanford University. Her research broadly contributes to the theoretical understanding of academic knowledge creation by mainly examining the impact of academic search engines, gender inequality in higher education, and the social structure of knowledge construction. To investigate, she utilizes new big data sources, innovative analytical strategies, natural language processing, and advanced statistical methods and works with interdisciplinary research teams.
Wonjae Lee
Wonjae Lee is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining GSCT, he was a senior researcher in the Department of Sociology at Seoul National University and a research associate at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. His research interests include social exchange theory, social network analysis, computational social science, and economic sociology. He has authored and co-authored several publications in PNAS, Harvard Business Review, and more.
Jae Yeon Kim
Jae Yeon Kim is an Assistant Professor of Data Science at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management. He is also affiliated with the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he was a pre- and postdoctoral fellow. He received his PhD in political science from the University of California-Berkeley, where he was a Senior Data Science Fellow at Social Science D-Lab. He studies power, inequality, and political change drawing on computational, experimental, and archival methods. He has published widely in leading political science and computational social science journals. Jae Yeon also co-developed MapAgora, an R package that helps collect, process, and combine various data on U.S. nonprofits at scale.
Hyejin Youn
Hyejin Youn is an associate professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). She is also an external faculty at Santa Fe Institute. Before Northwestern, she was a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, and at MIT Media Lab, and a senior research fellow at Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford, and Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. Her PhD is in Statistical Physics at KAIST. Her research aims to develop a mathematical and computational framework to understand complex systems.
Sung Eun Kim
Sung Eun Kim is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Korea University. She received her PhD in political science from Columbia University. She specializes in international political economy, with a focus on the intersection of domestic politics and international relations. Her research examines the relationships between and among economic globalization, information, political elites and individual political behavior, drawing upon a wide array of quantitative and text-based data.
Daegon Cho
Daegon Cho is an Ewon Associate Professor of Information Systems at KAIST College of Business. He received a PhD in information systems and management from Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. His research topics are business analytics, economics of IT, and applications of AI/ML to businesses. His research appeared at Information Systems Research, Marketing Science, Production and Operations Management, and Journal of the AIS and other journals.
Hyunjin Song
Hyunjin Song is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. Previously, he earned his PhD in communication at the Ohio State University. After finishing the PhD, he was an Universitätsassistent, post-doc in the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna. Also, he has been a member of Vienna Computational Communication Science Lab. He is interested in the role of interpersonal political discussion network and its effect on political behaviors, including voters' attitudes and their electoral engagements. On the other side, he is also working on computational methods and advanced quantitative analysis, including linear conditional modeling, multilevel modeling, and statistical inferences of network data.
Jin Young Kim
Jinyoung leads the Data & Analytics (DnA) team at Naver Search which solves challenging data and analytical problems faced by various search and recommendation services across Naver and Line. The team taps the latest outcomes in relevant research areas (IR / RecSys / Data Mining) and contributes back to the community via publications and open source activities. Previously, Jinyoung worked as a data scientist at Snap and a senior applied researcher at Microsoft.
Eric Giannella
Eric Giannella is Director of Data Science at Code for America, a civic tech non-profit that makes government services easier to access. Eric has done research in a variety of settings, spanning government, small and large tech companies, and nonprofits. Prior to Code for America, he was at the California Department of Justice working to make data more widely available for the public, journalists, and academics. He has published on social support, justice reform, and technology and society. Eric has a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley, and an M.S. and B.A. from Stanford.
Suhem Parack
Suhem Parack is a Staff Developer Advocate at Twitter. He helps students and academic researchers with their research using the Twitter API. Before joining Twitter, he was a Solutions Architect at Amazon.
Jeon June
June Jeon is an assistant professor of sociology at Chungnam National University (CNU), Republic of Korea. He is a qualitative ethnographer and theorist, specialized in sociology science, technology, and environment. His recent research interests include computational large-scale qualitative analysis on varieties of inequalities in scientific knowledge production. June received Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has published in Social Studies of Science, New Media & Society, Agriculture & Human Values, among other journals.
Taesoo Song
Taesoo Song (he/him) is a Ph.D. Student in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. He is broadly interested in the issues of housing policy, neighborhood change, and migration, particularly in the context of high-opportunity and high-cost urban areas.
Sevde Arpaci Ayhan
Sevde Arpaci Ayhan is a PhD candidate in international studies at Seoul National University. Her specialization is development economics. Currently she develops three essays dissertation on green productivity, innovation and growth. She utilizes computational methods to conduct empirical research. She is particularly interested in econometrics, machine learning and artificial intelligence for policy-making world. She also teaches a quantitative methods course at Sookmyung Women's University.
Minjin Chae
Minjin Chae is a PhD student in sociology at Harvard. Her current research examines the role of worker bargaining power in providing workers with more control over their work schedules and hours. More broadly, she is interested in identifying the opportunities and risks brought by ongoing labor market transformation (e.g., automation) for employees’ personal/family life and their variations across gender, race/ethnicity, and class. She hopes to explore the relationship between occupational requirements, organizational practices, and working conditions using the online job postings and reviews data.
Yuki Asahina
Yuki Asahina is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea, where he teaches about Japanese society, inequality, and qualitative research methods. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and an affiliate of the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Comparative Inequality and Inclusion at Harvard University. Yuki’s research interests include social inequality and political sociology with a particular focus on East Asia. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Sociology, Politics&Society, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Contemporary Japan, among other journals.
Soyeon Jeon
Soyeon Jeon is Master's Student, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Seoul National University. Her research interests lie in analyzing the public opinion in politics using advanced technical methodology. She aims to examine new media’s impact on public opinion formation and political persuasion. She also investigates how emotion and political sophistication take part in political persuasion of the polarized through statistics-based survey and experimental research methods. She will join as a Ph.D. Student, Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis starting Fall, 2022.
Daehyun Kim
Daehyun Kim is a Ph.D. student in Management at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His research focuses on how the new wave of digitalization affects an individual's decision to enter entrepreneurship. In more detail, He is interested in expanding our understanding of 1) the entry of online matching platforms and entrepreneurship and 2) AI exposure and necessity-driven entrepreneurship.
Hao-Yun Lee
Hao-Yun Lee is a master’s student at the Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST. Her research interests lie in the field of user research. She received her bachelor's degree in industrial design from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan.
JinTae Bae
JinTae Bae is a Master’s student in sociology at Korea University. His key research interest involves the interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural sociology and computational social science, geared towards investigating the cultural environment by leveraging novel computational methods and data. In his current thesis project, he is exploring the dynamics of collective depression narratives in an online mental health forum in the course of COVID-19 with various text analytic and network measures. Furthermore, he is also actively seeking how new computational methods provide opportunities in bridging the qualitative and quantitative social science paradigms
Jennifer (Jung Min) Noh
Jennifer Noh is a PhD candidate at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. Her PhD research focuses on the development of a mobile health-tracking system which can assess and predict the health and wellbeing of people with intellectual disabilities. To achieve this, she aims to collate and analyse different sets of physiological and psychosocial data obtained from both smartphones and wearable wrist sensors. Before starting her PhD, she received her bachelor’s degree at York University (Canada) and master's degree from University College London (UK).
Wenyuan (Sophia) Lu
Wenyuan (Sophia) Lu is the second-year global master student, KDI School of public policy and management/ Evans Public policy School, University of Washington. Her research interests lie in economics history, labor economics and development economics. The current research topics focus on economics history about gender, human capital and early industrialization. She desires to utilize more computational science knowledge to solve the problems in the historical data collection and historical newspaper text analysis.
Ha Eun Choi
Ha Eun is a PhD student in Political Science at Michigan State University. Her main research interests include gender and trade, public opinion on trade and economic policies, and international organizations. She is interested in using and learning more about computational methods including network and text analysis to understand the interdependencies and networks of various political actors as well as the diffusion of gender-related trade and economic policies across countries.
Gayoung Kim
Gayoung Kim is an M.A. graduate in Sociology from Seoul National University and a research associate at Institute for Social Development and Policy, SNU. She is interested in political polarization and social cohesion in digitalized society. With a focus on quantitative methods and computational social science, Gayoung is currently exploring the cultural dynamics of gendered political and social conflicts in Korea.
Kadir Jun Ayhan
Kadir Jun Ayhan, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Ewha Womans University Graduate School of International Studies. His main research interests include public diplomacy, power in world politics, and Korean foreign policy. Ayhan serves as Editor-in-Chief for Journal of Public Diplomacy. He has been serving as a member of the National Unity Committee under the Korean President(-elect) since April 2022. Ayhan regularly consults for governmental public diplomacy projects in Korea. He holds a Ph.D. (2016) and M.I.S. (2010) from Seoul National University Graduate School of International Studies and a Bachelor of Commerce (2008) from The University of Auckland. He has published articles in International Studies Perspectives, Korea Observer, Politics & Policy, and Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, among others.
Eun Ji Sally Son
Eun Ji Sally Son is an incoming PhD student in political science at Columbia University. She is interested in American politics, and within that, public opinion, political behavior, and quantitative methods. Over the past few years, she has been working as an institutional research data analyst at Stanford School of Engineering, where she worked on projects such as faculty quality of life survey, statistical analysis of annual donor behavior, and understanding remote learning experiences during the pandemic. She hopes to use quantitative techniques to understand factors that shape anti-democratic behaviors and find ways to tackle polarization, partisan animosity, and political violence. She is also interested in democratizing the data science process and promoting data literacy through research and teaching. She has a BA in political science and political economy from UC Berkeley and a MA in quantitative methods in the social sciences from Columbia University.
Miri Kim
Miri Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Korea university. Her research is focused on microeconometrics and panel data models both empirically and theoretically. She is also interested in utilizing big data and artificial intelligence in econometric analysis, especially in causal inference.
Jee Young Bhan
Jee Young Bhan (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of California - Davis. She studies the sociology of education and social stratification, with a focus on public education, policy, and neighborhood and community contexts. Specifically, she is interested in incorporating computational methods to understand cultural capital’s influence on student educational experiences and class reproduction.
Jisung Yoon
Jisung Yoon is Ph.D. Candidate in the industrial and management engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology. After graduation, he will be joining the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) as a Postdoctoral Fellow. His research focuses on the development and application of machine learning methods for network data, practically in the area of computational social science. In particular, I have been studying questions about innovation and human mobility in the concept of Science of Science.
Iegor Vyshnevskyi
Iegor Vyshnevskyi is enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Public Policy of KDI School. Before entering the program he worked in the banking industry for about 10 years, including 5 years at the financial stability department of the National Bank of Ukraine doing financial modeling and bank stress-testing. His research interests lie mainly in the field of central banking, namely nonperforming loans, banking supervision, climate risk in banking and finance, transparency and independence. He has publications on banking supervision. Iegor has been involved in a number of development consultation projects.
Minsang Namgoong
Minsang Namgoong is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST. His research aims to develop mathematical and computational models capable of describing cultural events and contents. He is interested in a wide variety of cultural topics, but he is particularly fond of storytelling.
Yoonyoung Na
Yoonyoung Na is a Ph.D. Student in Sociology at Seoul National University. He graduated from Seoul National University in 2020 with an MA in Sociology. He is interested in cognitive sociology, and how social interactions shape people's shared understanding. His current project is to explore the possiblities of deliberation.Lisbon
All Participants
Qiwei Han
Qiwei Han is currently an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Business Analytics at Nova School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE), Portugal. He is an affiliated faculty with the Data Science Knowledge Center of Nova SBE. He received Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy and M.S. in Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon University. His research is at the intersection of econometrics and machine learning, using complex data-driven approaches on a variety of projects with societal impacts. He served as the Technical Mentor for Data Science for Social Good Europe program jointly offered by Nova SBE and the University of Chicago in 2017 and 2018. His research appeared in data science and information systems conferences and received the Best Paper Award from International Conference on Social Computing.
Filipa Reis
Invited Assistant Professor of Data Science at Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics. Filipa holds a PhD in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University, a MSc from CLSBE, and bachelor's degree from Nova SBE. Her research focuses on media consumption patterns and the impact of digitization and convergence technologies on consumer choices and behaviors. She has also participated in experiment-driven business analytics consulting projects for policy formulation and evaluation in the telecommunications sector. Her work has been published in Management Science and presented at top peer-reviewed research conferences such as the International Conference of Information Systems and the Economics of Digitization Seminar Series of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Filipa teaches quantitative and data analysis courses at the undergraduate level including Statistics I, Statistics II, Statistics for Business and Economics, and Business Research Methods.
Jinjun Xiong
Dr. Jinjun Xiong is an Empire Innovation Professor with the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University at Buffalo (UB) . He received his Ph.D. degree in 2006 from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with an Outstanding Ph.D. Award, his M.S. degree from University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2002, and his M.S. and B.S. degrees from Tsinghua University in 2000 and 1998, respectively. Before joining UB in 2021, Dr. Xiong was Program Director and Senior Research Scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. Dr. Xiong also co-founded the IBM Smarter Energy Research Institute and led a number of enterprise-scale collaborations with world-wide electric utility companies to address sustainability issues with renewable integration. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers in top AI conferences and systems conferences. His publication has won seven Best Paper Awards and eight Nominations for Best Paper Awards. Dr. Xiong also won top awards from various international competitions, including the recent Championship Award for the IEEE GraphChallenge on accelerating sparse neural networks, and the Championship Awards for the DAC'19 Systems Design Contest on designing an object detection neural network for both edge FPGA track and the edge GPU track. Many of his research results have been adopted in commercial enterprise-scale products and tools.
Abisai Perez
Abisai Perez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation research explores the early modern Iberian empires in Southeast Asia. While pursuing his doctoral degree, he has transitioned into the world of Data Analysis and Digital Humanities. He holds several certificates in Data Analysis with Python, Statistics, and Introductory Machine Learning. During the summer of 2021, Abisai worked as a data analyst and business consultant in Pintumex, a leading company in the coats and paints industry in Mexico. He produced a statistical analysis of the company´s five decades of existence by following a historical approach and quantitative methods. During the academic year 2021-2022, he was co-instructor of the Spanish Paleography and Digital Humanities Institute at LLILAs Benson Library.
Anqing Hu
Anqing is currently a Master's student at New York University, majoring in Management of Technology. She obtained her Bachelor's degree in management at Wuhan Textile University in 2021 and visited Hanyang University (Ansan, South Korea) in 2018 and NYU Shanghai in 2021 as an exchange student. She was previously a social media influencer with 6k+ followers and 50k+ likes. Inspired by that experience, her recent research interest is to utilize social media tools in the supply chain for a better management outcome. Outside of her studies, she likes to learn gaming theory and UI/UX design by playing Switch games, traveling and learning new languages. After she finishes her research in NOVA SBE, she will continue her study in a research program at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and then travel around Europe.
Elena Pupaza
Elena Pupaza is a social scientist and post-doctoral researcher at Stockholm University Demography Unit (SUDA). She studies behavioural science in a causal inference framework, using quantitative methods and quasi-experimental designs. Her primary research interests are immigrant integration and understanding how migrants shape their local communities. Elena completed her doctoral studies in political science at the London School of Economics in 2021 and went on to research adaptation trajectories of descendants of refugees at Stockholm University, as a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC funded project A Better Life for the Children of Exile: Intergenerational Adaptation of the Descendants of Refugees.
Filippo Andrei
Filippo Andrei is a doctoral student in sociology and social research at the University of Trento. In April 2018, after graduating in communication studies (with laudem) at the University of Turin, he worked as an assistant researcher at the unit of organization studies of the department of politics, culture and society of Turin. His work focuses on the social mechanisms that generate cooperation and trust in illegal trade on the darknet. Furthermore, he is interested how social structure shapes technology in organizations and, in turn, how technology influences decision making. He has presented his work at the International Conference on Social Dilemmas and at the R&D Management Conference.
Ishwar Khatri
Ishwar Khatri is a PhD candidate at the NTNU Business School, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). I have an MBA in finance (Pokhara University) and a Master’s in International Business (NTNU). My research focuses on corporate social performance and its implications, where I intend to employ experimental and observational data. I am also interested in the quantitative text analysis of corporate annual reports and digital press releases to examine the quality and quantity of such company disclosures and their components.
Leonie Gehrmann
Leonie Gehrmann is a doctoral candidate in Quantitative Marketing at the University of Mannheim. She obtained both her Bachelor (Economics) and Master (Business Research) degree there as well. Her research mainly focuses on machine learning applications in marketing and consumer psychology. Current projects center on the analysis of text and image data from advertisements. As a lecturer, she teaches courses on Marketing Analytics and R.
Marc Pocsay
Marc Pocsay is a pre-PhD student at the Graduate School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University. He has worked as a research assistant and econometrics tutors at the same university. His research interests include corporate entrepreneurship and innovation at established corporations. His most recent work has been focused on the corporate venture capital behaviour of family and founder controlled firms.
Muhammad Masood
Muhammad Masood is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, HKSAR. His research focuses on the impacts of digital media use, political communication, public opinion, and civic engagement. Masood's PhD dissertation examines the pro-religious-minority implications of digital media use in Pakistan. He studied in four countries and won multiple international fully funded scholarships and research grants. He has published research papers and presented research at numerous scientific conferences across the world.
Patrícia Machado
Patrícia Machado is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Management at NOVA School of Business and Economics. Her research interests lie at the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship. She graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, in Chemical Engineering, in 2001 and did her MBA at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics in 2005-2007. Since then, she has been a Teaching Assistant at Católica for the “Introduction to Management” and “Strategy” courses in the undergraduate programs. After some work experience as an engineer at Novartis Pharma in Basel, Switzerland, and at Portucel, Setúbal, she joined Galp Energia where she worked as a Controller and a Product Manager (2002-2007). Since then, she has acquired an extensive management experience, having worked as an Assistant Director of Corporate Finance at Caixa - Banco de Investimento (2007-2008), as a Supply Chain Manager and Export Markets Director at Quilaban (2008-2016) and as consultant at CESO-Development Consultants (2019-2020). She founded UPA Kids, a Portuguese brand of sustainable children’s furniture, in 2016.
Qi Shi
I have more than 5 years of research experience in oncology as a researcher. In June 2017, I obtained a Ph.D. degree in Clinical Medicine from Xi'an Jiaotong University. The research is focused on discovering and validating the role of oncogenes in cancer cell signaling pathways in various cellular processes. From 2018 to 2019, I worked as a research specialist at Emory University in the School of Medicine. In 2019, I got a master's degree in medical informatics from the University of Porto, focusing on the model on monitoring the effectiveness of clinical guidelines. To go deeper, I am currently pursuing a master's program in Data Science at NOVA IMS school, focusing on data mining, machine learning, data visualization, deep learning, big data and model management, text mining, etc.
Ricardo Coelho da Silva
Ricardo Coelho da Silva is a PhD student at NovaSBE, Lisbon, Portugal. He holds a double Master’s degree in Management from the same school, and in Knowledge Management from NovaIMS. His interests include open and user innovation, applications of machine learning in technology and innovation management, and how online communities and projects develop.
Stefan Munnes
Stefan Munnes is a Berlin based sociologist and interested in all forms of social inequality and the consequences for society. My main motivation is to study social conflicts and ways of dealing with changing societies. Specifically, I have been working primarily on phenomena of antisemitism and gender inequality. I’m also total into coding, have spent the last three years working as a data assistant at the Social Science Center in Berlin, collecting and organizing many different types of data, and since the beginning of this year I am a PhD student in Computational Social Science. In my free time I do weightlifting and like to explore the worlds around me, the analog as much as the digital.
Alessandro Gambetti
Alessandro Gambetti is currently a Research and Teaching Assistant of Data Science at the Nova School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE), Lisbon, Portugal. He recently received an MSc in Finance from Nova SBE, majoring in Data and Business Analytics, and he holds a BSc in Economics & Finance from the Alma Mater Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy. His research interests span from applied data science in both social and business sciences in which data may be considered as a driving factor in decision-making. Aside from research, he is currently involved in tutoring MSc students in data-based subjects with the goal of easing the overall learning process.
Jaime Montana
Jaime Montana is a postdoctoral researcher at PROSPER (CATOLICA-LISBON, School of Business and Economics), where he studies firm performance and workers' wellbeing using large administrative datasets. Jaime received a Ph.D. in Economics from Paris School of Economics under the supervision of David Margolis. Previously, he graduated with a MRes in economics from Paris School of Economics, and an Erasmus Mundus Master in quantitative economics. Jaime's research questions aim at understanding, both from a theoretical and an applied perspective, how workers and firms match, and why skill mismatches occur. He is also interested in informal employment in developing countries and in exploiting non-traditional sources for market information. Jaime has worked in the Colombian Ministry of labor, the private sector, and was a consultant for different multilateral organizations.London
All Participants
Joshua Becker
Joshua is an Assistant Professor at the UCL School of Management, University College London. Joshua received their PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Kellogg School of Management. Prior to graduate school, Joshua worked professionally in mediation and conflict resolution, spent some time managing training and coaching for a customer service department, and now serves as a pro-bono mediator with the Chicago Conflict Resolution Center. Joshua's research focuses on communication networks and collective intelligence.
Nicola Perra
Nicola is a Reader in Applied Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London. Nicola's research focuses on human dynamics, big-data analytics, network science, and mathematical/digital epidemiology. In particular, his interests lie on the characterization and modeling of dynamical processes unfolding on time-varying and multiplex networks, human adaptive behaviors, data-driven modeling of infectious diseases, and the study of Online/Offline Social Networks.
Michael Yeomans
Michael is an Assistant Professor in Strategy and Organisational Behaviour at Imperial College Business School. In his research, Michael uses natural language processing to study decision-making in conversation. He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago and a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University.SICSS London Seminar Series
Alex Sutherland
Alex is Chief Scientist and Director of Research and Evaluation at BIT. His recent published work has been on police body-worn cameras and he has led a number of large-scale randomised-controlled trials in education. Before joining BIT, Alex was at RAND Europe for 5.5 years, and spent three years coordinating and teaching research design/quantitative methods at the University of Cambridge. Prior to Cambridge, he worked at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford and has a D.Phil. in sociology, also from Oxford.
Neave O Clery
Originally from Dublin, She is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London where she leads a research group focused on data-driven models for economic development and the emergence of complexity for urban systems. She was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. Before this she was a Fulbright Scholar and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School following her PhD (mathematics) at Imperial College. She is also founder and Editor in Chief of Angle – a journal based at Imperial College focusing on the intersection of policy, politics and science – since 2009.
Stephen Hansen
Stephen Hansen is an Associate Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School. Most of his research focuses on organizational economics and monetary policy. Increasingly he draws on unstructured data sources and machine learning methods to address questions in these areas.
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye
Yves-Alexandre is an Associate Professor at Imperial College London where he heads the Computational Privacy Group. He is currently a Special Adviser on AI and Data Protection to EC Justice Commissioner Reynders and a Parliament-appointed expert to the Belgian Data Protection Agency. In 2018-2019, he was a Special Adviser to EC Commissioner Vestager for whom he co-authored the Competition policy for the digital era report. He is affiliated with the Data Science Institute and Department of Computing. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard working with Latanya Sweeney and Gary King and he received his PhD from MIT under the supervision of Alex Pentland
Zizhou Peng
Zizhou Peng is a doctoral student at Warwick Business School. His current research uses advanced empirical quantitative methodology to analyse unstructured data such as text, image and video. He holds a BSc in Geophysics from the University of Edinburgh and a MSc in Business Analytics from Warwick Business School.
Yuerong Zhang
Dr. Yuerong Zhang is a Leverhulme EC Research Fellow at Bartlett School of Planning (BSP), University College London (UCL). Prior to that she was the research fellow in Transport modelling at MaaSLab. Her work interests are network resilience, spatiotemporal transport analysis and new mobility technologies and services.
Yifei (Ephie) Wang
Yifei (Ephie) is a PhD student in Information Systems & Management at Warwick Business School. Her research interests include online harassment and spam. In her current research, she uses machine learning and natural language processing to study the incidence of online harassment.
Yaoxi Shi
Yaoxi is a PhD student in Organisational Behaviour at Imperial College Business School. She studies people’s social lives (e.g., conversations, impression management) with computational methods and experiments. Before joining Imperial, Yaoxi completed her MA in social sciences at the University of Chicago.
Xia Zeng
Xia Zeng is currently a Computer Science PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London, supervised by Dr. Arkaitz Zubiaga. She received a Master’s degree on Linguistics with Distinction from University College London and a Bachelor's degree on Translation from Zhejiang University of Technology. Previously she was a visiting student at UC San Diego and a research assistant at TU Darmstadt. She is very interested in applying various NLP methods on all kinds of interesting social science questions.
Valentina Semenova
Valentina Semenova is a PhD candidate in mathematics at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professors Doyne Farmer and Xiaowen Dong. Her research is targeted towards understanding social dynamics from using a complex systems approach leveraging machine learning techniques and social media data, with implications for financial stability and economics. Before beginning her studies at Oxford, Valentina completed a master’s degree at Columbia University in Operations Research, studying the optimization of dynamic systems under the supervision of Professor Yuri Faenza. Prior to Columbia, she worked for 2 years in algorithmic trading at Goldman Sachs and 2 years at Palantir Technologies (a technology company specializing in big data analysis). Valentina completed her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College where she double-majored in mathematics and economics.
Prashant Garg
Prashant Garg is a PhD student at the Department of Economics and Public Policy at Imperial College London. His area of interest include belief formation and information diffusion. He loves using diverse tools such as network analysis and textual data, and marrying them with econometrics to understand causal relationships. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a "predoc" at Imperial College, working on projects related to environmental economics, behavioural economics, mobility and productivity. He received his BSc. and MSc. in Economics from Cardiff University and UCL.
Mia Jovanova
Mia Jovanova is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies behavior change using brain, social network and mobile phone data. Her current work examines how neural and social processes interact, via machine learning tools, to improve the predictive and explanatory power of health behavior change theories. She further deploys experiments to test mobile health interventions. Mia holds a BSc from Cornell University.
Matteo Burato
Matteo is a PhD student in Strategy at ICBS. His work is mainly concerned with the strategic decisions and behavioural patterns of modern enterprises in multiple-goals/multiple-optima scenarios. His main focus is sustainability strategies, their evolution, and their effects on performance. The analysis of sustainability report is a key tool in this effort.
Matija Franklin
Matija Franklin is a PhD student at UCL’s Causal Cognition Lab. He works on AI Ethics and Alignment, including researching the structure and properties of human preferences, the influence AI has on preference and behavior, explainable AI, and responsibility attribution. He has collaborated with researchers at the Nokia Bell Labs, Future of Humanity Institute, and Future of Life Institute.
Matheus Menezes
Matheus Menezes is a PhD candidate in Marketing at Imperial Business School. He holds a BSc in Economics with econometrics from University of Kent and a MSc in Economics from Barcelona School of Economics. His current research in consumer behaviour focuses on online social influence and consumer decision making online. Matheus's research methods include text mining and experimental design.
Manfredi de Bernard
Manfredi is a PhD student at the Culture, Media and Creative Industries department at King's College of London funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. I am interested in the implications of complexity theory on cultural policies and creative economy research.
Maina Korir
Dr Maina Korir is a lecturer in Information Technology at the University of Bedfordshire. She recently completed her PhD in Educational Technology at the Open University, UK. Her broad research interests are in human-technology interaction and recent research has focused on privacy in learning analytics and decentralized identity.
Kara Luo
Kara Luo is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and will begin her PhD program this fall in the Stanford GSB Organizational Behavior department. Her research interests include using computational methods to better understand culture and information networks using experimental and computational methods. She holds a B.S. and M.Eng. from MIT.
Juliane Schittek
Juliane Schittek is a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at the Imperial College Business School. Her research interests lie within diversity and inclusion. She examines how dominant groups react to diversity initiatives and how we can increase their support for diversity efforts as well as for subordinate groups in the face of growing demographic diversity. Her research builds social identity as well as signaling theory and spans perceptions of and reactions to diversity initiatives as well as the nascent field of allyship with a particular focus on performative allyship.
Jingze Wang
Jingze Wang is a doctoral student at UCL School of Management. He has broad interests in computational methods, personality and social network studies. He studies human behavior, preferences, and performance using a combination of advanced analytics and traditional experimental methods.
Ee Hwee Lau
Ee Hwee is a PhD student in Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Her research focuses on mindsets, prestige, and decision-making during employee recruitment. In particular, one project she is currently working on examines how mindsets about ability shape organizations’ use of institutional prestige as an exclusion factor to gatekeep certain individuals over others, despite all individuals being equally qualified.
Christine Nguyen
Christine is a doctoral student at Columbia Business School in the Management department. She is broadly interested in group status, societal status, and communication styles. Prior to beginning her PhD, she studied cognitive science at UC Berkeley, with minors in data science and applied linguistics.
Canfer Akbulut
Canfer is a Master's student at the University of Oxford and an alumna of Columbia University. Her research explores how people create relationships and share their beliefs on the internet.
Azza Bouleimen
Azza Bouleimen is a PhD Student in Informatics at the University of Zürich. She is also working at the Information Systems and Networkig Institute at University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland. Her work focuses on social media manipulation, and its impact on the political context in the MENA region. She is also interested in investigating the impact of social media toxicity on society. She currently works on a project that explores young people vulnerabilities to fake news. Prior to her PhD, Azza obtained, in 2020, a Degree of Engineering in Telecommunations from the University of Carthage - Tunisia, during which she participated in a year exchange at the University of Padova -Italy- in 2019 / 2020
Amin Mekacher
Amin is a PhD student in applied mathematics at City, University of London. His research focuses on the social incentives and hierarchies leading online communities to spread misinformation or hate speech, and how these phenomena amplify their identity as a disenfranchised community. His interest mostly covers online fringe platforms, and how deplatforming communities from mainstream social networks can alter the way their members interact with each other on uncensored platforms or exacerbate their mistrust against national authorities, such as mainstream media or political institutions.
Alexandra Kirienko
Alexandra Kirienko is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on flexible working, working from home an employee well-being.
Burint Bevis
Burint is a PhD student in Strategy & Organisational Behaviour at Imperial College Business School. He has a background in data science (Python and R) and has spent a number of years working as a consultant prior to starting his PhD.North Dakota State University
All Participants
Shuning Lu, Ph.D.
Shuning Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, North Dakota State University. Her research interests revolve around news use and effects, political communication, and digital journalism. Her recent projects explore social media news engagement, online incivility, and civic engagement with both observational and experimental data.
Zoltan P. Majdik, Ph.D.
Zoltan P. Majdik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, North Dakota State University. His research interest lies in the field of rhetoric, with a focus on computational approaches to rhetorical texts. His recent projects explore how complex matters such as climate change are framed in policy discourse, and on how to build machine learning models for classifying complex rhetorical language-structures.
Kaiping Chen, Ph.D.
Kaiping Chen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Life Sciences Communication. She employs data science and machine learning methods as well as interviews to examine how digital media and technologies affect politicians’ accountability to public well-being and how deliberative designs can improve the quality of public discourse on controversial and emerging technologies and mitigate the spread of misinformation. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and appeared in flagship journals across disciplines. As a civic engagement practitioner, Kaiping also helps local governments in US and China implement and analyze innovative practices of engaging citizens throughout policymaking.
S. Scott Graham, Ph.D.
S. Scott Graham uses computational methods to study communication in bioscience and health policy at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Politics of Pain Medicine (The University of Chicago Press, 2015), Where’s the Rhetoric? (Ohio State University, 2020) and The Doctor and the Algorithm (Oxford University Press, 2022). His research is also published in a variety of journals including, Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, Plos-One, and the Annals of Internal Medicine. His findings have been covered in The New York Times, US News & World Report, Science, and AI in Health.
Saif Shahin, Ph.D.
Saif Shahin is an Assistant Professor of Digital Culture at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. His scholarship looks at data and technology as sociocultural phenomena, power in digital social networks, and the politics of online identity construction. He regularly employs computational methods in his research, including natural language processing, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and network analysis — often in conjunction with qualitative techniques. His award-winning research has been featured in flagship journals in communication, sociology, and systems science. He also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics.
Tian Yang, Ph.D.
Tian Yang just received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and will join Chinese University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor in Communication this fall. He is interested in applying methods in computational social science to study political communication across the globe, especially in China and the US. Particularly, he looks at how today’s high-choice media environment influences the public’s information behaviors. His research employs various approaches, including network analysis, online experiments, natural experiments, etc.
Dan Pemstein, Ph.D.
Dan Pemstein is a Professor of Political Science & Public Policy at North Dakota State University. He is a comparative political economist and methodologist who studies challenges that digital networks pose to democracy and develops tools to better measure qualities of democratic institutions. He is co-director of the Digital Society Project, co-developer of the Unified Democracy Scores, co-author of the Scythe Statistical Library, and serves as project manager for measurement methods, and steering committee member, for the Varieties of Democracy project.
Dane Mataic, Ph.D.
Dane Mataic’s research explores the intersection of mobilization, international conflict, and social inequalities. Broadly, he applies organizational and community theories to address topics as wide ranging as the spread of governmental policies that regulate religious organizations, the mobilization of religious members by American churches, and the spread of religious bias and advocacy.
Maral Abdollahi
Maral Abdollahi is a doctoral candidate at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. She has a master's degree from the University of Vienna. Maral studies consumers' perceptions and responses regarding virtual influencers. She is passionate about advertising, emerging technologies, and consumer psychology.
Sara Bano, Ph.D.
Sara Bano is an assistant professor in the School of Education North Dakota State University. Her research interests focus on international and comparative higher education, adult learning, and transformative learning in global context. Her recent projects are examining transformative learning for nursing faculty in online educational environments. She hopes her research will positively impact adult learners’ experiences in diverse educational contexts.
Jamie M. Chen, Ph.D.
Jamie M. Chen is from Department of Management and Marketing at North Dakota State University’s College of Business. With a Ph.D. degree in regional economics, Jamie has built an expertise in service management and digital marketing innovations. Her future research would focus on social media data mining (e.g., content analysis) to develop new business models.
Emmanuel M. Dadzie
Emmanuel Mylo Dadzie is a Ph.D. student in Communication at North Dakota State University.He aims at contributing to the realignment of democratic institutions in democracies indeveloping countries by researching the interaction of the communication of political actors,social psychology, and public policy. UNESCO WPF content development team member.
Jesse DeDeyne
Jesse DeDeyne is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Baylor University in Waco, TX. His research interests include: religion (in particular Evangelical Protestants, and politically liberal Evangelical Protestants), politics (in particular split-ticket voting and disparate identities), and stratification at all levels.
Yuming Fang
Yuming Fang is a third-year PhD student in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests are in health communication, specifically examining how individuals respond to health misinformation and misinformation correction interventions.
Emily Galbraith
Emily Galbraith is a second-year master's student in Sociology at North Dakota State University. Her research interests lie global development, human rights, and political change. She also aims to make data accessible, and foster ethical, meaningful engagement with social data.
Tzu-Hsin Huang
Tzu-Hsin Huang is a doctoral student at Brown School, Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on child maltreatment prevention and intervention. She had over a decade of practice experience in child protection services and policy implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
Prasanna Humagain, Ph.D.
Prasanna Humagain is a postdoc research specialist at the Upper Great Plain Transportation Institute, NDSU. His research spans the areas of travel demand modeling, travel behavior, transportation planning, and tourists' behavior. He is also interested in understanding tourists' perceptions and informing planning & policy measures for sustainable development, as well as designing policies conducive to the physical and mental well-being of commuters.
Lei Jiang, Ph.D.
Lei Jiang is an assistant professor in the School of Education at North Dakota State University. His research interests focus on TESOL and bilingual education, educational leadership, and teacher education. His recent projects analyze both national large-scale data sets and ethnographic data to explore transnational students’ educational experiences, high school-to-college transition, and culturally sustaining school leadership.
Chetna Kuanr
Chetna Kuanr is a first year PhD student at Northeastern University's Department of Sociology. Substantively, her research focuses on examining the relationship between spatial and social boundaries to understand populism and social movements with a regional focus on South Asia. More broadly, she is interested in theories of urban sociology focused on the Global South and combining computational methods and machine learning with qualitative methods.
Wenhao Li
Wenhao Li is an undergraduate senior at the University of Minnesota and an incoming graduate student of University of Chicago's computational social science master's program this fall. His research interests are the application of biostatistical methods to economics and the Developmental Dictatorship.
Xinyue (Gordon) Liu
Xinyue Liu is a Ph.D. student at North Dakota State University's Department of Communication. His research interests lie at the intersection of media effects and emerging media technologies, with a focus on how media platforms (both entertainment and instructional) can influence and facilitate users' psychological processing.
Loi A. Nguyen, Ph.D.
Loi A. Nguyen is an Assistant professor at Metropolitan State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Human Resource Development with a minor in Business Administration from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research has been published in books, and journals such as Management Learning, Journal of Economics and Development, Journal of Organisational Studies and Innovation.
Mir Rabby
Mir Rabby is a master’s student in the Department of Communication at North Dakota State University. His research interest lies in organizational and small group communication, such as anonymity, social influence, and group processes. He aims to employ computational methods (e.g., text mining) for analysis of interactional data.
Sarah Thorngate
Sarah Thorngate is a librarian at Northwestern University and a Ph.D. student in sociology at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests lie in social class inequalities in higher education, and in how race, class, and gender shape information seeking and information marginalization in maternal health and mothering.
Michael Vosburg
Michael Vosburg is a PhD student at North Dakota State University's Department of Communication. He has taught and practiced photojournalism in four states for more than 30 years. His research interest lies in visual communication. He hopes to develop concepts and theory about effects of visual communication.
Kurt Williams
Kurt Williams is a STEM education researcher interested in improving educational equity by leveraging data for evidence-based policymaking. Kurt is now a PhD candidate in STEM Education at North Dakota State University and formerly an intern in the U.S. Department of Education Office of the Chief Data Officer.
Shuxi Wu
Shuxi Wu is an M.A. student in the Asian Studies Program at the University of Oregon. Her disciplinary fields are anthropology and media studies, and her research interests are digital infrastructures in East Asia.
Hao Xu
Hao Xu is a PhD Candidate in Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and an incoming Lecturer in Marketing Communications in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on CSR communication, corporate social advocacy, and social media analytics.ODISSEI
All Participants
Tom Emery
Dr. Tom Emery is the Deputy Director of ODISSEI, where he is responsible for the strategic development of the infrastructure and international collaborations. Emery is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Sociology of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Before that, he was the Deputy Director of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague. Emery gained a PhD in Social Policy from the University of Edinburgh in 2014 and his thesis examined the interaction between financial support between elderly parents and their adult children in a number of European countries. His research also covers questions of comparative survey methodology and policy measurements in multilevel contexts.
Paulina Pankowska
Dr. Paulina Pankowska is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sociology and Communication Science Departments of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the topics of data and methods quality. She is currently involved in an ERC project investigating the problem of measurement error in the context of career and employment trajectories. She is also the task leader of the ODISSEI benchmarking task, which aims to organize an algorithm benchmark for the social sciences. The overarching goal of this project is to guide social science research towards a culture wherein different methods and techniques that are used to solve a specific problem are compared and evaluated objectively.
Javier Garcia-Bernardo
Dr. Javier Garcia-Bernardo is an assistant professor at Utrecht University in the Social Data Science (SoDa) team. Before that, he was a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam and at Charles University (CORPTAX), and a data scientist at the Tax Justice Network. In his research he applies computational models to understand social and economical systems. He completed his PhD in Political Economy at the CORPNET group (University of Amsterdam), and his MSc in Computer Science at the University of Vermont.
Adriënne Mendrik
Adriënne is CEO and Co-Founder of EYRA, a company that develops sustainable onine platforms to support open and FAIR science. Adrienne has significant expertise in deploying platforms for the evaluation of benchmarking challenges and more broadly in collaborating with scientists in the development of research software. She holds a PhD in Biomedical Imaging from the University of Utrecht.
Suze Zijlstra
Dr. Suze Zijlstra is Community Manager of ODISSEI. She is responsible for communications, organising events, and the coordination of the educational programme of ODISSEI. In June, she will be coordinating the practical side of SICSS-ODISSEI. You can reach her through suze@odissei-data.nl.
Adriana (Anda) Iamnitchi
Anda is Professor and Chair of Computational Social Sciences in the Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University since August 2021. Anda has been trained as a computer scientist with a PhD and MS from University of Chicago. Until recently, she was Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of South Florida. Her research trajectory led from distributed computing (such as decentralized management of user data) to computational social sciences (such as modeling information diffusion in social media and identifying patterns of information operations). She has been awarded various professional recognitions such as National Science Foundation Career Award and ACM Distinguished Member
Eszter Bokányi
Eszter is a research postdoc in the POPNET project investigating a population-scale social network of the Netherlands. She has a background in physics and graduated with a PhD from statistical physics at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. The topic of her thesis was already rather connected to computational social science, having investigated a huge database of geolocated Twitter messages. She is still mostly interested in spatial social networks and their connection to human mobility, as well as dynamic phenomena such as the spreading of innovations over these social networks.
Wouter van Atteveldt
Wouter is a leading computational communication scientist, developing and using state of the art computational communication science techniques. Combining these computational techniques with traditional panel survey methods allows studying the effect of individual media diets, for example in the recent Dutch parliamentary elections. Wouter is an interdisciplinary scientist by training, having received his M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh and a joint Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Communication Science from the VU Amsterdam. Wouter is a leading Communication Science Scholar who co-founded and chaired the Computational Methods division in the international scientific association ICA. He founded and is editor-in-chief of a new open access journal called Computational Communication Research published by Amsterdam University Press and sponsored by multiple international universities.
Joris Mulder
Joris works as a senior survey researcher at Centerdata and is the Coordinator of the LISS panel. Joris was trained in computer science and graduated in Social and Economic Psychology (MSc.) from Tilburg University in 2010. After graduating, he continued studying data science. As a social and economic psychologist with an affinity for technology and data science, Joris has knowledge of human behavior within socio-economic decision-making processes and specific technical knowledge and experience with the implementation and management of extensive and innovative research projects, applying various forms of research methods (e.g. online survey research, (mixed-mode) experiments, face-to-face interviews and (online) focus groups and data science techniques).
Nate Breznau
Nate is Principal Investigator & Postdoctoral Researcher at the SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen. Nate is a leading advocate for open and reproducible science, as well as a political scientist focusing on the relationship between public opinion and social policy. Nate attained his PhD in Sociology from the University of Bremen in 2013.
Matthew Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he serves as the Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age. Salganik's research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. During sabbaticals from Princeton, he has been a Visiting Professor at Cornell Tech, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and Professor in Residence at the New York Times.
Hekmat Alrouh
Hekmat Alrouh is a PhD candidate in Behavioral Genetics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of obesity and its relationship to educational attainment. A medical doctor by training, he aims to bridge the gaps between the medical and behavioral disciplines to better understand the causes and consequences of obesity.Lianne Bakkum
Lianne Bakkum is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Clinical Child and Family Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in Public Health and Primary Care from Cambridge University. Her research interests include child development, intellectual disability, youth care, and use of routine care data.
Dominika Czerniawska
Dominika Czerniawska is a postdoc at Leiden University, Science Based Business working on an ERC project about international scientific consortia (e.g.Human Brain Project). She is a sociologist, a social network analyst, and an art historian trained in Manchester and Warsaw. In her research, she tries to disentangle the mechanisms behind mutually-reinforcing powers of social networks, scientific institutions, and core-periphery structures. She has done research on gender and networks showing the discrepancy of network composition and structure.
Kasimir Dederichs
Kasimir is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. In his thesis, he examines inequalities in voluntary involvement as well as the role of voluntary organizations and volunteer work for social capital and social cohesion. His joint article with Hanno Kruse, entitled "Who stays involved? - A Longitudinal Study on Adolescents' Participation in Germany" was recently published in the European Sociological Review. He holds a Bachelor and a Master degree from the University of Cologne.
Melisa Lucia Diaz Lema
Melisa Diaz is a postdoctoral fellow at Politecnico di Milano. She is currently collaborating with the Amsterdam Centre of Learning Analytics at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Her most recent work explores data analytics techniques for supporting educational decision-making processes, developing early warning systems for detecting at-risk students and evaluating the effectiveness of educational interventions.
Reshmi Gopalakrishna Pillai
Reshmi is a Lecturer at the Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD from the University of Wolverhampton for her thesis on the expressions of psychological stress in tweets. Her research interests are in analyzing language using natural language processing methods for a better understanding of behaviors and states of individuals and the society.
Gita Huijgen
Gita Huijgen is a first-year PhD student in sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She examines the interrelations of public care provision, family solidarity and community cohesion, for which she intends to use computational methods. She obtained a MSc and a BSc in sociology at Radboud University.
Kyri Janssen
Kyri Janssen is a PhD student at Delft University of Technology, with an educational background in spatial economics, human geography, and international development studies. Her research examines state-led gentrification and how this shapes residential mobility of individual households within and between cities of the Netherlands.
Ranran Li
Ranran Li is pursuing a PhD in Personality Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She adopts multiple methods in her study of person-situation interactions (incl. scale development, meta-analysis, diary study, multilevel modeling, network analysis, machine learning). She is keen on applying CSS methods to advance the study of personality/social psychology.Cecil Meeusen
Cecil Meeusen is Assistant Professor in sociology and social data science (tenure track since October 2020) at the Institute of Social and Political Opinion Research (ISPO) of the Center of Sociological Research (CeSO) at the KU Leuven. Her research draws on surveys, survey embedded experiments and geospatial indicators to analyze how social and political attitudes of native majority and ethnic minority citizens may radicalize.
Marilù Miotto
Marilù is a research master in social and behavioural sciences at Tilburg University. She holds a BA in International Relations from University of Trento and a MSc in International Security Studies from Charles University, Prague. While studying at Charles University Marilù collaborated with Periculum, a collaborative research hub dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, security order, and radicalisation as present manifestations of future challenges. Her actual studies focus on developing NLP methods to detect radicalisation processes.
Anne Maaike Mulders
Anne Maaike is a PhD Candidate in sociology at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. Her research investigates career inequalities in Dutch academia along the lines of gender and ethnicity. Specifically, she is interested in how professional networks can hinder or promote science careers of women and ethnic minorities.
Daniela Negoita
Daniela Negoita is a Junior Researcher at the European Values Study at Tilburg University. She holds a MSc in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento. Her research projects revolve around survey data, their harmonization and analysis, along with leveraging the FAIRification of research outputs.
Cecilia Potente
Cecilia Potente is a postdoctoral scholar at the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, University of Zurich, where she studies how socioeconomic status is associated with gene expression in the form of mRNA. Her research interests are in Demography, Sociogenomics, Sociology, Life-Course Research, and Health Inequalities in general. She carried out her PhD research in the Department of Sociology and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. As part of her doctoral studies, she examined different aspects of the socioeconomic inequality in health and mortality starting from the gradient in disability trajectories before death to the causal effect of education on cancer incidence and mortality. Before joining the PhD, she completed Master and Bachelor degrees in Economics and Social Sciences at Bocconi University, Milan.
Mikhail Sirenko
I am a Postdoc Researcher on the Horizon 2020 project HERoS at the Delft University of Technology. I have a background in data science which I recently enhanced with simulation & modelling for policy analysis. I aim to understand how cities recover, adapt, or transform in the face of uncertain future events like pandemics, heatwaves, or segregation.
Jarik Stam
At the time of writing I am in the final phase of the Social Sciences Research Master at the University of Amsterdam, before which I completed the Sociology Bachelor at the VU Amsterdam. During these studies I have developed a strong interest in using computational methods to answer research questions about cultural causes of differences and developments in behaviors and attitudes.
Willem Vermeulen
Willem is pursuing a PhD at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI-KNAW & UMCG). He has a MSc in Computational Science and BSc in Computer Science. Following his strong interest in human demographics and behaviour he currently researches union dissolution patterns in the Netherlands.
Kevin Wittenberg
Kevin Wittenberg is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Utrecht University. His research focusses on collective action and cooperation. As a part of a transdisciplinary program, he studies the emergence and sustainability of citizen collectives for healthcare in the Netherlands. Additionally, he is interested in the integration of machine learning techniques and large social network data into traditional social sciences paradigms.
Samareen Zubair
I am a Research Masters student at Tilburg University for Social and Behavioral Sciences (Minor: Methods and Statistics). I did my bachelors in Psychology from Bilkent University, Turkey. With an interest in Psychology and passion for Mathematics, research methodology seemed like a perfect blend.Oxford
All Participants
Evelina Akimova
Evelina Akimova is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Biosocial Research at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and a Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College. Evelina’s main research areas are health inequalities, chronotype, and wellbeing, using methods from computational social science and statistical genetics. Her current research focuses on the use of molecular genetic, survey, and accelerometer data to understand the complex interplay between chronotype and labour market decisions, trajectories, and experiences. She received her DPhil in Sociology at the University of Oxford in 2021 where she investigated the joined role of biological and socio-demographic determinants of depressive symptoms.
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is an associate professor of social demography and professorial fellow of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She completed her DPhil in Sociology jointly affiliated with the University of Oxford and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Her research spans a number of substantive areas in demography and sociology, including gender, mortality and health, marriage and family, and ethnicity and migration. Her work has sought to adopt computational innovations both in terms of modelling approaches such as agent-based models and digital trace data from web and social media platforms to study social and demographic processes.
Charles Rahal
Charles is a social science methodologist and applied social data scientist with a background in high-dimensional econometrics, having completed his PhD in 2016. He is particularly interested in unique data origination processes, be they unstructured or otherwise, and is an advocate for open source and reproducible academic research. He presently teaches 'Python for Sociologists' and 'Replication', both in Michaelmas term, although he has also recently given workshops and guest lectures on the themes of 'An Introduction to Machine Learning' and 'An Introduction to the Command Line'.
Francesco Rampazzo
Francesco Rampazzo is a Career Development Fellow in Marketing and Consumer Demography at the Said Business School and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. He is also a Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College. He is completing a PhD in Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Southampton and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. His PhD thesis focuses on the use of digital traces combined with traditional data sources to estimate the number of migrants. Francesco is a demographer with a broad range of research interests, which include digital and computational demography with applications in fertility, migration, and survey research.
Tobias Rüttenauer
Tobias Rüttenauer is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on environmental inequality, selective migration trajectories, and spatial demography. Furthermore, he is interested in quantitative spatial methods, longitudinal regression models, and the use of geographical information systems to connect different sources of administrative data.
Maksim Zubok
Maksim Zubok is a Clarendon and Nuffield scholar reading for MPhil in Politics (European Politics and Society). His research combines digital trace and administrative data to study public opinion. Maksim works as a research assistant at the Legitimacy in Global Governance project, where he applies large language models to derive fine-grained measures of people's preferences for global governance from social media data. His broader interests include survey research, post-stratification methods, and natural language processing.
Pawel Adrjan
Pawel Adrjan is Head of EMEA Research at the global job site Indeed, where he develops actionable insights on the labour market to help businesses and policy makers make better decisions. During his time at Indeed, he has led innovative research on the transformation of the world of work and has collaborated with leading economics think tanks and international organisations. His analyses feature regularly in the media. Over the last two decades, Pawel has worked in Europe and the US, holding senior positions in risk management at Goldman Sachs and Barclays in New York and London. He is a Research Fellow in Economics at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, and a member of the Research Advisory Board at Open For Business, a coalition of global companies dedicated to LGBT+ inclusion. Pawel holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Warwick, as well as a PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford.
Nicola Barban
Nicola is a Professor of Demography at the University of Bologna and an international co-investigator of the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change (MiSoC). He is the Principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant GENPOP: Genes, genealogies and the evolution of demographic change and social inequality. His research interests include Quantitative methods in social sciences, Sociogenomics, Demography, Social interactions, Life course, and Migration and Ethnicity.
Tommaso Batistoni
Tommaso Batistoni is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lead Programmer at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences at Nuffield College. Tommaso’s main research areas are the evolution of cooperative behaviour in humans, the role of reputation in the resolution of large-scale social dilemmas, and the development of tools facilitating online experiments. His current work focuses on the interplay between scales of interactions (global vs local) in the production of public goods and the development of a package to extend the Python-based oTree framework to conduct experiments.
Oriol J. Bosch
Oriol J. Bosch is a PhD candidate at the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics. He is also a non-resident research fellow at the Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology (RECSM – Universitat Pompeu Fabra). As a methodologist, Oriol focuses on understanding how to better collect and analyse attitudinal and behavioural data for the social sciences. He specialises in topics related to measurement quality, web and mobile surveys and the use of digital trace data and sensors/apps to enhance or substitute surveys, and the effect of these on data quality. His work has explored the impact on data quality of using novel data types to answer survey questions as images, voice memos and emojis. For his PhD, Oriol is developing and applying new methodologies to assess the errors of web tracking data and compare these with the ones of surveys.
Tom Douglas
Tom Douglas is Professor of Applied Philosophy based in the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, where he is Director of Research and Development. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Editor of the Journal of Practical Ethics, and Principal Investigator on the project ’Protecting Minds: The Right to Mental Integrity and the Ethics of Arational Influence’, funded by a Consolidator Award from the European Research Council.
Hannah Furnas
Hannah Furnas is a research science manager on the Demography and Survey Science team at Meta where she leads a team focused on ads and business products and data transparency. Hannah has a PhD in Sociology and Demography from Penn State.
Ben Goldacre
Ben is a doctor, academic, writer, and broadcaster. He trained in medicine at Oxford and UCL, in psychiatry at the Maudsley, and in epidemiology at LSHTM. His academic and policy work is in informatics, epidemiology and evidence based medicine, where he works on various problems including variation in care, better uses of routinely collected electronic health data, evidence-based social policy, access to clinical trial data, efficient trial design, and retracted papers.
Douglas Leasure
Doug’s research spans human demography, population ecology, geosciences, and Bayesian statistics. He develops novel methods to map populations and demographics with high spatial resolution using sparse survey data while accounting for uncertainty in population estimates to support informed decision-making for census support, government services, and global health initiatives. His interdisciplinary research combines powerful analytical approaches in human demography and population ecology with exciting new geospatial data derived from household surveys and space-based Earth observation platforms. To promote research with real-world impacts, Doug is committed to open science and develops web applications that translate scientific results into easy-to-navigate interactive maps and tools to facilitate uptake by stakeholders globally.
Blake Miller
Blake Miller is an Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science in the Methodology Department at the London School of Economics. Blake's current methodological research agenda develops methods that provide researchers with the necessary tools to annotate large, unbalanced text corpora using active learning. He also is developing tools to increase the external validity of media effects experiments using realistic, interactive survey vignettes.
Neave O'Clery
Originally from Dublin, Neave is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London. Her group focuses on studying the processes underlying economic development and the emergence of complexity for cities, often using tools from graph theory and network science. She was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford where she established a new group working at the interface of mathematics, data science and development/urban issues.
Amy Orben
Dr Amy Orben is a Programme Leader Track Scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, and a College Research Fellow at Emmanuel College. She leads a research group investigating the links between digital technology use, mental health and cognition in adolescence. Alongside her research, Dr Orben campaigns for the adoption of more transparent and open scientific practices. Before joining the University of Cambridge, Dr Orben completed a DPhil in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, for which she was awarded the British Psychological Society Award for Outstanding Contributions to Doctoral Research, and an MA in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
Mark Verhagen
Mark Verhagen is a PhD candidate at Nuffield College and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford. He has a background in Sociology (Oxford) and Econometrics (University of Amsterdam). In his research he applies methods from the domains of machine learning and pattern recognition to answer a wide range of social science questions.
Lena Voita
Elena (Lena) Voita is a final-year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh supported by the Facebook PhD Fellowship award. Her research is mostly focused on understanding how neural networks learn to process natural language. Previously, Lena was a research scientist at Yandex Research and worked side by side with the Yandex Translate team. She also teaches NLP at the Yandex School of Data Analysis; the extended public version of (a part of) this course is available at [NLP Course For You](https://lena-voita.github.io/nlp_course.html)
Bo Zhao
Bo completed a PhD in Computer Science and Informatics in 2016 at Cardiff University and worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre (Respiratory) supporting clinical studies on respiratory diseases before joining the University of Oxford and LCDS. He previously worked on several multi-disciplinary projects including national and regional COVID-19 related studies, breathomics sample collection and analysis and mass-spectrometry workflow automation. His current research interests lie primarily in semantic and sentiment text analysis, robust and dynamic data management, data visualisation and prediction, and gamifications in research studies.
Anna Altová
Anna is a PhD candidate in the Department of Demography and Geodemography at Charles University. Having a background in demography and social epidemiology, her research focuses mainly on cancer epidemiology with a special emphasis on cancer prevention and screening behaviours among Czech women using a mixed methods approach.
Athina Anastasiadou
Athina Anastasiadou is a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Her dissertation research focuses on heterogeneities in migration, particularly on gender- and age differences in migration patterns. Therefore, she is interested in computational methods and the use of digital trace data. Before coming to the MPIDR, she obtained an M.Sc. in Economics from the Vienna University of Economics and Business and a B.Sc. from the University of Cologne.
Ross Barker
I am a research assistant at the Vienna Institute of Demography and I am moving on to a PhD in Demography beginning September 2022. My focus is on using web scraping and text analysis to better understand fertility decision-making. Overall, I'm interested in using non-traditional data in the field of demography.
Nico Buettner
I am a doctoral candidate in Politics at the University of Oxford, and a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Politics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. My research interests include political psychology, public opinion research and causal inference techniques. I am particularly working on the relationship between personality and politics, attitudes towards immigrants and minorities, political candidate characteristics and methodological challenges in conjoint experiments. I hold bachelor and master degrees in Political Science from the University of Vienna, Austria.
Gregory Clark
Gregory Clark is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Said Business School, University of Oxford. He is affiliated with Centre for Corporate Reputation and Future of Marketing Initiative. His research interests include social networks, spectral graph theory, and computational social science.
Qi Cui
Qi Cui is a PhD student in demography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He completed a masters in social research at the Australian National University and a masters in demography at the European Doctoral School of Demography. His interests include diffusion processes and intergenerational fertility transmission.
Benjamin Patrick Evans
Benjamin is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Complex Systems at the University of Sydney. He works primarily on the emergent dynamics from bounded rational agents in games and economic markets. Previously, he completed his bachelor's and master's in Computer Science, focusing on machine learning.
Kristijan Fidanovski
Kristijan Fidanovski is a doctoral researcher of pronatalism in Eastern Europe at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford. He is also interested in voting behaviour, electoral systems and European integration. Kristijan holds a BA and an MA in Politics and International Relations from University College London and Georgetown University.
Rachel Ganly
Rachel Ganly is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. Her doctoral research investigates how inequalities in health and socio-economic outcomes emerge during key family processes such as marriage, childbearing and divorce. Rachel holds a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Bath and MPhil in Social Science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prior to graduate school she worked in the non-profit sector at PathFinders Hong Kong, an organisation which assists migrant workers during pregnancy and childbirth.
Natalia Garbiras-Díaz
Natalia Garbiras-Díaz is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021, where she is currently a Research Associate at the Center for Development Policy. She holds a Master's degree in Economics from the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). Prior to receiving her PhD, she worked at the World Bank, the Observatory of Democracy and the National Planning Department of Colombia. Her main research interests are comparative politics and the political economy of development, focusing on corruption, public goods provision and accountability in Latin America. She also studies the formation of citizen and ex-combatant attitudes and their role in post-conflict peace stabilization. In her book project, she explores the informational and institutional environments that pave the way for the rise and success of outsider candidates.
Maria Gueltzow
Maria is a PhD Student at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam. She holds a B.Sc. in Health Sciences from University of Applied Sciences Hamburg and a (research) M.Sc. in Health sciences with a specialization in public health epidemiology from Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Solhee Han
Solhee Han is a PhD student in Social Policy at University of Oxford. She conducts comparative studies on welfare state financing and redistribution and public attitudes towards the welfare state in the context of tax-benefit trade-offs. Previously, she worked at think-tanks on design and evaluation of income security policies.
Olena Holubowska
Olena is currently pursuing PhD at university KU Leuven in Belgium. She completed her masters in Mathematical Modelling and Computation at DTU in Denmark. Her research investigate into human mobility and mobility patterns; currently focusing on the variation in intra-urban mobility of residents with migratory background.
Roselinde Janowski
Roselinde is a doctoral student in Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on developing effective engagement strategies for an open-source mobile parenting application to prevent violence against children among families in Tanzania as part of a large-scale optimisation trial. Before starting her doctorate, Roselinde completed a Master’s in Psychological Research at the University of Cape Town.
Eroll Kuhn
Eroll Kuhn is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, and holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research examines the politics of immigration as well as the integration of migrants in receiving societies, labor markets, and political systems. To address research questions, he use methods and designs to credibly identify causal effects using observational data as well as natural language processing and other tools for text-as-data.
Diyi Liu
Diyi is a student on the DPhil in Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences at the Oxford Internet Institute. She’s fascinated by how digital networks boost the power of online communities, influence the way that social actors exchange meaning with each other, and ultimately reshape people’s social lives. Prior to joining the OII, she completed both her BA and MA in International Journalism and Communication in China.
Lara Minkus
Lara is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Flensburg. She received her PhD in Sociology from the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS). She is interested in gender, family sociology, social inequality, public opinion dynamics, quantitative methods, and survey methodology.
Long Nguyen
Long Nguyen is a PhD student in Sociology at Bielefeld University. His research focuses on improving the usability of big spatial data in the social sciences. His daily work mainly involves writing R packages to facilitate spatial linkage between online data and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
Juliana Outes
Juliana works as a Data Steward for the Government Outcomes Lab (Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford). She supports INDIGO (International Network for Data on Impact and Government Outcomes), an emerging data collaborative where different organisations with an interest in social impact share data on outcomes-based projects. Juliana has an MA in Politics, Big Data and Quantitative Methods from Warwick University.
William Rudgard
William Rudgard is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on identifying cost-effective services that may support and empower vulnerable adolescents across Ethiopia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe to participate fully in this critical period of life. He is particularly interested in the interconnected nature of social vulnerabilities, and the transformative role of health and social protection systems.
Ryan Shandler
Ryan Shandler is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Nuffield College, and the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Ryan’s research interests lie at the intersection of international security and political psychology. He explores how emerging technologies elevate the role of public opinion in international affairs. Methodologically, Ryan conducts experiments that expose participants to cyber threats in order to measure the societal, political, and psychological consequences. Ryan received his PhD in political science from the University of Haifa, and has a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) from the University of Melbourne.
Doron Shiffer-Sebba
Doron Shiffer-Sebba is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests lie at the intersection of wealth inequality, finance, and the family. His research projects include understanding the role of bureaucracy for elite families, analyzing the role of extended kin wealth on children's outcomes, and investigating community effects on tax avoidance using the Panama Papers. Doron also has an ongoing project developing a computer vision approach to studying human interaction in physical space (using machine learning). This approach can be leveraged to investigate interaction rituals, cultural capital, and other physical manifestations of social theories.
Andra Sonea
Andra Sonea is a Research Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and is in the process of completing her PhD in Urban Science at the University of Warwick. Her research explores spatial access to banking, the resilience of the everyday banking infrastructure and global open banking business models.
Gaspard Tissandier
Gaspard is a Ph.D. student in Economics and Public Policy at the University Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne, where he works on the interaction of Machine Learning and Public Policy and how we can improve higher education and criminality policies using predictive algorithms. He is also interested in the social and philosophical implications of public algorithms.
Artem Volgin
Artem Volgin is a PhD student in Social Statistics at the University of Manchester, UK. His interests revolve around applications of advanced statistical and computational techniques to public policy. His current PhD research focuses on investigating pupils' transitions between schools using network analysis and spatial statistics.
Tobias Wolfram
Tobias Wolfram is a PhD-candidate in Sociogenomics at Bielefeld University and ENSAE-CREST, interested in the intersection of behavioral genetics, differential psychology and social stratification. He also works as a statistician for Civey, a startup in the realm of online non-probability sampling.Paris
All Participants
Etienne Ollion
Étienne Ollion is a CNRS research fellow and Professor of Sociology at École Polytechnique. His research focuses on politics, and he integrates digital data to more classic data sources and methods.
Germain Gauthier
Germain Gauthier is a PhD candidate at École Polytechnique and a doctoral affiliate at the Institute for Public Policies (IPP). His research interest lies in the formation, persistence, and unravelling of social norms and of beliefs. Relying on social networks, surveys and administrative data, his main focus has been on the evolution of gender norms.
Felix Lennert
Felix Lennert is a PhD candidate in Sociology at École Polytechnique under the supervision of Étienne Ollion. He holds an M.Sc. in Computational Social Science from Linköping Universitet. His research interest centers around political polarization and its underlying processes which he studies using large-scale social media data and a diverse set of computational methods.
Elliott Ash
Elliott Ash is Assistant Professor of Law, Economics, and Data Science at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on empirical analysis of the law and legal system using techniques from econometrics, natural language processing, and machine learning.
Marie Bergström
Marie Bergström is a Permanent Researcher at the French National Institute for Demography. Her work deals with online dating which she investigates using digital data.
Julia Cagé
Julia Cagé is an Associate Professor of Economics at Sciences Po Paris. Her research deals with political economy, industrial organization and economic history. She is particularly interested in media economics, political participation and political attitudes.
David Garcia
David Garcia is Full Professor for Computational Behavioral and Social Sciences at TU Graz. His research analyzes human behavior through digital traces and deals with topics such as emotions, polarization, inequality, and privacy.
Gloria Gennaro
Glora Gennaro is a Postdoctoral Student at the Immigration Policy Lab at ETH Zurich. Her research focuses on current challenges of democratic societies in Western Europe and in the US where she studies the demand and supply of populism, electoral responses to immigration, and emotions in politics.
Lucas Girard
Lucas Girard has recently acquired his Ph.D. in Economics at CREST and is a Lecturer at ENSAE Paris. His research interest is in the field of econometrics. He develops and applies measures for segregation/polarization and investigates the construction of non-asymptomatic confidence intervals.
Guillaume Hollard
Guillaume Hollard is a Senior Researcher at CNRS and Professor of Economics at École Polytechnique, where he also serves as the Vice President of the Economics department.
Marc Keuschnigg
Marc Keuschnigg is Professor of Sociology at Leipzig University and Associate Professor at Linköping University. His research deals with cultural dynamics, social norms, and spatial inequality.
Gianluca Manzo
Gianluca Manzo is Professor of Sociology at Sorbonne University. His research is of theoretical and empirical nature. The former revolves around meta-theoretical reflections on sociological theorization, the latter is concerned with a broad range of topics such as educational inequalities, relative deprivation, status hierarchies, and, more recently, innovation diffusion and migration dynamics.
Ivaylo Petev
Ivaylo Petev is CNRS Research Fellow at the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST) where he heads the department for Sociology. His research deals with inequalities in consumption and lifestyles, environmental practices and discrimination from historical and comparative perspectives.
Liva Ralaivola
Liva Ralaivola is the head of the Criteo Research Lab. There, they develop cutting-edge machine learning tools for online marketing. Formerly, he was a full professor in Computer Science at Aix-Marseille Université (currently on leave).
Matthew Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he serves as the Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He is also affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers including the Office of Population Research and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.
Paola Tubaro
Paola Tubaro is CNRS Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique (LISN). Her research focuses on the digital platform economy, the global supply networks of the artificial intelligence industry, the role of human labour in the development of automation, and inequalities in access to data.
João Areal
João Areal is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the CDSS. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Politics and Philosophy from the University of Sheffield (UK) and a Master's degree in Social Sciences (Research) from the University of Amsterdam (NL). His master thesis explored the topic of affective polarisation in Brazil, focusing on the concept of negative political identities. During his time in Amsterdam, João worked as a research assistant and undertook an internship at the Hot Politics Lab (https://www.hotpolitics.eu/), where he and his colleagues developed a measure of elite hostility using parliamentary speech data. Methodologically, his interests lie in the field of Computational Social Sciences, with a focus on automated text analysis. João's research interests include affective polarisation, positive and negative partisanship, comparative political behaviour, and Brazilian politics.
Başak Bozkurt
Başak is a DPhil student in Social Data Science at the University of Oxford, interested in electoral integrity and election-related mis- and disinformation on social media. She has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and a double major degree in Political Science and International Relations. Başak holds master’s degrees in Sociology and Political Science.
Thomas Delcey
Thomas Delcey is a visiting fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. His research examines the history and sociology of economics, with a particular focus on finance. Thomas is interested in applying computational tools to his field. His main research project aims at studying the impact of business schools on the field of economics.
Ahmed Fouad El Haddad
Ahmed Fouad El Haddad is currently pursuing a PhD in political science at Sciences Po Bordeaux. His work lies at the intersection of political economy and comparative politics. He uses quantitative and computational methods to study what drives policy reforms in non-democratic contexts. Ahmed Fouad holds a master's degree in political science and comparative sociology from the University of Bordeaux.
Yann Goltrant
Yann Goltrant is a PhD candidate at University Paris-Dauphine. His research interest focus on the economic elites, and more specifically on the boards of directors. Building on data gathered from different sources (e.g. annual reports, Who's Who), he studies the careers of board members in the UK.
Sascha Grehl
Sascha Grehl is a PhD candidate in sociology at Leipzig University. His research is concerned with how prosocial and antisocial behavior can be explained using evolutionary dynamics and taking into account recent findings in cognitive research. While initially experimental, he has recently also been exploring agent-based models and their potential for explanations in the social sciences.
Joshua Hellyer
Joshua Hellyer is a doctoral researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, where he studies the interplay between ethnic and “lookist” discrimination in the German labor market. His research interests are shaped by previous nonprofit work in his native Iowa and studies in urban planning and sociology.
Roxana Hofmann
Roxana Hofmann is a recently graduated MSc Psychological Research student interested in the modelling of intraindividual variability and nuancedness in personality. Currently, she is working with Columbia University on analysing gender inequalities in physical mobility, before starting her PhD at the University of Edinburgh.
Juliet Inyang
Juliet Inyang is an Assistant Lecturer of Marketing at the University of Calabar. She is the co-founder of Academic Hive, a research community supporting young academics in Africa. She intends to combine computational, quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate how AI supports the internationalization of higher education in developing countries.
Donia Kamel
I am a first year PhD student in Economics at the Paris School of Economics. I am particularly interested in studying migration through the lens of big data and novel methods to understand the role of networks, mobility, assimilation, integration of refugees, intention to migrate and attitudes towards immigration and refugees.
Maël Lecoursonnais
Maël Lecoursonnais is a PhD student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University, Sweden. His research interests span spatial inequalities, causal inference, and applied machine learning. His current project investigates the consequences of spatial inequalities on life-course outcomes such as education or income, using causally-oriented methods and/or machine learning algorithms. He holds a MA in Quantitative Sociology from Paris-Saclay University as well as BAs in Mathematics Applied to Social Sciences and Political Sociology.
Alexiane Lerouge
Alexiane Lerouge is a journalist specialized in data-driven stories. She started her career working for Alternatives Economiques. More recently she has contributed to La Gazette des Communes and Disclose and taught data journalism in the ESJ Lille. Her favourite projects feature investigations about French parliament members, decisions by the CNESER disciplinaire or the unexpected projects aid money from the AFD end up supporting. She also likes to write about the environment, industry and northern countries.
Ana Lutzky
A former specialized journalist on corporate responsibility and environment, Ana Lutzky shifted to a full-time data journalist role in 2018. She now leads Data Sup-Recherche at AEF news agency in Paris, which is leader in covering public policies. Teaming with another data journalist, they build a weekly data-driven newsletter that breaks stories about higher education and research. Inside this 80 journalists agency, she besides have a transversal role as she coordinates a network of around 10 colleagues, mixing journalists from the newsrooms and a developer/designer. They apply data skills on 5 main topics : education, housing, environment, social issues, and security. She also teaches data journalism at Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, where her students pursue a master's degree in information design and transmedia journalism.
Anastasia Magat
Anastasia is a PhD student in sociology at Grenoble Alpes University. Her research focuses on the mediatization of French suburbs on social media and the role of inhabitants in its construction. Her work relies on mixed and computational methods from social media and interviews.
Mella Perleberg
Mella Perleberg is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Sociology and Social Research at University of Cologne. Her research interest concerns the application of machine learning in criminological research and most recently she explored how machine learning algorithms can be used for crime prediction. She received her bachelor's degree at University of Goettingen.
Molly Quinn
Molly is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at University College Dublin and holds an MA in Psychology. Her current work uses tools from psychology and natural language processing to understand and model the cognition of unexpected events. Part of this work won the ESCoP Early Career Publication Award 2021.
Ange Richard
Ange Richard is a Sociology PhD Student at the Université Grenoble-Alpes. They started in October 2020, after a Master’s degree in NLP and a MA in Gender and Media Studies. Their research aims to implement quote extraction systems for French to study gender imbalance in sources in news media.
Victoire Sessego
Victoire Sessego is a doctoral student in sociology at the ENS Paris-Saclay. Their research focuses on Do It Yourself practices among the upper middle classes in France. In their research, they use both qualitative and quantitative methods as they believe they should not be separated.
Olga Suslova
Olga Suslova is a PhD student in urban studies at the Laboratory Technology, Territories and Societies (CNRS, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, Gustave Eiffel University). She holds a Master's degree in urban planning and studies from the Paris School of Urban Planning and a Diplôme in geography from the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. Her current research examines postsocialist urban transformations in Saint Petersburg (Russia).
Nadine Zwiener-Collins
Nadine Zwiener-Collins is a postdoctoral researcher in Politics and Gender, Diversity and Equality at the Department of Political Science at the University of Salzburg, funded by the Land Salzburg. Her interests include gender differences in political interest, attitudes, and participation and teaching critical data literacy skills.
Arman Akgönül
Arman Akgönül is a student of the engineering cycle at ENSAE. He has a strong background in mathematics, geopolitics and economics. He is now in the process of getting familiar with social sciences.
Joséphine Mayans
Joséphine Mayans is currently a statistical engineering student at ENSAE Paris, after a two-year study course focusing on social sciences and mathematics. She is particularly interested in political sociology.
Jérémi Bornet
Jérémi Bornet is a student from ENSAE. He's looking forward to attend the SICSS because he is really interested in social sciences
Juliet Meynent
Juliet Meynent is a student in the ENSAE's engineer cycle. Their areas of interest are computational social sciences.Penn
All Participants
Xi Song
Xi Song is an Associate Professor of Sociology and a faculty member of the Graduate Group in Demography at University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include social stratification and mobility, social inequality, population studies, and quantitative methodology. Her current research examines social, economic, and demographic processes that govern the persistence of inequality across life stages and generations from the 18th century to the present.
Daniel Hopkins
Daniel J. Hopkins is a Professor in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Political Science, and he holds a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. His research focuses on political behavior, with special emphasis on American politics, voting, racial and ethnic politics, local politics, and research methods. His research has employed a variety of statistical and computational methods to analyze texts. The author of 47 academic articles and the 2018 book The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized, Hopkins also regularly writes about American politics for the website FiveThirtyEight.com. Professor Hopkins received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2007. He subsequently was a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University and an Assistant and then Associate Professor at Georgetown University.
Hanming Fang
Hanming Fang is Joseph M. Cohen Term Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an applied microeconomist with broad theoretical and empirical interests focusing on public economics, including topics such as discrimination, social insurance, and welfare reform, health insurance markets, and population aging.
Alejandra Regla-Vargas
Alejandra Regla-Vargas is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her broad research interests include digital culture, race/ethnicity, and online social networks.
Shengchun Huang
Shengchun Huang is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in digital news consumption, algorithm-driven aggregators/platforms, and social effects in the high-choice media environment. She applies a variety of computational methods in research work, including network analysis, Markov chains, word embedding and nlp, etc.
Tian Yang
Tian Yang is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in applying methods in computational social science to study political communication across the globe, especially in China and the US. Particularly, he looks at how today’s high-choice media environment influences the public’s information behaviors. His research employs various approaches, including network analysis, online experiments, natural experiments, etc.
Eugenio Paglino
Eugenio is a second-year Ph.D. student in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a BSc and a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. Before becoming a PhD candidate, he worked as a research assistant at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute and the Dondena Center for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. His broad research interests include the interactions between population and the environment, migration, the computational social sciences, and inequality. He loves visualizing data and is interested in studying ways in which data visualization can help researchers to communicate more clearly and to reach a wider audience.
Lyle Ungar
Lyle H. Ungar is a machine learning researcher and professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also affiliated with the psychology department at the university. His research group develops scalable machine learning and text mining methods for use in natural language processing, psychology, and medical research. Projects ranged from crowd-sourced decision making to mining social media to better understand connections between mental and physical well-being.
Yphtach Lelkes
Yphtach (Yph) Lelkes is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication. He studies the structure, dynamics, and causes of political attitudes, with a particular emphasis in polarization and American politics. His work lies at the intersection of public opinion, political psychology, and political communication.
Katherine Ognyanova
Katherine (Katya) Ognyanova studies the effects of social influence on civic and political behavior, confidence in institutions, information exposure/evaluation, and public opinion formation. Her methodological expertise is in computational social science, network science, and survey research. Her recent work examines the links between misinformation exposure and political trust. Ognyanova is one of the founders and a principal investigator for The COVID States Project – a large multi-university initiative exploring the social and political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Brandon Stewart
Brandon Stewart is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and is also affiliated with the Department of Politics and the Office of Population Research. He develops new quantitative statistical methods for applications across the social sciences. Methodologically his focus is in tools which facilitate automated text analysis and model complex heterogeneity in regression. Many recent applications of these methods have centered on using large corpora of text to better understand propaganda in contemporary China.
Junming Huang
Junming Huang is an Associate Research Scientist at the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China, Princeton University. His research interests lie in causal inference, science of science, statistics analysis and social networks.
Emilio Zagheni
Emilio Zagheni is Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and Affiliate Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, where he served as Training Director of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. He received his Ph.D. in Demography (2010) and M.A. in Statistics (2008) from U.C. Berkeley. Zagheni is best known for his work on combining digital trace data and traditional sources to track and understand migrations and to advance population science. In 2016 he received the Trailblazer Award for Demographic Analysis from the European Association for Population Studies for his role in developing the field of Digital and Computational Demography. As co-chair of the Digital Demography Panel of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, he has played a key role in favoring collaboration and exchange between demographers, statisticians and computational social scientists.
Will Wang
Will Wang is a Principal Researcher in the Office of the Chief Economist at Microsoft Research. He is also a Visiting Scholar in the Marketing Department at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are in Industrial Organization and Applied Microeconomics. Recently my research has focused on the economics of cloud computing and empirical market design.More coming soon...
Tian Yang
Tian Yang is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in applying methods in computational social science to study political communication across the globe, especially in China and the US. Particularly, he looks at how today’s high-choice media environment influences the public’s information behaviors. His research employs various approaches, including network analysis, online experiments, natural experiments, etc.
Alejandra Regla-Vargas
Alejandra Regla-Vargas is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her broad research interests include digital culture, race/ethnicity, and online social networks.
Shengchun Huang
Shengchun Huang is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in digital news consumption, algorithm-driven aggregators/platforms, and social effects in the high-choice media environment. She applies a variety of computational methods in research work, including network analysis, Markov chains, word embedding and nlp, etc.
Eugenio Paglino
Eugenio is a second-year Ph.D. student in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a BSc and a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. Before becoming a PhD candidate, he worked as a research assistant at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute and the Dondena Center for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. His broad research interests include the interactions between population and the environment, migration, the computational social sciences, and inequality. He loves visualizing data and is interested in studying ways in which data visualization can help researchers to communicate more clearly and to reach a wider audience.
Benjamin Manning
I am a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania working in the computational social sciences. My (aspiring) research interests are 1) improving methods to answer social science questions using the tools of statistics and machine learning, 2) social networks and information economics. I will be enrolling at MIT in the fall of 2022 to pursue my PhD with the Information Technology group at Sloan.
Jamaal Green
I am a postdoc interested in the ways that our built environment shapes social and economic inequality and figuring out ways to apply spatial analogies to explore these problems.
Nicolas Choquette-Levy
Nic Choquette-Levy (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Public Policy and International Affairs at Princeton University. Nic's PhD research integrates agent-based modelling, game theory, and survey methods to assess the impacts of potential policy interventions, including weather-based crop insurance and cash transfers, on farmer climate adaptation outcomes in South Asia. At SICCS Penn, he is keen to learn more about network analysis and techniques for wrangling big datasets, particularly regarding global flows of remittances from international migrants. Nic is originally from Montreal, Canada, and obtained undergraduate degrees in biomedical engineering and international relations at the University of Southern California, and a Master's degree in Energy and Environmental Systems at the University of Calgary.
Kadija Ferryman
Kadija Ferryman is a medical anthropologist who studies racial health equity in digital health technologies. Dr. Ferryman is Core Faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Ferryman began her professional career over 20 years ago as a policy researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. Dr. Ferryman received her BA in anthropology from Yale University and her PhD in anthropology from the New School for Social Research. She has published research in journals such as Journal of the American Informatics Association, Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, and Genetics in Medicine.
Bonnie Siegler
Bonnie is a PhD student in sociology at Columbia University in New York City. She is interested in the relationship between culture, inequality and organizations, focusing on K-12 schools. She analyzes how stakeholders in schools - administrators, teachers, parents, etc. - make meaning out of and understand their experiences in light of educational inequality and segregation. As cases, she has focused on school choice and school policies on teaching about race/racism. Her research uses a variety of methods including survey experiments, interviews, and computational text analysis.
Mauricio Bucca
I’m an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Previously, I was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute and earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at Cornell University. I study labor market inequalities, intergenerational mobility and beliefs about inequality using a combination of statistical modeling, empirical strategies for causal inference, experimental and computational methods.
Abigail Dym
Abigail Dym is a joint-PhD candidate in political science and education policy at UPenn, where she studies political behavior related to civic education, political knowledge and engagement, learning, and public policy. She is committed to leveraging diverse research methodologies to answer questions and promote processes related to democratic governance, particularly for young people.
Michael Cohen
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the psychology department at UPenn. My primary interest is in understanding the psychological and brain mechanisms that underlie the persistence of misinformation in affecting decisions after a factual correction, a phenomenon known as the Continued Influence Effect. Prior to moving to this line of research (in my PhD at UCLA and a previous postdoc at Northwestern), I focused on how reward and strategies affect learning. I also have an interest in aging-related changes to cognition, and my work at Penn has included a collaboration with the neurologists at Penn Memory Center. I am interested in learning how to apply textual analysis methods to the constructed mock social media stimuli that we created for my current project, and also to learn how computational social science methods can be used to understand the spread of misinformation on real social media platforms.
Daniela (Ela) Castellanos-Reyes
Daniela (Ela) Castellanos-Reyes is a Ph.D. Candidate in Learning Design and Technology at Purdue University. Proudly raised by a single mother, Ela approaches her research with the belief that online and distance learning improve women's lives. She is an educational researcher within the fields of instructional design and educational data mining. Her research focuses on supporting online learners' social presence through network analysis. Specifically, Ela is interested in how peer-influence shapes learning communities in online learning environments. Her recent work examines the relationship between student retention and social media affordances (e.g., like buttons) in Massive Open Online Courses. Ela's methodological expertise includes network analysis, survey research, and hierarchical linear models. Her work has been published in Computers in Human Behavior, the Journal of Computing in Higher Education, and TechTrends. Ela's work has been supported by the International Peace Scholarship awarded by Philanthropic Educational Organization (P.E.O.) and the Frank DeBruicker Graduate Award in Educational Technology. Prior to her doctoral studies, Ela earned her B.A. in English Philology and English Education from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and a master’s degree in Learning Design and Technology at Purdue University. Outside research, Ela enjoys attending church, re-reading Harry Potter, and dancing in the kitchen with her husband.
Haoning Xue
Haoning is a PhD candidate in Communication at University of California Davis. Her research focuses on the spread and effects of health misinformation and correction online with both computational and experimental methods.
Garumma Feyissa
I am Garumma Feyissa. Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University, School of Public Health. I hope that the training will help me to build computational skills and skills of web scraping. I am planning to apply these skills to understand perceptions of the community about health problems and policy perspectives on these problems. I aim to build skills in utilizing electronic medical records and social media. Further, I look forward to meet and collaborate with others with similar interests.
Shawn Chiang
Shawn Chiang is a PhD candidate in Health Behavior and Health Promotion and a doctoral fellow with the Center for Public Health and Technology at the University of Arkansas. His research focuses on the uses of new communication technologies to influence health behaviors and to reduce health disparities. His dissertation focuses on understanding the use of social media in health interventions and how engagement is operationalized to understand impact of social media on health behavior. You can learn more about his work at https://shawnchiang.com/.
Mehak Sachdeva
Mehak Sachdeva is a PhD candidate in computational spatial science within the Spatial Analysis Research Center at Arizona State University. Her research interests are in creating and testing statistical tools for urban spatial analysis with a focus on understanding and incorporating the spatial scale of processes in local modeling.
Xinyi Zhou
Xinyi Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer and Information Science at Syracuse University. Her research broadly spans (applied) machine learning, natural language processing, and computational social science. Currently, her research focuses on leveraging large-scale multimodal and behavioral data, psychological theories, and AI techniques to understand, predict, and mitigate mis/disinformation online. Her work on mis/disinformation has been published in, e.g., ACM Computing Surveys and The Web Conference.
Muhammad Haroon
I'm a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis where I'm advised by Professor Zubair Shafiq. My research interests involve the privacy and fairness aspects of AI in online systems.
Xijing Li
2nd Year Ph.D. student in UNC-CH city and regional planning; Mphil in CUHK department of geography (research oriented); Bsc in Urban planning, PKU.
Rehana Odendaal
Rehana Thembeka Odendaal is a joint PhD student in Education, Culture and Society and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her MA in Historical Studies and BSocSci at the University of Cape Town, with a particular interest in oral historeis and public institutions. Rehana's current work with Dr Krystal Strong's African Youth Leadership Study draws on her experience as a youth educator and organizer, and her PhD research hopes to understand the role that transnational education plays in shaping African political and economic development. Trained as a qualitative researcher, Rehana is excited about the opportunities that commutational socail science holds for expanding the scope of qualitative research.
Julia Cope
Julia Cope is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The motivation for her research is to investigate how people communicate and engage with information through different mediums, especially in times of crisis. She is interested in the application of computational methods to investigate patterns in news exposure and news content at scale. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh and worked as a data analyst before joining Annenberg.
Zening Duan
Zening (‘Ze’) Duan (Mass Communications) is a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research examines public opinion dynamics, the political and societal effects of emerging media technology, and the applied methods in computational social science. His research works have appeared in Human Communication Research and Politics and the Life Sciences, and he co-authored one chapter in the book Battleground (2022). In 2021, he co-founded COMPutation, an independent, non-profit WeChat-based platform committed to breaking down walls between young scholars, industry partitioners, media, and the public by promoting research resources in computational social science. Ze is also a skiing enthusiast, and he hopes to learn how to fly a propeller plane.
Safianu Omar
I am a PhD student in the department of Information Systems at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Prior to that I have served as a researcher and lecturer at the Center for business and social informatics at the Islamic university college of Ghana and Akim State College respectively. My research areas are within the domain of ICT4D, social and development informatics and I am currently working on my PhD thesis related to using social media for boosting emergency and disaster communication within the sub-Saharan context.
Kai Feng
Kai Feng is a doctoral student in Demography and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in family demography and social inequality with special attentions to East Asian contexts. In 2022 SICSS at Penn, he wants to learn text analysis and applies it to a dataset about Chinese millennials‘ dating/marriage preferences.
Abiodun Azeez
Abiodun Azeez is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in disparities in access to banking products and housing. She is interested in using computational methods to investigate changing perceptions of financial services institutions and homeownership among various demographic groups.
Benjamin Lira
I'm a first-year PhD student at Penn in the Psychology Department. I am working with Dr. Angela Duckworth. As of now, my work has centered on the limitations of questionnaire data (e.g., reference bias), and on potential ways to overcome it (e.g., analysis of natural text in application essays.
Taylor Heath
Taylor Heath is an advanced Sociology and Demography doctoral student at Penn focusing on the intersection of natural disasters, social vulnerability, and housing and neighborhood inequality. Her prior work has examined federal policies such as post-disaster buyouts and flood insurance distribution, and market responses following flood and wind disasters such as changes to eviction patterns and rental prices.Roma Tor Vergata
All Participants
Gustavo Piga
Gustavo Piga, Ph. D. in Economics at Columbia University, is Full Professor of Economics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where he chairs the International Master in Public Procurement Management and the Bachelor degree in English in Global Governance. He has chaired the Italian Procurement Agency for Goods and Services, Consip Ltd., between 2002 and 2005. He is the author of the controversial 2001 report on Derivatives in Public Debt Management. He is the editor of several books, among which the Handbook of Procurement, Cambridge University Press, with Nicola Dimitri and Giancarlo Spagnolo and Revisiting Keynes - Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, MIT Press, with Lorenzo Pecchi. He is the author of the recent book “L’interregno” by Hoepli on the European crisis. He is also the co-editor of the European Journal of Public Procurement Markets and member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian Parliamentary Budget Office.
Simone Borra
Simone Borra is associate professor of Statistics in the Economics Department of University of Rome Tor Vergata. He teaches graduate courses in Business Statistics, Business Intelligence & Data Mining, and Statistical methods for management. Simone is the coordinator of a one year post graduate Master in Customer Experience, Statistics, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence with the partnership of SAS Institute and Accenture. His main research interests are in Statistical methods for Machine Learning and Nonparametric methods to measure prediction error.
Laura Brandimarte
Laura Brandimarte is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona. She obtained her Master of Science in Economics at the London School of Economics and her PhD in Public Policy and Management, with a specialization in Behavioral Sciences, at Carnegie Mellon University, where she continued her academic career as a Post-doctoral Fellow. Her research and teaching interests focus on behavioral aspects of privacy and security decision making, privacy as self-determination, algorithmic bias, and disinformation. Her work was published in several leading academic journals, including Science, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology - General, and the ACM Computing Surveys.
Casey Fiesler
Casey Fiesler is an associate professor in Information Science (and Computer Science by courtesy) at University of Colorado Boulder. She researches and teaches in the areas of technology ethics, internet law and policy, and online communities. Her work on research ethics for data science, ethics education in computing, and broadening participation in computing is supported by the National Science Foundation, and she is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. Also a public scholar, she is a frequent commentator and speaker on topics of technology ethics and policy, and her research has been covered everywhere from The New York Times to Teen Vogue, but she's most proud of her TikToks. She holds a PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech and a JD from Vanderbilt Law School.
Ariana Mrereju
My name is Ariana Alexandra Stefania Mrejeru and I’m 21 years old. Currently I’m a student enrolled in Global Governance B.A. at university of Tor Vergata in Rome. One of my biggest passions is investigating my surroundings and understanding the reasons and the factors influencing specific situations. I value awareness and I think multidisciplinarity is the best way to achieve it. As said before, I’m still a student and so I’m still projecting my future day by day. Now I’m not able to clearly say what I want to do one day, but I can definitely answer what kind of person I want to be in the next few years. I would like to help people, working on society's dynamics. Although I'm still not sure how to do it, I strongly believe in cooperation and awareness as the means to achieve freedom.
Camilla D’Onofrio
I am a second-year student from the Undergraduate Degree in Global Governance, at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, currently majoring in Economics and Philosophy. I have attended a classical high school, focusing on humanities courses like Philosophy, Latin, and Ancient Greek. By studying Economics and Statistics, I developed a fascination for applied economic research. I became interested in learning more about decision-making processes and how economics influences them, also considering ethical and psychological implications. In the future, I would like to pursue a Master’s Degree in Behavioral Economics, with a specific focus on the role played by this field in evidence-based policymaking. In addition, I am presently volunteering as a marketing team leader in Aiesec in Roma Tor Vergata, which has helped me build my leadership abilities and boost soft skills such as public speaking, problem-solving, time management, and teamwork.
Cecilia Lisi
My name is Cecilia and I live in Rome, Italy. I consider myself a curious, determined and dynamic woman involved in being an active part in this modern, digital and globalized society. I believe that there are no limits when we talk about knowledge and skills that someone can acquire and that is exactly my goal for the future: never stop learning. By striving for excellence through active leadership, my objectives are to empower others and become a world citizen. Having attended a scientific high school and being part of a multidisciplinary Bachelor (Global Governance) helped me to master many topics from the more philosophical to the more mathematical ones, and I believe that this program would advantage me in the process of upgrading my skills and comprehension not only on the topic to be discussed but also on the field of Behavioral Economics, which I would love to master during my future career.
Clémence Maquet
I am a 23 year old French student with a background in literature and humanities `classes préparatoires`. As a student of Global Governance at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and dual degree student in HSE Saint Petersburg, I found my way in interdisciplinarity, and specifically the union of social sciences, law and new technologies. Having worked for a year as a tech journalist in France and realising my thesis about the patriarchal structures of social media, I have a passion for investigating online phenomena and behaviour, particularly on social networks.
Davide Bellucci
I obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Turin in May 2020. I joined Lear as junior consultant in January 2020. Before, I worked as a consultant in the Research and Impact Assessment (RIA) division of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) of the United Nations. I obtained my Master Degree in European Economy and Business Law (EEBL) at the University of Rome Tor Vergata in 2015 with a thesis on the liberalization process of the Italian tobacco market. I also completed the second level master in Development Economics and International Cooperation in the same University in 2016. I have recently won a research grant to work on the Italian Digital Media Observatory (IDMO) project at the University of Roma Tor Vergata.
Eric Shuman
I recently completed my PhD student in social psychology at the University of Groningen supervised by Eran Halperin, Tamar Saguy, and Martijn van Zomeren, and am about to begin my post-doc at NYU with Eric Knowles and Harvard University with Amit Goldenberg. My research interests include collective action, emotions, and intergroup power relations. In particular, I am interested in different types of collective action (e.g. nonviolent, nonnormative, violent). My research examines psychological factors that promote support for these types of action, but also the effects and effectiveness of these types of action at motivating historically advantaged groups to address inequality. I study the predictors and effects of collective action both using traditional psychological lab and survey experiments, but also by examining the dynamics and reactions to real-world protests in surveys and on social media.
Esra Saçli
My name is Esra Saçlı. I am a senior International Relations student from Istanbul, Turkey. For my studies, I moved to Ankara, where I focused on the social and political history of the Middle East, propaganda, and social theories apart from my regular curriculum. Additionally, during my exchange semester at the Humboldt University of Berlin, I started to be interested in forced migration and R. Due to my background in Economics, the latter inspired me to expand my quantitative research methods by taking small steps in Phyton and R. Therefore, having an opportunity to join the SICSS community and expand my vision in Computational Social Sciences is thrilling for me. I look forward to gaining a solid knowledge of these tools before a Master's degree program, instrumentalizing them in my future research on migration and meeting like-minded fellow researchers. Apart from my studies, I enjoy learning Italian and German, taking photographs, travelling and exploring sound art.
Florian Schmid
I am pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Sociology with a minor in Computer Science at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. I am currently writing my bachelor thesis about life satisfaction and physical attractiveness using quantitative methods. Apart from that, my research interests mainly extend to text mining, the use of Twitter data and game theory. Moreover, I work as a student assistant at the chair of Computational Social Science at Ludwig Maximilian University. There, I am involved in current research projects and support the organisation of a scientific workshop. One recurring theme in this context is the application of topic modeling to social science text data.
Francesco Maccarone
I am currently a graduate student in Sociology at Sciences Po, in Paris, and an intern at the Délégation à la stratégie et à la recherche of Bibliothèque Nationale de France. After a master’s degree in Law at the University of Turin, where I dedicated my final dissertation to the study of the activity of social problematization conducted by online moral entrepreneurs in the Italian criminalization process of so-called revenge porn, I am now working at the intersection of Bourdieusian field theory and science & technology studies on the theme of citizen science. I am additionally interested in digital sociology, both substantially and methodologically, particularly as for the investigation of social-media influencers' digital capital. Alongside sociology, I am passionate about cinema, with-or-without-music poetry, and symbols in general.
Gabrielle Poccia
I’m an incoming master’s student at Oregon State University, where I will hold an assistantship in the Public Policy Laboratory. I earned a BA in Urban Studies and Planning in San Francisco, studying homelessness and emergency housing policy during the COVID pandemic. My research interests include data production from the state of Oregon, where drugs have been recently decriminalized, drug policy reform, and counteracting the racist system of mass incarceration. I am also a stand-up comedian and dedicated to the free exchange of ideas.
Giovanni Burro
I’m a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Finance of Bocconi University. I hold a PhD in Statistics, with a minor in behavioural science, from the University of Warwick. My research interests are focused on the behaviour of economic agents. They span several fields. First, I do research in behavioural finance. My works investigate the behaviour of individual financial traders and the disposition effect. Second, I work on different aspects of judgement and decision making: i) how patience interacts with age and economic conditions; ii) ambiguity attitudes towards financial products and how they relate to financial literacy; iii) how memory affects probability judgments of unexpected shocks, like Covid. Third, I work in the field of socio-economics. More specifically, on happiness economics, and on deception in economic interactions. I work with observational, survey, and experimental data. I employ a mix of techniques from survival analysis, causal inference, and machine learning.
Jonas Schoene
I am a doctoral student in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford supervised by Prof. Brian Parkinson and Prof. Amit Goldenberg.In my research I investigate the spread of emotions in groups on- and off-line, specifically the reason why negative emotions tend to spread faster, and the factors and consequences of this spread. To answer these questions I use mixed methods, combining traditional psychological research techniques with modern computational social science approaches. Prior to my doctoral studies I obtained a B.Sc. in Business Psychology and researched emotions at the Stanford University, Norwegian Cyber Defense Force, and the Leicester City Football Academy.
Katharina Lillich
I’m currently pursuing a bachelors degree in Sociology and Computer Science at the University of Munich. My research focuses on the use of digital methods for social science research with text as well image data, human-animal-studies, and the broader topic of sustainability. I am a research assistant at the Chair of Computational Social Sciences at the University of Munich.
Malene Hornstrup Jespersen
I’m a PhD student in Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen. The PhD forms part of the ERC-funded project DISTRACT: The Political Economy of Attention in Digitized Denmark. I hold a BSc in Anthropology and I’m currently finishing my Master’s degree in IT and Cognition alongside my PhD studies. My research focuses on digital disconnection practices as well as discourses and values tied to these practices. I employ methods from both traditional social science and computational social science in my research, spanning classic surveys, natural language processing techniques, and quali-quant studies mixing ethnographic interviews with tracking of digital use habits.
Maribel Dano-Luna
I’m a PhD Candidate from the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. My PhD research is in modelling inclusive firms and empirically testing the implications of an inclusive business accreditation policy on firm behaviour, social welfare, and incentive design. I have previously conducted research on the drivers of SME competitiveness as a former Senior Researcher at Asian Institute of Management RSN Policy Center for Competitiveness. I was also a consultant at Asian Development Bank.
Nantina Vgontzas
Nantina Vgontzas received their PhD in sociology from New York University and is a postdoctoral researcher at the AI Now Institute. Their research sits at the intersection of global political economy, technology, and labor. Currently, they are writing a book about the shopfloor politics of retail supply chains as it relates to crises in care and climate infrastructures. Nantina was previously a fellow at the Urban Democracy Lab and Center for Engaged Scholarship.
Oriana Milanese
I am an Italian student in “Global Governance” at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata.” I have always been interested in social sciences. One of my main purposes has always been to understand how the world works. Before studying statistics, I used to think that numbers were mainly related to natural sciences only, but this subject showed me the importance of quantitative methods in social sciences as well. Furthermore, as an intern in an NGO, I discovered the importance of data to assess the quality and the impact of all those kinds of third sector programs aimed at improving the well-being of people. Thus, these “discoveries” made me think about a future career in the field of public policy and economics. For all these reasons, I decided to join the SICSS in Rome. Learning a new programming language and discovering a new and truly interdisciplinary subject, such as computational social science, will be highly beneficial for my academic and professional future. Last but not least, I can’t look forward to being part of such a heterogeneous class and meeting new people from all over the world!
Paolo Barbaranelli
I am a second year student of the undergraduate degree in Global Governance, an interdisciplinary course of studies in Political Science. I have attended a scientific high school, acquiring a preparation both on quantitative methods but also on the humanistic perspective, and starting to be interested in social sciences. During my bachelor degree, I had the opportunity of attending courses regarding different fields of study: in particular, I started to be interested about economics, with a special focus on the behavioural approach to the discipline and thus on the research on the decision making process of the individual in different contexts and conditions, which I intend to deepen in my future studies. During my undergraduate degree I also have the chance of deepening my knowledge in other fields of research such as statistics and philosophy, which are often the subjects of the books that I read and that I alternate with novels. Aside from reading, another interest that I have developed is writing.
Rebecca Florea
I am a first year student of Medicine and Surgery in Tor Vergata. I attended a scientific high school which gave me the basis of the scientific method and a particularly developed scientific mindset. I consider that to face the different kinds of problems of any field of expertise a variety of specific languages to suit the different faces of the problem. These can be achieved only by gaining an interdisciplinary path, so my interests vary from human body, to maths, to social sciences (I attended many United Network activities both as a participant and a staffer) to singing and others. I am looking forward to working and studying with interesting people on the problems given by the SICSS and to learning and discovering aspects of the reality that show the way humans behave, which is one of the most fascinating things for me.
Shazeda Ahmed
Shazeda is a doctoral candidate at the University of California Berkeley School of Information, and a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. Shazeda's doctoral dissertation investigates how tech firms and the Chinese government are collaborating on the country’s social credit system. Her additional work focuses on perceptions of algorithmic discrimination and emotion recognition technologies in China, as well as applications of artificial intelligence in Chinese courtrooms. She was a pre-doctoral fellow at two Stanford University research centers, the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and has previously worked as a researcher for Upturn, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, Ranking Digital Rights, and the Citizen Lab, and the AI Now Institute.
Thiago Matheus
I have been a Legislative Analyst at the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies since 2013, when I started my studies in Electoral Law and Political Science and developed my interest in applying statistical and computational sciences in this area. My research is focused on the relationships between electoral and party systems. The thesis of my current Professional Master seeks to study the coattail effect of local elections in the fragmentation of the Brazilian Legislative Branch. I am interested in research related to underrepresented groups in politics too. My educational background also includes a Bachelor's degree in Physics and Statistics, having completed a Master in Physics in 2008. I had professional experience as a Physics teacher at the Brasília Department of Education for two years and as a statistician at the Superior Labor Court between 2008 and 2013. In 2017, I obtained the bachelor's degree in law with a thesis that analyzed the proceedings in the National Congress of the project about the SNTV (Single Non-Transferable Vote).
Yuyi Shen
I’m a second-year Master's student in Development Studies at the Geneva Graduate Institute and I graduated from the School of International Studies in Peking University as a bachelor of laws last summer. I'm Interested in food security and environmental protection. Currently I'm developing skills in statistical analysis/visualization and project management in order to be a better development practitioner in the future.Alessio Huma
Tech Enthusiast, Alessio Huma is a Global Governance undergraduate at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.Niranjan Nair Reghuvaran
Niranjan Nair Reghuvaran, commonly known as Pachu, is a Global Governance undergraduate at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.Vlad Cristinel Simon
Vlad is a Computer Science undergraduate at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.Rutgers
All Participants
Michael Kenwick
Michael Kenwick is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
Katie McCabe
Katie McCabe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
Andrey Tomashevskiy
Andrey Tomashevskiy is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.P.M. Aronow
Associate Professor of Political Science, Statistics and Data Science, and Biostatistics at Yale University.
Melissa Dreier
Clinical Psychology PhD student at Rutgers University.
Jessica Hamilton
Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University.
Robert Kubinec
Assistant Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi
Tamar Mitts
Assistant Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs and a Faculty Member at the Data Science Institute and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
Gonzalo Rivero
Associate Director of Research at Pew Research Center.
Sarah Shugars
CDS Moore-Sloan Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Center for Data Science.
Akeela Careem
Akeela is a PhD candidate in Social Psychology at Rutgers University. Her research interests include political protest, extremism, and motivated reasoning.
Elias Chavarria-Mora
Elias Chavarria-Mora is a political science PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing on comparative political behavior. He has an MA from the same university and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Costa Rica. His dissertation focuses on the use of social media for electoral campaigning by political parties. Prior research has mostly focused on protest politics and party competition and has been published in Latin American, Spanish, and American journals.
Sung Eun Choi
Sung Eun is a doctoral student in political science at Rutgers University. His research interests include international security, in particular interstate war and peace, alliance politics, and coercive diplomacy. His current research examines the effects of alliances on the durability of postwar peace after interstate wars.
Joanna Coleman
Joanna Coleman is an Assistant Professor of Urban Ecology at Queens College at the City University of New York, having recently (2021) come from Singapore, where she was a Senior Lecturer at National University of Singapore. Her applied, interdisciplinary research agenda (natural & social sciences) fundamentally aims to tackle the environmental crisis, which is strongly driven by urbanisation. Joanna is also a core member of two working groups (Human Dimensions & Bat Trade) in the IUCN Species Survival Commission, Bat Specialist Group. As such, she and her collaborators study human-bat relationships, try to mitigate conflicts and aim to end the unsustainable trade in bats.
Melissa Dreier
Melissa is a PhD student in the Hamilton Lab at Rutgers University. She studies how adolescent development intersects with a rise in mental health concerns, including suicide and other self-destructive behaviors. Before Rutgers, Melissa got her BA at Harvard University and completed a post-baccalaureate research coordinator position at Massachusetts General Hospital.Dhia Hammami
Mona Kleinberg
Mona is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and will take up a new faculty position at Queens College, CUNY in the Fall of 2022. Mona is keenly interested in the political effects of the incorporation of technology into routine cognitive functions. Her research addresses whether citizens can google their way through politics and examines what civic competence looks like when people use the internet as an extension of their mind. She is also interested in the intersection of race and new technology (e.g. the effect of internet use by marginalized groups on representation, and the connection between Facebook and ethnic conflict).
Samantha Koprowski
Samantha Koprowski is a PhD student in Political Science at Rutgers University studying Women & Politics and American Politics. Her research interests include women's campaigning strategies and issues of women's representation in U.S. legislative institutions. She is particularly interested in social media data collection and automated text analysis.
Ying Liu
Ying Liu is a doctoral student in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University–Newark. Her substantive research interests include public and nonprofit management, organizational behavior and theory, representative bureaucracy, and social equity. Methodologically, she is interested in experimental design and analysis, causal inference, and computational methods.
Lü Pin
Lü Pin is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University. Her research interests are in strategic directions of the Chinese feminist movement in an authoritarian political context. She received her M.A. in Gender Studies from the University of Albany. Outside of academia, she has been working as an organizer for the feminist movement in China for over 20 years.
Qiyao Pan
Qiyao Pan is a doctoral student in sociology at CUNY Graduate Center. She is also affliated with CUNY Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR). With her broad interests in urban sociology, spatial demography, migration and computational methods, her current research examines the neighborhood effect on restaurant closings using spatial analysis.
George Quinn
George D. Quinn is a Ph.D. student studying Political Science at Rutgers University. His research areas include a focus on American Politics and political behavior, such as analyzing age or race as factors in voter turnout. A graduate of Stockton University in Southern New Jersey, George focused his undergraduate research on quantitative methods serving as the primary teaching assistant for two semesters for the campus's political methods course. Lastly, George has maintained a secondary interest in Holocaust & Genocide research, focusing on Jewish-American refugee resettlement and immigration patterns. George has made several presentations on this topic on behalf of the Stockton University Holocaust Resource Center.
Casey Randazzo
Casey Randazzo is a doctoral student at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information Science. Casey investigates emotional contagion in online collectives in their efforts to promote or resist social change.
Huma Rasheed
Huma Rasheed is a doctoral candidate in Communication at the University of Delaware. She studies narrative persuasion, incivility, and misinformation using experimental and computational research methods. Huma received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Management with the highest accolades. She has six years of experience working with international non-governmental organizations.
Lina Saud
Lina Saud recently received her PhD in social psychology at Rutgers University and will begin working as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Rezarta Bilali at New York University this fall. Her research examines the influence of narratives on various social issues including responses to collective blame, attitudes toward immigrants, and support for contemporary protest movements.
Alice Timken
Alice is a Ph.D. student in comparative politics and law and courts at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University studying institutions, judicial behavior, and access to justice in democracies.
Anthony Vanky
Anthony Vanky is an Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan Taubman College. He is also affiliated with the UM Digital Studies Institute and the Michigan Institute for Data Science.
Gahwan Yoo
Gahwan Yoo is a doctoral student in the Silver School of Social Work at New York University. Her interests include mental health in immigrant/refugee communities, minority mental health, mental health disparities, and advocacy. She is also interested in using text as data, with a focus on mental health.
Jeffrey Coltman-Cormier
PhD student in political science at Rutgers University and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
Michael Strawbridge
PhD student in political science at Rutgers University.Singapore
All Participants
Subhayan Mukerjee
Subhayan Mukerjee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media, and a principal investigator at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community at the National University of Singapore. He researches online audiences using computational methods, and teaches courses in quantitative methods, programming, and data visualization.
Jack Linchuan Qiu
Jack Linchuan Qiu is Professor and Research Director at the Department of Communications and New Media and a principal investigator at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community at NUS. His research interests include digital labor, platform economy, and case studies, especially in the Asia-Pacific.
Renwen Zhang
Renwen Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. Her research lies at the intersection of health communication, human-computer interaction, and interpersonal communication. She examines the design, use, and effects of digital technology for promoting wellbeing and mental health.
Sandra González-Bailón
Dr. Sandra González-Bailón is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, data mining, computational tools, and political communication. Her applied research looks at how online networks shape exposure to information, with implications for how we think about political engagement, mobilization dynamics, information diffusion, and news consumption. Her articles have appeared in journals like PNAS, Nature, Science, Political Communication, The Journal of Communication, and Social Networks, among others. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). She serves as Associate Editor for the journals Social Networks, EPJ Data Science, and The International Journal of Press/Politics, and she is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. She leads the research group DiMeNet (/daɪmnet/) — acronym for Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication.
Kokil Jaidka
Dr. Kokil Jaidka is an Assistant Professor in Computational Communication at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests lie in developing computational models of persuasive and argumentative language and building social media platforms that better facilitate constructive conversations. Her research has been published in Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Journal of Communication, among other venues.
Hai Liang
Dr. Hai Liang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is also a theme co-leader of the Computational Social Science Laboratory at CUHK. His research interests include computational social science, political communication, and public health. Currently, he is working on several interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of computational social science (analytical approach) and social media studies (data source). He has published numerous articles in top journals such as Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, among others.
Jisun AN
Dr. Jisun AN is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University (SMU-SCIS). She is a member of SODA (Social Data and AI) lab, where she develops AI and NLP methods to understand, predict, and nudge online human behavior and to tackle various social problems, from media bias and framing, polarization, online hate, to healthy lifestyle and urban changes. Before joining SMU-SCIS, she was a scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, and she received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, UK. She is an associate editor of EPJ Data Science and has served as a PC chair for ICWSM'22. She has been a member of the PC of major computer science conferences and computational social science conferences, including WWW 2016-21, ICWSM 2012-21, ACL 2019-21, EMNLP 2019-21, and IC2S2 2016-21.
Prasanta Bhattacharya
Dr. Prasanta Bhattacharya is a Research Scientist and Innovation Lead with the Social and Cognitive Computing Dept. at the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR Singapore, where he works on network science and behavioral analytics. Prasanta holds a Ph.D in Information Systems from the Department of Information Systems and Analytics, National University of Singapore, where he studied network science with a special focus on predictive and inferential methods in large social networks. His current research agenda aims at understanding the role of big data in emerging social and business applications from finance, education and healthcare. Prasanta actively collaborates with major industry partners from around the world, and has presented his research in leading computer science, information systems and marketing science venues.
Suhem Parack
Suhem Parack is a Staff Developer Advocate at Twitter. He helps students and academic researchers with their research using the Twitter API. Before joining Twitter, he was a Solutions Architect at Amazon.
Aimee Pink
Aimee Pink received her PhD in Psychology from Swansea University, U.K. and currently works as a Scientist at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore. Her research focuses on the influence of emotion regulation on eating behaviours and behaviour change towards increasing sustainable behaviours (e.g., alternative proteins).
Annabel Ngien
Annabel is a PhD student in Communications and New Media in the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include health communication, public health and socio-psychology of social media.
Catalina Udani
Catalina Mica Udani is a current PhD student in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include conflict, immigration, and human rights. She studies how international conflict affects individual domestic outcomes and social identities, with a focus on nondemocratic states in the global south. Her dissertation examines how diplomatic sanctions may drive change in a state’s migration policy and human rights social practice.
Chuanhui Wu
Chuanhui Wu is currently attending as a Ph.D. candidate at Nanjing University, China, and also works as a joint PhD student at National University of Singapore. His main research interests include social media and consumer health informatics. His work appeared in several journals including Telematics and Informatics, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, and Electronic Commerce Research and Applications.
Fan Huang
Fan Huang is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Singapore Management University. His current research focuses on computational approach to improve the explainability of Machine Learning models, the implementation scenarios would be mostly in the field of Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science, e.g., Hate Speech Detection and so on.
Gerard Yeo
Gerard Yeo is a PhD student under the Integrative Sciences and Engineering Programme (ISEP) and Institute of Data Science (IDS) in the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research interests revolves around reasoning about emotions from various modalities using machine learning and computational methods. He holds a Bachelor and a Master degree in Psychology from NUS.Huang Xin
Jamie Lo
Jamie is a PhD candidate at Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore. Prior to coming to Singapore, she completed a Masters in Public Health in Epidemiology at Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health. She also holds a Bachelors degree from Cornell University in Human Biology, Health & Society. Her research interests pertain to value of care and potentially non-beneficial medical treatments, as well as exploring the intersectionality between social sciences and data science.
Jinyu Tang
Jinyu Tang is pursuing a Ph.D. in Information Studies at Nanjing University. She is currently a visiting research student in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. She is particularly interested in how technologies could shape people’s life. She has a background in engineering and education.Mahak Nagpal
Nathanael Sumaktoyo
Nathanael Sumaktoyo is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He previously did postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Konstanz, Germany and the University of Notre Dame, USA. His research is on identity politics, political behavior, and political psychology. Methodologically, he is interested in experimental methods, causal inference, Bayesian analysis, and computational methods.
Pey Wen Liaw
Liaw Pey Wen is a Ph.D Student at the Department of Malay Studies, National University of Singapore. Her research investigates the Malay monarchy's utilization of digital media as its survival strategies. She receives her MA in Communication from National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She is recognised for in-depth writing about human-interest stories. She is also a member of Freedom Film Network.
Rakoon Piyanontalee
Rakoon Piyanontalee is an assistant research professor with the Center for International Human Resource Studies within the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the Pennsylvania State University (USA). His research examines the impact of human resource management practices on teams, work units, and organizational outcomes.
Siew Keong Chung
Research fellow at Social Service Research Centre
Tianyu He
Assistant Professor at National University of Singapore Business School, Department of Management & Organisation. Her research aims to understand how people and different hierarchical structures influence conflict, cooperation, and coordination in organizational teams.
Trung Kien Dang
Kien is a PhD student at Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore working on machine learning in the intensive care unit. He is currently exploring the use of computational methods in social sciences and climate change. Outside of research Kien also enjoys doing software engineering/data science consulting and contributing to open source software.
Yen Kiat Chong
Yen Kiat Chong is currently pursuing a PhD at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. His research interests are in the areas of welfare states and labour markets. He is interested in employing computational social science methods to research on poverty and welfare attitudes.
Yifei Wang
Yifei Wang is a master’s student (by research) in communications and new media at the National University of Singapore. His works apply quantitative and computational methods to explore the interactive mechanisms between public opinion and public policy in an increasingly digitized society.Ying Kiat Tan
Ying Kiat is a PhD student at National University of Singapore’s School of Computing. His current research interest is to develop and apply computational tools on the issue of polarisation and echo chamber in the society. Prior to starting his PhD, he served for many years in Singapore’s public service.
Yipeng Xi
Yipeng Xi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communications and New Media at National University of Singapore. His research interests lie in digital activism and digital culture in authoritarian contexts. He seeks to integrate computational methods with critical insight from collective behavior theory.
Yuanyuan Wu
Yuanyuan Wu is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication and New Media at National University of Singapore. Her research interests mainly extend to health-related misinformation, media psychology and media effect. She is particularly interested in exploring media related to alternative medicine.
Zicheng Wu
Zicheng Zhu is a doctoral student in the Department of Communications and New Media at National University of Singapore. Her research interest includes digital well-being and game studies, lying at the intersection of communication and human-computer interaction. She is currently interested in understanding players' tension between play and non-play and helping people develop an intentional relationship with technology.
Jessalin Tan Hui Yan
Jessalin Tan is a fresh graduate from National University of Singapore, B.Soc.Sci. (Hons.) with Highest Distinction in Psychology (major) and Communications and New Media (minor). As a strong advocate of mental health, her Honours thesis research involved a randomised control trial examining the efficacy of a self-guided application in improving stress coping and wellbeing among a student population. She is also interested in human behaviour, communication and marketing. She looks forward to learning more as a Student Helper for SICSS.
Chong Li Xuan
Li Xuan is a penultimate undergraduate pursuing Food Science and Technology in the National University of Singapore. She is currently interested in learning about alternative food technology and the intersection of food and culture. Outside of school, she enjoys spending time armed with a boat and a paddle.
Bryan Teo Jun Hao
Bryan Teo is a current undergraduate at the National University of Singapore pursuing a degree in Business Administration (Marketing). He enjoys travelling and bringing his camera along with him.Sydney
All Participants
Olga Boichak
Dr Olga Boichak is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney. She is a media sociologist with expertise in computational social science. Before joining the University of Sydney in 2019, Olga was a research associate at the Center for Computational and Data Sciences (Syracuse University, USA) and a visiting scholar at the Social Media Lab (Ryerson University, Canada). Together with colleagues she developed tools and analytic techniques that support social listening, information literacy, bot detection, and decision-making in complex scenarios.
Eduardo Altmann
Eduardo Altmann is a Professor in Mathematics at the University of Sydney. He is a mathematician/physicist with expertise in the dynamics of natural language, including the use of automated text classification methods and information theoretic measures for classifying text similarity. He, along with co-workers, developed stochastic block model methods for network and text analysis.
Tristram Alexander
Tristram Alexander is an Associate Professor in Physics at the University of Sydney. He is a physicist with expertise in the modelling of nonlinear dynamical systems with many interacting elements, including social media dynamics. He has developed a suite of processing tools to identify and analyse communities in Twitter stream data.
Timothy Graham
Dr Timothy Graham is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). His research combines computational methods with social theory to study online networks and platforms, with a particular interest in online bots and trolls, disinformation, and online ratings and rankings devices. He develops open source software tools for social media data analysis, and has published in journals such as Information, Communication & Society, Information Polity, Big Data & Society, and Social Media + Society. In 2021, Tim was announced as an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award recipient and was awarded funding for his project, Combating Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour on Social Media.
Jason Thompson
A/Prof Thompson works at the University of Melbourne’s Transport, Health and Urban Design (THUD) Research Laboratory within the Melbourne School of Design. Here, he focuses on the translation of research into practice across the areas of urban design, transportation safety, public health, post-injury rehabilitation, public policy, and health system design. His work has pioneered the use of agent-based models and computational social science in areas of traditional health and insurance system design, urban design, infectious disease, and transportation safety. A/Prof Thompson holds a PhD in Medicine, Masters in Clinical Psychology, and a Bachelor of Science with Honours and is a current Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) Fellow.
Kate Lowrie
Kate Lowrie commenced her career in research ethics at The University of Queensland in 2008, before moving to Sydney where she worked at the Cancer Institute NSW and The Centre for Health Record Linkage (CHeReL). Kate has worked as a human ethics officer in the Research Portfolio at The University of Sydney since 2015. She has a particular interest in human research ethics as it applies to social media research and research in the mental health field.
Alan Hales
Alan Hales holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Newcastle and a Master of Management from Macquarie University. After joining the University of Newcastle Research Division Alan held various research administration roles before securing the Manager, Research Compliance, Integrity and Policy position. In this role Alan was responsible for human and animal ethics processes and was a senior advisor to the Human Research Ethics Committee and Animal Care and Ethics Committee for over ten years. Alan joined the University of Sydney as the Human Ethics Manager in 2021 and is the Chair of the HREC Executive while working closely with the University’s three human research ethics committees.
Marian-Andrei Rizoiu
Dr Marian-Andrei Rizoiu is a Senior Lecturer in Behavioral Data Science at the University of Technology Sydney. He is interested in stochastic behavioural modelling of human actions online, at the intersection of applied statistics, artificial intelligence and social data science. He leads the Behavioral Data Science lab, which studies human attention dynamics in the online environment, the emergence of influence and opinion polarisation. Marian-Andrei’s research has been funded by Facebook Research and Defence Science and Technology (DST). His work has appeared in the PNAS, PLOS ONE, PLOS Computations Biology, WWW, NeurIPS, IJCAI, and CIKM.
Claire Mason
Dr Claire Mason is a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO's Data61. Her applied research supports agility and resilience in the Australian workforce by capturing novel sources of data about the changing labour market which inform the choices of job seekers, educators and employment services providers. Claire's research has been covered by mainstream media outlets such as the ABC's 7:30 Report, The Australian, The Financial Review and The Conversation and published in scientific journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, PLOS One, Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology and Small Group Research.
Caron Chen
Dr Haohui “Caron” Chen is a computational social scientist working for CSIRO's Data61. His multidisciplinary background including GIS, remote sensing, machine learning and statistical modelling allows him to build computational models to solve real-world problems at scale. In the early stage of his research career, Caron focused on disaster management, where he analysed 9.7 million geo-tagged tweets and found social media activities geographically correlated with reported damage during Hurricane Sandy. In the past four years, he has been obsessed with the future of work study. He and his colleagues created the Data61 Australian Skills Dashboard: skills.csiro.au
Andrew Reeson
Dr Andrew Reeson is a Research Team Leader at CSIRO’s Data61. In his research, he applies behavioural science with econometric modelling to address issues of national significance to Australia. After a mis-spent youth taking biology at Oxford he switched to economics in order to focus on some of the more challenging aspects of real-world problems. In recent years he has shifted his focus to the digital economy, including modelling the potential impact of technology on employment and future skills demand. He is also researching how digital platforms should be designed and implemented to support efficient and equitable data sharing.
Simon Musgrave
Dr Simon Musgrave was a member of the linguistics program at Monash University from 2003 until 2020. His research interests included the use of computational tools in linguistic research and the relationship between linguistics and digital humanities. He was involved in the Australian National Corpus project, an important piece of digital research infrastructure, and has been a member of the executive of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities since 2015. Simon currently is part of the team delivering various language-related infrastructures including the Australian Text Analytics Platform and the Language Data Commons of Australia.
Daniel Angus
Daniel Angus is a Professor of Digital Communication, leader of the QUT Digital Media Research Centre’s Computational Communication and Culture Program, and Chair of Infrastructure within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society. His research examines issues at the intersection of technology and society, with a focus on algorithms, misinformation, and new methods to study the digital society.
Suhem Parack
Suhem Parack is a Staff Developer Advocate for Academic Research at Twitter and helps students and researchers understand how to get Twitter data for their research.
Linda Aulbach
Linda is a PhD fellow in Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University and holds an MA in Digital Humanities. She is focusing on Artificial Intelligence Ethics, exploring the implementation of such as well as discussing the concept of empathy within this scope. Her work in AI Ethics originated in Germany and she has recently worked with Australian AI organisations.
Uttama Barua
Uttama Barua is a PhD student in Built Environment at the UNSW. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Planning at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her broader research interest is planning for disaster risk reduction and management.
José-Miguel Bello Villarino
José-Miguel is a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney Law School and the Institutions programme of the ADM+S Centre of Excellence. His current research focuses on regulatory approaches to artificial intelligence, especially on how to deal with risks derived from the operation of AI systems from a comparative approach.
Tayla Broadbridge
Tayla is a joint-PhD candidate in mathematics at the University of Adelaide and the University of Nottingham. Her research explores the presence and development of food deserts using agent-based modelling and data science approaches, with the goal of developing more effective interventions. Tayla received her honours degree in applied mathematics from the University of Adelaide.
Mahli-Ann Butt
Dr Mahli-Ann Butt is the Sydney Games and Play Lab’s research chair, a research assistant on the 'Emerging online safety issues' project funded by the eSaftey Commission, and serves on the board of the DiGRA and DiGRA Australia. Her research investigates embodied precarity and how videogames intersect with everyday life.
Simon Chambers
Simon Chambers is a postdoctoral research fellow at The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University. His research draws on mixed methods approaches to investigate the dynamics of cultural fields. He is particularly interested in the application of social network analysis techniques to model the evolution of musical styles.
Jean Linis-Dinco
Jean Linis-Dinco is a PhD candidate in Cybersecurity at UNSW-Canberra. Her work examines how propaganda travels from the state to the people online in the context of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. Methodologically, Jean uses computational social science approaches particularly Natural Language Processing to analyse and predict social conflicts. Jean's work has focused on the intersection between human rights and technology. As part of this work, Jean has been regarded as one of the top 100 women in AI Ethics by the Women in AI Ethics.
George Gyamfi
George is a PhD candidate in the School of Languages and Cultures at The University of Queensland. I aim to apply theories and concepts from the field of education, combined with insights from online learning to make practical contributions to teaching, learning and research in higher education.
Qihang Jiang
Qihang Jiang is a Ph.D. student, a research assistant (T2, 2022) and a casual academic (LING5003 Language Technology, T3, 2021 & 2022) from School of Humanities & Languages, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales. His main research interests centre on corpus-based translation studies, audiovisual translation, fansubbing, eye-tracking study, reception study.
Kateryna Kasianenko
Kateryna is a PhD Student at Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre studying transnational digital publics using computational and qualitative methods. She researched the reception of the war in Ukraine and the MeToo movement in Japan, and previously worked in the news media and software industries.
Wynston Lee
Wynston Lee is a PhD candidate at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication within Haiqing Yu's ARC Future Fellowship Project on The Social Credit System and Everyday Life in China. His PhD dissertation takes a political economy and Science and Technology Studies approach to analysing China's Social Credit System.
Cathy Xuanchi Liu
Cathy completed her Bachelor of Statistics Honours and continues her academic career as a PhD candidate in Discipline of Complex Systems of the University of Sydney Science School. Her main area of interest is community structure in social media and topic modelling.
Bogdan Mamaev
Bogdan is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Griffith University's School of Government and International Relations. His research examines how political regimes, repression, and electoral manipulation impact claims-making, social movements, and contentious politics. His interests include the use of computational techniques to understand contention in restrictive political settings.
Shima Saniei
Shima Saniei is a PhD candidate and casual academic in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Shima's research draws on the communication and public relations literature to examine activist groups' narratives and social networks. Shima is interested in using CSS to explore narratives and networks in online communities.
Premeet Sidhu
Premeet Sidhu is a PhD student at The University of Sydney. Her PhD explores the modern resurgence and appeal of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons [D&D]. Her current research interests include investigating how meaningful player experiences in games can be applied and considered in education and media.
Elena Sheard
Elena Sheard is a PhD student with the Sydney Speaks Project at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on predicting language change over individuals’ lifespans, using quantitative analysis of longitudinal data from the 1970s and 2010s. She completed her Bachelor (Linguistics and Italian Studies) and Honours (Linguistics) Degrees at the University of Sydney.
Ryan Stanton
Ryan Stanton is a PhD Student at the University of Sydney whose research focuses on analysing gaming podcasts as an example of new media production. His research interests cross a broad variety of new media and digital cultures including gaming content creation, platform studies, production studies, and more.
Guangnan Zhu
Guangnan Zhu holds a BE degree with honours in advanced computing and a Master of computing at ANU and is doing his PhD in QUT. His research focuses on the development and application of computational methods and machine learning techniques in communication and digital media, especially in detecting and analysing online disinformation and misinformation. His PhD project focuses on the detection of coordinated inauthentic behaviour using multimodal data.
Dorcas Zuvalinyenga
Dorcas Zuvalinyenga has a PhD in Applied Sociolinguistics from the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include multimodal languaging, socio-onomastics, toponymy, linguistic landscapes, language and gender, critical discourse analysis, digital language literacies, digital technologies & texts, language and identity, literary and cultural studies, and intercultural communication.
Justin Miller - teaching assistant
Justin Miller is a PhD student at the University of Sydney. His area of interest is in natural language programming and its applications to social media. He has a Master of Data Science from Western Sydney University and has worked as a data scientist within the legal industry.
Jen Grinham - administrative assistant
Jen Grinham is a PhD student at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include data privacy, ethics, profiling, algorithmic bias, internet cultures, governance, digital media, and she is currently examining student data privacy risks created by educational technology companies.
Yori Insi Eriyanti - PR assistant
Yori Insi Eriyanti is in her last semester of Master of Strategic Public Relations at the University of Sydney. She found her passion in creating communication plans, brand strategies, social media communication and design. Currently, she is the Co-Director of the Media Department of the Indonesia-Australia Association.Taiwan
All Participants
Xuechunzi Bai
Bai (pronounced like bye) is a rising fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She holds a certificate in Statistics and Machine Learning and a joint degree in Social Policy from the School of Public and International Affairs. She is a graduate student fellow in the Program in Cognitive Science and the winner of the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences at Princeton. Her research examines how and why humans learn inaccurate stereotypes. Whenever she doesn't feel like researching, she likes walking her 100-pound big boy -- an Alaskan Mamalute -- Alpha around the Princeton campus.
Spe Chen
Spe Chen is a data and graphics journalist who recently relocated back to Taiwan, her home country, after working in newsrooms in Singapore, China and the U.S. for the past six years. She’s most recently a data visualization designer at Straits Times. She specializes in integrating data and visuals in storytelling to educate and entertain readers. Her works have been honored by the Society of News Design and Sigma Awards. She holds a post bachelor's certificate from The Lede Program of Columbia Journalism School and a Master's degree in Visual Tools to Empower Citizens from the University of Girona.
Fu-Yin Cherng
Fu-Yin Cherng is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at the National Chung Cheng University. She received her Ph.D. degree from the National Chiao Tung University in 2019. She conducted research at the University of California, Davis, as a postdoc in 2019 and École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) from 2016 to 2017 as a doctoral research assistant. Her research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Neuroergonomics, and Data-Driven Design. After a long day of working, Fu-Yin likes to play with her beloved cat and read various books, anime, and comics. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Mushishi” are the two must-reads if anyone asks her for recommendations.
Peter Wang
Peter Wang (mostly known as PeterWolf on the Internet) has been running Droidtown Linguistic Tech. - a company providing infrastructure tools for NLP (Natural Language Processing) - for over a decade. His daily work is a mixture of technical parts on computer science and humanity parts on human languages. His superpower is to twist the probability in the universe to bring up bugs in the software system. The talent is pretty handy in the development phase.
Daniel Kao
Daniel is currently pursuing a masters in GIS and Cartography from the University of Wisconsin. Graduated from UCSD with a bachelor's in Computer Science. He previously worked as a Principal Engineer at Commonwealth Magazine, and Software Engineer at The New York Times.
Marian-Andrei Rizoiu
Dr Marian-Andrei Rizoiu is a Senior Lecturer in Behavioral Data Science at the University of Technology Sydney. He is interested in stochastic behavioral modeling of human actions online, at the intersection of applied statistics, artificial intelligence and social data science. He leads the Behavioral Data Science lab, which studies human attention dynamics in the online environment, the emergence of influence and opinion polarization. Marian-Andrei’s research has been funded by Facebook Research and Defence Science and Technology (DST). His work has appeared in PNAS, PLOS ONE, PLOS Computations Biology, WWW, NeurIPS, IJCAI, and CIKM.
Hannah Waight
Hannah Waight is a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics. Hannah studies state media coordination and manipulation in non-democratic contexts, especially contemporary China. She is particularly interested in what makes state propaganda visible and what makes state propaganda spread. Hannah has also previously written on the sociology of knowledge and the history of social thought. Hannah received her Ph.D. from Princeton University's sociology department in May 2022. She also has a Bachelor's and Master's degree in East Asian Studies, both from Harvard University. Hannah enjoys trees and rock climbing.
Ning Chen
Ning Chen is a PhD student in the Department of Applied Economics at National Chung Hsing University. Her interests include livestock economics, farm animal welfare, and agricultural policy. She holds an MA in Journalism and a BBA in Finance both from National Taiwan University. Prior to beginning her PhD, Ning was a journalist with 10-year experience on agricultural and environmental issues.
Yen-Ping Chang
I’m an assistant professor in the psychology department of NTHU, Taiwan. My lab explores the roles of emotions in interpersonal communication and affiliation. You can find more info about our work at ericalab.com/ In addition to, and probably more than research, I love my family, cycling, music, and cats.
Hung-Chieh Shen
Hong-Chieh Shen is a graduate student at the School of the National Defense University, majoring in journalism. His research mainly about the network and frame of Chinese diplomats' discussion on Twitter. He was admitted to the Annual Conference Of The Chinese Communication Society. His research interest is natural language processing.
Hung-Wen Tsai
Hung-Wen Tsai received his bachelor's degree in Information Management from National Taiwan University. After graduation, he works as a Data Engineer/Analyst in the software industry and TA of an online data course. He is interested in applying advanced data analysis & modeling techniques in social science topics. He is also planning to apply for a quantitative social science master's program shortly.Chia Fang Cheng
Chia Fang Cheng is a Linguistic master student in National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She uses experimental approaches to explore the cognitive processing of tone sandhi in speech production. Her current research examines the temporal profile of tonal alternations in Taiwan Mandarin.
Ming-June Yuan
Ming-June Yuan is currently pursuing a MA in Journalism at National Defense University, Taiwan. His research focuses on computational methods for the study of social media communication. His current research focuses on the Russia-Ukraine war twitter communication of social networks.
Tien-I Tsai
Tien-I Tsai is an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at National Taiwan University. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Her research focuses on information behavior, especially how individuals with diverse backgrounds seek information and work collaboratively to fulfill their learning objectives.
Hsin-Yun Wang
Hsin-Yun Wang is a 3rd-year doctoral student and a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute of Education at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan. Her research interest is to examine student-directed virtual reality (VR) co-creation for knowledge co-construction and co-creativity through various quantitative approaches including lag sequential analysis, social network analysis, and other techniques associated with learning analytics.
Wei-Chun Tsao
Wei-Chun Tsao is a graduate student in Sociology at National Taiwan University and a research assistant at Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. She has worked as a research assistant in various labs and projects after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in psychology from National Taiwan University. Her previous publications focused on family interactions, intergenerational relationships, and social changes in Taiwan. Currently, she is interested in text mining and interdisciplinary exploration of social issues using emerging data sources in addition to traditional survey data.
Sam Robbins
Sam Robbins is a project coordinator at Open Culture Foundation and editor/translator at Taiwan Insight. He graduated with a masters degree in sociology from National Taiwan University and is interested in the intersects of digital technology and politics in Taiwan and Beyond.
Man-Lin Chen
Man-Lin is an undergraduate student in Economics at National Taiwan University. She also works as a research assistant in the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica. She is interested in social networks, including social media analysis, friendship dynamics, and peer effects. Currently, she is learning econometrics, computational sociology, and data science these interdisciplinary methods and knowledge.
Yu-Yao Tseng
Yu-Yao Tseng is an engineer at Gsolar Solution Co., Ltd now. He graduated from the Master's Program of Green Energy Science and Technology at Feng Chia University. His research uses Python to write predictive model code to study the effects of big data. Besides, he also has a lot of interest in data science.
Shinyin(Shin) Liu
Shin Liu is a research associate at National Taiwan University and a freelancer who works with NGOs on different research projects. Shin was prior a social worker and an INGO worker. Her primary research interest focuses on children and youth social work and well-being, especially the marginal adolescents. She is also broadly interested in NGO service evaluation and re-design, and the application of social design and innovation in the helping professions. She believes in evidence practice and is passionate to explore any possible solution to real-world challenges, computational social science is one of them. Shin holds an MSW in social work and a BE in counseling.
Zih-Chun Su
Zih-Chun Su is PhD student of Graduate Institute of Photonics and Optoelectronics at National Taiwan University. His research interests include the silicon photonics, the optical data processing.
Adny Chou
Andy Chou is a postdoctoral scholar at the Flagship Project in the Department of Sociology at National Taipei University. His research interests are economics of education, labor economics, and applied microeconomics.
Pei-Chiang Lee
Pei-Chiang Lee is a research assistant in the National Academy for Educational Research. He received his M.S.W. from the Department of Social Work at National Taiwan University. His research interests focus on the well-being and educational outcomes of students with disabilities, with special attention to their school-to-work transition and independent living. His current research project uses administrative data to explore the inequality of employment outcomes between university graduates with and without disabilities.
Che-Wei Hsu
Che-Wei Hsu is a data analyst at the National Academy for Educational Research. He received his M. S. in sociology from National Taiwan University. His research interests focus on the equality of education and the educational choices of students. He currently uses administrative data to study the college entrance policy in Taiwan.
Xin-You Chen
I am a data analyst in Academia Sinica. I received my M.A. in contemporary China study program from National Tsing Hua University. My research interests focus on international relations, arms transfer, China influence, Taiwan–China relations. My ongoing project is “An empirical analysis of China’s arms transfer.
Morris Yang
Morris Yang is a graduate student at NCCU’s College of Communication. He studies social media behavior relate to problematic speech and political polarization. He is particularly intrigued by how conspiracy evolves and disseminates, partly because of his discomfort with the online discourse on China-Taiwan tensions and identities. He also holds a BFA degree in motion pictures from NTUA. He faithfully loves the works of Jonathan Franzen and Alice Munro.
Yu Zhang
Yu Zhang is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Central University (NCU), Taiwan. Before, he graduated from Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies at Shih Hsin University. His research interests are natural language processing, automatic question answering, text mining and analysis.Yi-Hua Lin
Yi Hua Lin is a graduate student in Computer Science at National Chengchi University. Her research interests include Data Mining and Social Computing.
Yu-Hui Chang
Yu-Hui is an assistant professor in the Center for Teacher Education at National Sun Yat-sen University. She is proud to be one of the participants in SICSS Taiwan 2021 to relearn new lenses and approaches in revisiting social science studies. As the Learning Experience Chair of SICSS Taiwan 2022, she is looking forward to encouraging more collaborative fun within interdisciplinary social scientists and data scientists to play with data and respond to social needs. She will be moderating a discord server for fellow learners of computational social science. A personal fun fact is that she is equally as adept at reading minds with her third eye as she is at reading data.
Tsai-Yen Han
Tsai-Yen is a postdoctoral research fellow in the National Academy for Educational Research. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University in 2021. She is passionate about using computational methods and approaches to study the social sciences. As the Admission Chair of SICSS Taiwan 2022, she is dedicated to fostering a research community interested in computational social science. Her research utilizes quantitative and qualitative methods to explore gender and inequality in public health, reproduction, and education. Her current research project is to examine the gendered decisions in undergraduate fields of study.
Robin Lee
Robin Lee is a PhD student in Sociology at Princeton University. He is the Lead Organizer of SICSS-Taiwan 2022. He worked in the New York Times and United Health Care in data analytics. He is interested in organizational sociology, technology studies, content moderation, and fairness in machine learning. Robin is passionate about creating communities for newcomers in programming and data science. He is the co-founder of Taiwanese Data Professionals. He began learning violin online during the pandemic. He enjoys hiking and skiing.
Chung-Pei Pien
Chung-Pei is an assistant professor in the International College of Innovation. He is the University Partnership Chair of SICSS Taiwan 2022. He received his PhD in Sociology from Texas A&M University. His research areas include science and technology research, energy and sustainable environment, experts and technology politics and interpretable policy analysis. In his former life, he was a journalist.
Cecilia Liu
Cecilia Liu is the Chief of Staff and Finance Chair of SICSS-Taiwan 2022. She received her Juris Doctor degree from University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2015. In her previous life, she was a transactional lawyer in New York and Taipei for more than ten years. She is interested in the issues of gender inequality in STEM fields and passionate about encouraging more girls and women to join the tech space. She began practicing horseback riding and tennis after moving to the States (never too late!) and has been enjoying the hobbies a lot during the pandemic. Fun fact about her: she is an avid cook and was once responsible for daily meals of a team of 40 volunteers in Chimei island of Penghu while doing community outreach.
Ming-Hung Wang
Ming-Hung Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering of National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan. He is the Program Chair of SICSS-Taiwan 2022. He received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2017. He is the PI of Digital Society and Security Lab (DIGI-SSL). The group uses data science and computational methodology to investigate issues related to computational social science and network security. Currently, his team is working on integrating statistical learning, graph theory, and data visualization to understand information dissemination and information operation on large-scale social media platforms (Facebook, PTT, Instagram, Tiktok, etc.). Their daily works include analyzing the source of the dis/misinformation, identifying malicious accounts/sockpuppets, and exploring various social media security issues.In his free time, he loves playing guitar. His favorite bands are 伍佰 & China Blue and Oasis. He is a loyal baseball fan although he can only pitch at 100km/h.
Yu-Chen Dai
Yu-Chen Dai is a graduate of Feng Chia University in the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science. His research interests analyze the malicious behaviors on social media, including information manipulation and disinformation. Currently, he focuses on using network structure and user behaviors to identify the sockpuppets in social media. He is honored to be a participant in SICSS Taiwan 2021 cooperates with different field scientists to explore and learn computational social science. He is expecting to let more people know, "What is computational social science?", "What can data do?" and mix our skills to find the interesting thing in the world.
Fu-Ying Lin
Fu-Ying Lin has been working as a language instructor for over a decade, from high school to tertiary institutes in different countries, including Taiwan, Turkey, and Germany. Currently, she works as Education Fellow at the Wikimedia Foundation, responsible for the higher education discovery project with the focus of understanding the current challenges and opportunities in higher education. She holds a Ph.D. in corpus linguistics from Freie Universität Berlin. She is an advocate of free knowledge and open access, and interested in applying data to management. She feels honored and excited to be part of SCISS Taiwan 2022, where she can cooperate with scientists from different fields and learn computational social science. In her free time, she likes cooking, baking, watching movies, listening to music, and doing kickbox training.
Wei-Yu Chen
Wei-Yu is an operation specialist in Uber Eats. She majors in Political Science at National Taiwan University and discovered the importance and passion for data science while working. She plays a marketing role in SICSS-Taiwan, hoping to arouse more people's attention to the spark generated by the collision of data science and social science through different social media. In her spare time, she enjoys reading books, watching movies, cooking, photography, hiking, and loves to challenge things she has never tried before.Coming soon...
Tokyo
All Participants
Hirokazu Shirado
Hirokazu Shirado is Assistant Professor of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his doctorate in Sociology at Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His reseach interests include social networks and computational social science. He is particularly committed to the experimental study of cooperative behaviors as they manifest through interactions between people located within social networks.
Makiko Nakamuro
Makiko Nakamuro is Professor of Policy Management at Keio University. She is an economist who has focused on economics of education. Makiko graduated from Keio University, Faculty of Environmental Information (SFC) in 1998, and then completed Masters and Ph.D. programs at Columbia University in the city of New York (in 2005 and 2010, respectively). She used to work for the Bank of Japan and the World Bank where she was given considerable hand-on training on economic research. She also worked for Tohoku University as an Assistant Professor, particularly working on the project of international migration.
Wentao Xu
Wentao Xu is a Ph.D. candidate of Graduate School of Informatics at Nagoya University. He is the Tokai National Higher Education and Research System Interdisciplinary Frontier Next Generation Researcher and will join the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of Zhejiang Lab in China as a post-doc. His research interests include social networks, misinformation, and developing methods for CSS research.
Neil Hwang
Neil Hwang is an Assistant Professor of Business and Information Technology at CUNY-Bronx Community College, and his research interests include network statistics, game theory with networks, and causal inference.
Shogo Masaya
Shogo Masaya works for an energy company, INPEX. His current interests include data processing, energy transformation and innovation. He received his Ph.D. from Delft University of Technology in applied physics.
Makoto Takeuchi
Makoto Takeuchi is a PhD student at the University of Tsukuba. He works for a web company as a data scientist. His research topics include statistics of human behavior and information diffusion. He is interested in understanding the dynamics of human activities and their application to recommendation and marketing.
Honoka Toda
Honoka Toda works for NTT R&D, a Japanese IT company. She is interested in data science and social psychology. Her main research interests are altruistic behavior among groups and psychological factors.
Kaveh Kadkhoda Mohammadmosaferi
Kaveh Kadkhoda is an independent researcher. His present research primarily focuses on a deeper understanding of complex networks with machine learning and data mining. His career goal is to work where he can have the opportunity to conduct high-quality research while teaching and mentoring undergraduates and graduates.
Zelda Marquardt
Zelda Marquardt is a Ph.D. candidate at Kyoto University's Graduate School of Advanced Integrated Studies in Human Survivability. Her research topic is on bridging the gender gap in financial inclusion. She is currently focused on global migration and remittance networks.
Georg Ahnert
Georg is a postgrad student at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. He is currently working on Hindu nationalism and right wing extremism during an internship at the Computational Social Science Lab, Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is also interested in ML fairness and development cooperation.
Jeehyun Park
Jeehyun Park is a Ph.D. candidate in the graduate program of Global Studies at Sophia University, Japan. Her work focuses on foreign aid and social development, especially in the health and education sectors. The current dissertation explores the role of policy evaluation in terms of improving aid effectiveness.
Sabina Insebayeva
Sabina Insebayeva is currently a research associate at the Asia Research Institute (Identities Cluster), National University of Singapore (NUS). Prior to this she was a researcher affiliated with the Nippon Foundation Central Asia-Japan Human Resource Development Project, University of Tsukuba, and a research fellow at the Central Asia Program of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES), the George Washington University (GW).
Hironobu Bito
He is currently a Ph.D. student at Osaka University in Japan and specializes in Sociology. He studies an interdependence of normative and non-normative incentives in social science theory, taking a theoretical approach from explanatory sociology and rational choice sociology. He is interested in the conditions that normative conduct and internalization of a norm occur and diffuse and why gendered division of housework equalizes at a slower pace than expected. He mainly uses quantitative data and experiments to solve theoretical and empirical puzzles.
Atsushi Ueshima
Atsushi Ueshima is a postdoctoral fellow at Tohoku University. His research interests lie in the field of human group decision making. He has experience using natural language processing for conversation data analysis.University of Rochester
All Participants
Cantay Caliskan
Cantay Caliskan is an assistant professor of instruction at the Goergen Institute for Data Science, University of Rochester. He studied political science, computer science, and statistics during his PhD, and received his degree from Boston University in 2018. Cantay received his BA in Economics, Mathematics, and Intl. and Global Studies from Brandeis University and his MA in International Relations from Koç University. His research interests include computational social science, emotion quantification and face/gesture recognition, social media, US Congress, and networks of lobbying.
Ezgi Siir Kibris
Ezgi Siir Kibris is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and an MS student in Data Science at the University of Rochester. She has MA degrees in Political Science and European Studies and BA in Economics from Sabanci University. Her dissertation research revolves around judicial politics, international courts, democratic backsliding, and gender. She is interested in quantitative methods, specifically causal inference, machine learning, and natural language processing.
Bahar Zafer
Bahar is currently a first-year Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester. Before starting her Ph.D. in Political Science, she worked as a research assistant in an SNF-funded project at the University of Zurich, which analyzes discourse and sentiment around immigration issues applying NLP techniques to text from newspapers. She received her M.A. in Analytical Political Economy at Duke University and B.A. in Economics and Sociology at Bogazici University.
Keynote Speaker: Gary King
Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University (one of 25 with Harvard’s most distinguished faculty title) and Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. King develops and applies empirical methods in many areas of social science, focusing on innovations that span the range from statistical theory to practical application. King is an elected Fellow in 8 honorary societies (National Academy of Sciences, American Statistical Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Society for Political Methodology, National Academy of Social Insurance, American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Guggenheim Foundation) and has won more than 55 prizes and awards for his work. King was elected President of the Society for Political Methodology and Vice President of the American Political Science Association. He has been a member of the Senior Editorial Board at Science, Visiting Fellow at Oxford, and Senior Science Adviser to the World Health Organization. He has written more than 185 journal articles, 20 open source software packages, and 8 books.
Elliott Ash
Elliott Ash is Assistant Professor of Law, Economics, and Data Science at ETH Zurich’s Center for Law & Economics, Switzerland. Prior to joining ETH, Elliott was Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Warwick, and before that a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University’s Center for the study of Democratic Politics. He received a Ph.D. in economics and J.D. from Columbia University, a B.A. in economics, government, and philosophy from University of Texas at Austin, and an LL.M. in international criminal law from University of Amsterdam.
Dino P. Christenson
Dino Pinterpe Christenson is an Associate Professor (Ph.D., Ohio State University; B.A., University of Michigan) in the Department of Political Science at Washington University, a Faculty Affiliate in the Division of Computational & Data Science, and a Research Fellow at the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. Christenson studies American political behavior and quantitative methods, with recent work exploring presidential voting behavior, campaign dynamics in presidential primaries and caucuses, the coalition behavior of interest groups, and public opinion and the media environment of institutional outcomes. More generally, his research in American politics concerns electoral behavior, public opinion, political psychology, political communication, interest groups and judicial politics. He has broad methodological interests as well, including survey research, experimental design, longitudinal and nested data models, Bayesian analysis, social network analysis and causal inference.
Bryce J. Dietrich
Bryce J. Dietrich is an Assistant Professor of Social Science Informatics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Iowa. His research uses novel quantitative, automated, and machine learning methods to analyze non-traditional data sources such as audio (or speech) data and video data. These methods are used to understand the causes and consequences of non-verbal political behavior, such as vocal inflections and walking trajectories, especially in relation to descriptive representation and implicit gender/racial bias. His work has appeared in the Nature, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and Political Psychology. This work has also received grant support from major organizations, like NIH and NSF, and has been covered by popular outlets like NPR, BBC, The Economist, The Washington Post, and FiveThirtyEight. Finally, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and was recently a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School and Northeastern University.
Jonathan Herington
Jonathan Herington an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, and Assistant Director of Graduate Education in the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering, at the University of Rochester. Between 2014 and 2019 I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Kansas State University. Previously Jonathan was a Research Fellow in the Medicine, Ethics, Society and History unit of the University of Birmingham. Jonathan completed my PhD in the School of Philosophy, at the Australian National University. Jonathan is a native of Brisbane, Australia and recieved a BA (Hons I) in International Relations and Philosophy, and a BSc in Microbiology, from the University of Queensland. Prior to undertaking my PhD Jonathan was located at the Centre for International Security Studies, University of Sydney.
Mayya Komisarchik
Mayya Komisarchik is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Rochester. Her research interests focus on representation, voting rights, race and ethnic politics, policing, immigration, and political incorporation. Her recent work has addressed changing electoral rules in southern counties in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, the lasting effects of Japanese Internment, representativeness in policing, and the political incorporation of immigrants to the United States. Her work on the role of compactness in redistricting has been published in the American Journal of Political Science and won the Robert H. Durr award for the best article applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem in 2019. Her work on the impact of Japanese Internment is forthcoming in the Journal of Politics. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2019.
Onur Varol
Onur Varol is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Sabanci University, and has an affiliation with the Center of Excellence for Data Analytics. Onur is the director of VIRAL Lab which focuses on computational social science, networks, and machine learning. During his PhD at Indiana University, Onur was a proud member of NaN group and focused on the detection of persuasion campaigns and social bots using the tools of machine learning, data mining, and network analysis. Onur developed a social bot detection system Botometer (aka BotOrNot). Onur closely worked with Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini, and Emilio Ferrara on various projects related with detection of manipulation on social media.
Elya Zhang
Elya J. Zhang is a senior lecturer of history at the University of Rochester. She received her B.A. from the Renmin University of China and her Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego. In her research and teaching, she explores the financial and spatial history of capitalism in China. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Cold War Studies, Business History Review, Reviews in American History, and two edited volumes by Cornell University Press and Stanford University Press. She has been awarded an An Wang postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard’s Fairbank Center, an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship, and an Abraham J. Karp teaching award at the University of Rochester. As a map lover, she also designed seven new courses in a row to systematically test the integration of scientific map-making into history research. By 2021, this unique challenge has attracted 327 students from 51 majors to experiment outside their comfort zones. The creations of her students are visible here: http://zhang.digitalscholar.rochester.edu/mapping/.
Moeed Baradaran
Moeed Baradaran is a rising senior majoring in international relations and economics at the University of Rochester. Fluent in Persian, English, and familiar with Arabic, Spanish, and Serbo-Croatian, he worked as a translator for United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a research assistant at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, he is interested in understanding the implications of the sanctions and analysis required in understanding their impact.
Huanyu Chen
Huanyu Chen is currently a rising senior student at the University of Rochester pursuing a B.S. in mathematics and a B.A. in economics. She is interested in using computational techniques, especially data visualization and quantification, to address social problems and improve equity between diverse groups.
Lipeng Chen
Lipeng Chen is a doctoral student in economics at the University of Rochester. His work applies reduced-form causal inference methods to topics in development economics and economics of crime. Thus far, he has studied the socioeconomic impacts of Internet access and becomes interested in computational social science. He holds a Master’s degree from Fudan University and a Bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University, both in economics.
Serdar Ciftci
Serdar Çiftçi is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Engineering Department at Harran University. Serdar obtained his PhD in 2017 from the Middle East Technical University, with his thesis titled Visual Privacy Protection Using False Colors. During his PhD, he did some part of his research at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Multimedia Signal Processing Group (MMSPG), as a visiting researcher. In 2017, the Middle East Technical University Prof. Dr. Mustafa Parlar Education and Research Foundation awarded him the Thesis of the Year Award for his PhD thesis. His research interests include deep-learning-based image processing studies such as image analysis, image enhancement, and high-dynamic-range imaging.
Theu Dinh
Theu Dinh is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Rochester. She studies American Politics and Political Methodology, with additional interests in Political Economy and Formal Theory. She is currently doing research on the politics of climate change. In a recent project, her co-author and she examine the effect of extreme weather events on support for climate action policies. She is also interested in understanding the political dynamics of the spread on social networks of misinformation about climate change. She has undergraduate training in Government, Business Management and Industrial Engineering.
Guzel Garifullina
Guzel Garifullina is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies (University of Rochester). Her research interests include comparative political behavior and authoritarian governance with a focus on Russia. Her previous projects use a variety of methods, including lab and survey experiments. She has earned her PhD in Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and will be joining the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University as a Postdoctoral Fellow this Fall.
Ahmet Arif Gunaydin
Ahmet is a PhD student in Political Science at University of Rochester. He is interested in electoral politics, polarization, public opinion and social media research. In his MA thesis he studied the relationship between electoral district magnitude and party system size in Europe and Turkey. Prior to his PhD, he studied Political Science and History at Bogazici (BA) and Sabanci (MA) Universities in Turkey.
Pei-Hsun Hsieh
Pei-Hsun is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stony Brook University. His research interests lie at the boundary of political economy, political behavior, and political psychology. His research focuses on how social preferences and beliefs affect collective decision-making, collective actions (e.g., mitigating public health crises and climate change), and redistributive policies. He uses a variety of methods, including experiments, machine learning, and agent-based modeling. His dissertation explores how people make tradeoffs between other people’s freedoms and what is best for society overall.
Angel Hwang
Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang’s research explores the role of emerging technology in the future of (team)work, culture, and human creativity. Through both quantitative and qualitative methods, she investigates how AI-empowered tools enhance innovation and team synergy at large scale on various platforms (e.g., virtual and mixed reality, text-based communication, and video chats), while addressing common challenges faced by marginalized individuals.
Arsal Imtiaz
Arsal Imtiaz is a graduate student in the department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. His research interests lie in pursuing Artificial Intelligence for Social Good. He is inclined towards studying social media behavior with computational methods to explore valuable insights about themes/events in a given time frame.
Mohamad Ali Kalassina
Born and raised in Lebanon, Mohamad Ali Kalassina is a Fulbright Scholar currently pursuing an MS in Data Science at the University of Rochester's Georgen Institute for Data Science. He holds a B.Eng. in Industrial Engineering from the Lebanese American University and has worked in supply chain analytics prior to moving to Rochester for graduate school. His research interests span social media analytics, machine learning, and computational social science. Mohamad Ali envisions himself founding a data consulting hub in the heart of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon on the long term after gaining enough hands-on experience to be able to give back to the Lebanese community in specific, and the international community at large.
Haotian Li
Haotian (Rick) Li is a Masters student at University of Rochester. His research interest includes behavior of online shoppers, especially for participants of emerging livestream shopping. He is also interested in investment choice of mutual/ hedge fund managers under pressure and how pressure influences decision making. He receives Bachelors degree of Financial Economics and Statistics at University of Rochester. Previously, he worked on machine learning algorithms of movie recommendation systems and market research of ScrewIT business plan at Ain Center of Entrepreneurship at University of Rochester.
Caio Malaquias
Caio Malaquias is a masters student in Political Science at Federal University of Pernambuco (Brazil). Caio is interested in using analytical frameworks and methodologies to evaluate and suggest decision-making processes, specially in public policies. He works on data collection and analysis and utilizes quantitative methods to create evidence-based decisions in public policies as well as to study conflict/coalitional dynamics, especially in multiparty presidentialism in Latin America.
Miguel Novo Villar
I am a retired student-athlete at the University of Rochester studying a master's in Data Science and graduating in December 2022. I am Spanish native from Aviles, Asturias and I completed a Bachelor in Computer Information Systems at Delta State University (MS). Among different, I am interested in GIS as I did a minor in Geospatial Systems and Intelligence and I will be interning at ESRI over the summer. Some topics that attract my attention in GIS are smart cities and sociopolitics.
Kepler Palacio-Soto
Kepler Palacio-Soto is a third-year undergraduate at the University of Rochester pursuing a BS in Brain & Cognitive Sciences. His principal research interests include the neural correlates of social cognition and psychopathology, but he is also interested in leveraging big datasets for insights about social interactions, public mental health, and cultural dissolution. Currently, Kepler helps wrangle and analyze data for an ongoing study exploring the efficacy of varied cognitive reappraisal strategies in improving cardiovascular responses to social stress.
Duy Pham
Duy Pham is a recent graduate at the University of Rochester - majoring in Data Science, Mathematics, and Economics. He seeks to apply Machine Learning methods in forecasting complex economic indicators and financial assets.
Xixi Xiao
I’m a PhD student in accounting at the University of Rochester. I am broadly interested in the effects of information transfer on real decisions, the effect of information intermediaries on capital markets and firm behavior, and managerial learning.West/Central Africa
All Participants
Benjamin Njila Tchakounte Fields
Benjamin Njila Tchakounte Fields is a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, an intern for the Oklahoma State Department of Education, and an intern for the Cato Institute. His research interests are in health, education, infrastructure, and development. Email: benjaminfields@berkeley.edu
Hugue Nkoutchou, Ph.D.
Dr Hugue Nkoutchou earned a PhD in Management (Finance) from the University of Bath (England) in 2017 and a Masters degree Cum Laude (With Distinction) Financial Management from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He is the founder and current Head of the Public Policy in Africa Initiative (PPiAI). Hugue is an Economic Consultant at ABiQ Business Intelligence DWC – LLC; and a political and economic commentator for BBC Africa covering Cameroon. He is also not a stranger to the teaching fraternity, he served as a teaching fellow for Financial Markets and teaching assistant for Corporate Finance and Investment Appraisal at the University of Bath School of Management. Email: hugue@publicpolicyafrica.org2021
Beijing
All Participants
Yan Leng
Yan Leng is an assistant professor in the McCombs School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin. She graduated from MIT Media Lab in May, 2020. She holds master degrees in Computer Science and Transportation Engineering, both from MIT. Yan is a network scientist working on social science problems. Her research lies in the intersection of machine learning, network theory, and causal inference. She uses large-scale behavioral data to understand collective human behavior over social networks and builds computational techniques for solving societal and organizational issues.
Tian Yang
Tian Yang is a PhD Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in applying methods in computational social science to study political communication across the globe, especially in China and the US. Particularly, he looks at how today’s high-choice media environment influences the public’s information behaviors. His research employs various approaches, including network analysis, online experiments, natural experiments, etc.
Yuan Yuan
Yuan Yuan is a PhD Candidate in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will be joining the Purdue Krannert School of Management in Fall 2021. He researches social and economic networks by applying cutting-edge computational methods, including machine learning, causal inference, and experimental design, to large-scale network data. He is especially interested in how social ties are formed and stabilized, and how social ties mediate social contagion, social exchange, prosocial behavior, and information diffusion. Yuan’s thesis advisor is Prof. Sandy Pentland. Yuan considers himself as a computational social scientist who cares a lot about research methodology.
Yong-Yeol (YY) Ahn
Yong-Yeol (YY) Ahn is an Associate Professor at Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering and a Visiting Professor at MIT. Before joining Indiana University, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University and as a visiting researcher at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute after earning his PhD in Statistical Physics from KAIST in 2008. His research focuses on complex social and biological systems by developing and applying network science and machine learning methods to a wide range of domains, including large-scale social phenomena, health, inequality, neuroscience, culture, and science of science. He is a recipient of several awards including Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship and LinkedIn Economic Graph Challenge.
Chris Bail
Chris Bail is 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 the Duke Population Research Institute. His research examines political polarization, culture and social psychology using tools from the field of computational social science. He is the author of Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream.
Yi Bu
Yi Bu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Management, Peking University. Before joining Peking University, he was a research fellow at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, and the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University working with Dr. Dashun Wang. Yi is doing research in the application aspect of big data analytics, with a particular focus on scholarly data mining. Specifically, his research endeavors to elucidate the process of knowledge diffusion, the analysis of scholarly networks and their variants, and bibliometric indicators for research assessment. Yi has an undergraduate degree in information management and system from Peking University, an M.S. in data science, and a Ph.D. in informatics from Indiana University. At Indiana, he was supervised by Professor Ying Ding.
Morgan R. Frank
Morgan Frank is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab, and a Digital Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Morgan is interested in the complexity of AI, the future of work, and the socio-economic consequences of technological change. While many studies focus on phenotypic labor trends, Morgan’s recent research examines how genotypic skill-level processes around AI impact individuals and society. Combining labor research with investigations into the nature of AI research and the social or societal implications of AI adoption, Morgan hopes to inform our understanding of AI’s impact. Morgan has a PhD from MIT’s Media Lab, was a postdoc at MIT IDSS and the IDE, and has a masters degree in applied mathematics from the University of Vermont where he was a member of the Computational Story Lab.
Shan Huang
Shan Huang is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Hong Kong. From 2018 to 2020, she was an assistant professor at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a digital fellow at MIT Initiative on Digital Economy and Stanford Digital Economy Lab. Her research focuses on the digital economy, social networks, and business analytics (e.g., A/B testing). Shan’s current work aims to understand the business value and social implications of new social media. Specifically, her studies examine how social advertising and social referral affect product virality, how emotions shape online content diffusion, and how weak ties can or cannot break people out of the echo chamber, in massive social networks. She has a particular interest in understanding how certain phenomena vary across individuals, social ties, products, and markets, using population-scale datasets and large-scale field experiments, and uses various research methodologies (e.g., large-scale networked randomized field experiments, machine learning, network analysis, econometrics) to pursue her research agenda. Shan’s research has been published in prominent management journals, including Marketing Science and the Journal of Management Information Systems. She has been collaborating closely with the leading tech firms (e.g., Tencent) to understand cutting-edge digital phenomena and their implications for business and society. Shan received a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University, a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, and a Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Zhiyuan Liu
Zhiyuan Liu is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua in 2011. His research interests include representation learning, knowledge graphs and social computation, and has published more than 90 papers in top-tier conferences and journals of AI and NLP including ACL, IJCAI and AAAI, cited by more than 13,000 according to Google Scholar. He is the recipient of the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of Tsinghua University, the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of CAAI (Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence), MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 China (MIT TR-35 China), BAAI Young Scientist. He serves as area chairs of ACL, EMNLP, COLING, IJCNLP, etc.
Mohsen Mosleh
Mohsen Mosleh is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Science, Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship Department, University of Exeter Business School and a Research Affiliate at MIT. Mohsen was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as the Department of Psychology at Yale University. Prior to his postdoctoral studies, Mohsen received his PhD from Stevens Institute of Technology in Systems Engineering with a minor in data science. Mohsen’s research interests lie at the intersection of computational/data science and cognitive/social science. In particular, he studies how information and misinformation spread on social media, collective decision-making, and cooperation.
Subhayan Mukerjee
Subhayan Mukerjee is an assistant professor at the Department of New Media and Communications of the National University of Singapore. A computational social scientist by training, he is interested in understanding the relationship between digital technologies and human behavior using network analysis, statistical inference, agent based modeling, and online experiments. He holds an MA and PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that he received a BE in Computer Science and MSc in Mathematics from BITS Pilani in India.
Nynke Niezink
Nynke Niezink is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining the department in 2018, she was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Groningen. She has M.Sc. degrees in Applied Mathematics and in Behavioral and Social Sciences, and B.Sc. degrees in Mathematics and in Pedagogy and Educational Sciences. Her research interests include the development of statistical methods for network analysis, with applications in education, health sciences and management. Most recently she has been working on methods for criminal network data.
Alex (Sandy) Pentland
Professor Alex 'Sandy' Pentland directs the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited scientists in the world, and Forbes recently declared him one of the '7 most powerful data scientists in the world' along with Google founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the United States. He co-led the World Economic Forum discussion in Davos that led to the EU privacy regulation GDPR, and was central in forging the transparency and accountability mechanisms in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. He has received numerous awards and prizes such as the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review, the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, and the Brandeis Award for work in privacy. He is a founding member of advisory boards for Google, AT&T, Nissan, and the UN Secretary General, a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies including social enterprises such as the Data Transparency Lab and the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and leader within the World Economic Forum.
Anfan Chen
Anfan Chen is a postdoc research fellow in the School of Journalism and Communication at Chinese University of HongKong (CUHK). His work applies computational method (i.e. Text Mining) to understand the nuances of controversial/emerging science social representation, online social movement and online health behavior. Before join CUHK, he obtained his PHD degree in Tsinghua University, and worked as research fellow in the University of Science and Technology of China.
Xiduo Chen
Xiduo Chen is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of Arizona. Her current research includes econometric methods in many instruments and social networks.
Zhuo Chen
Zhuo Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. His work examines the sociopolitical consequences of communication technologies. His research interests include collective action, public opinion, civic engagement, and social organizing and networking in the digital era.
Ruijia Cheng
Ruijia (Regina) Cheng is a PhD student in the Human Centered Design & Engineering department at University of Washington. Her research focuses on studying collaborative learning activities in a variety of online communities. Recently she is particularly interested in understanding and designing for novices' engagement with data in online communities.
Zhaowen Guo
Zhaowen Guo is pursuing a PhD in political science at University of Washington. Her work has centered around how information and technology impact public discourses, government accountability, and social behavior. She draws on a mix-method approach with a particular interest in connecting formal models with computational social science methods. Prior to joining University of Washington, she holds a master's degree in political science at Columbia University with Chinese Government Scholarship, and a bachelor's degree in political science at Fudan University.
Shengchun Huang
Shengchun Huang is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is is interested in digital news consumption, algorithm driven aggregators/platforms, and social effects in the high-choice media environment. Before joining Annenberg, she received her B.A. degree in communication from Renmin University of China and M.A. degree in journalism and communications from Tsinghua University.
Sachin Kumar
Kumar is an Assistant Professor at University of Delhi, Delhi, India. He has also been a PhD student at the Dept of Computer Science, University of Delhi. He is interested in Artificial Intelligence(AI), Urban Computing, Information Systems and Computational Social Science. He particularly applies computational techniques of AI to develop data-driven urban computing solutions. He also applies AI techniques to investigate social networks, digital information diffusion patterns and social agents interactions.
Bo Li
Bo Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Formerly, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Oxford and University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stony Brook University. He is broadly interested in algorithms, AI and computational economics.
Yang Liu
Yang Liu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Management at Wuhan University, He graduated from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and was jointly trained at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in business analytics, computational communication, NLP and machine learning.
Yingdan Lu
Yingdan Lu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. Her research focuses on new media, political communication and information manipulation in authoritarian regimes, and applies various computational methods including automated text analysis and visual analysis to faciliate her research. Her most recent work examines the prevalence and features of multimodal propaganda on Chinese social media. She received her M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University, and B.A. in journalism from Tsinghua University. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Political Communication, Human-Computer Interaction, and Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.
Anmol Panda
I am an international doctoral student at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, where I study political communication and campaigning on digital platforms. My current focus is on the political preferences and campaign strategies among immigrant minority communities from Asia and Latin America in the United States.
Huilian Sophie Qiu
Sophie Qiu is a Ph.D. student of School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Her primary research interest is diversity and inclusion in open-source software. This includes using social network theories to study sustained participation and using NLP techniques to detect negative interactions. Her work on social capital in the open-source community won the Distinguished Paper Award at the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering.
Chenshuo Sun
Chenshuo Sun is a Ph.D. candidate in Information Systems at New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business where he is advised by Professor Anindya Ghose (Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Business). He has been conducting research developing and applying machine learning and economic methodologies, with a particular interest in the area of digital economy, including consumer journey analytics, AI chatbot, omnichannel marketing, privacy concerns around digital surveillance, and economics of emerging technologies. He is a winner of the J.P. Morgan Ph.D. Fellowship Award 2021 and many other scholarships. His research has been awarded seven research grants from Marketing Science Institutes (MSI) and several other corporations. Previously, he received his bachelor’s degree (Hons) from Sichuan University, China and his master's degree from Tsinghua University, China. Chenshuo enjoys being a competitive medalist swimmer with a butterfly focus since high school.
Ruqin Ren
Ruqin REN earned her PhD from USC Annenberg School for Communication. Her research focuses on the intersection of digital media technology, organizational communication, and information production behaviors. She is also interested in social network analysis, statistical modeling and other quantitative research methods. Her works have appeared in peer-reviewed publications including Internet Research, Communication Research, CHI conference, OpenSym conference, ICA, NCA, Sunbelt Conference, and HBES Conference. She also has professional working experiences at Ant Financial UX Research, Facebook UX Research, Eli Lilly Digital Government Relations, and Ogilvy Public Relations. She holds an M.A. from Georgetown University's Communication, Culture, and Technology program, and B.A. in English, B.S. in Business Management from University of International Business and Economics.
Cheng Jun Wang
Cheng-Jun Wang is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing University. He is the director of Computational Communication Collaboratory, and a research member of Web Mining Lab. His research on computational communication appears in both SSCI and SCI indexed journals, such as Internet Research, Cyberpsychology, Telematics and Informatics, Scientific Reports, PloS ONE, and Physica A.
Guang Wang
Guang is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Rutgers University and a visiting student at MIT Media Lab. His research interests include Data-Driven Cyber-Physical Systems, Applied Machine Learning and Computational Social Science, especially for applications in Smart Cities and Human Mobility. He has studied heterogeneous urban systems including taix, bus, ridesharing, carsharing, bikesharing, electric vehicle, instant delivery based on over 10TB of data. He investigates user behavior and system evolution patterns in these systems and provides fairness-aware decision making to manage these systems.
Xiangyu Wang
Xiangyu Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in Information Science at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on user online behavior analytics and the connection of users’ online-to-offline behavior using text mining, machine learning, statistical modeling and deep learning. She is particularly interested in analyzing user behavior in online health communities and social media platforms.
Xinyi Wang
Xinyi Wang studies communication and media effects in the context of health and mental wellbeing. Her research aims to understand the influence of the current media environment on people’s daily and long-term health decision-making. With a focus on psychosocial individual differences, she is particularly interested in the consequence of “triggering media content” to vulnerable populations (i.e., depression, addiction). In the long term, she aims to develop persuasive media content that promotes healthier lifestyles. Her research combines a variety of methods (i.e., self-report, fMRI, physiological measures, mobile application intervention) to expand the understanding of health behavior into multiple facets.
Y. Jasmine Wu
Y. Jasmine Wu is a doctoral student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University. Her current research applies computational methods to understand team diversity as well as network dynamics around teams in both academic and industrial settings.
Shiyang Xiao
Shiyang Xiao is a PhD student in Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her research interest lies at the intersection of public administration and data science. She applies big data methods to explore the decision-making process, the implementation, and the evaluation of public policies.
Chao Yang
Chao Yang is an associate professor at the Department of Automation, East China University of Science and Technology. She received the B.S. degree in theoretical and applied mechanics from Peking University in 2009 and the Ph.D. degree in electronic and computer engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2013. Her research interests include sensor scheduling in networked control systems, privacy in cooperative networked systems, and opinion dynamics in social network. Her interest toward social science seeks to integrate the tools from theories of networked control systems and theories of complex networks with the practical models in social science.
Yanni Yang
I am currently a Postdoc in The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. My PhD study mainly focused on pervasive human behavior and object monitoring with publications in ACM Ubicomp, IEEE TMC, IEEE Secon. Now I am also interested in healthcare-related and ocean-related computational social science.
Tong Zhang
Tong is a Postoc Research Fellow at School of Public Affairs of Zhejiang University, China. She got a doctor's degree in Economics, a master's degree in Education, a bachelor's degree in Management and Arts. Her research interests lie in government communication, social media and digital governance. She has a strong desire in both the research and practive of digital literacy.
Yiyan Zhang
Yiyan Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in advertising and economy from Peking University. Her research focuses on mediated communication between citizens, news media, and governments on digital platforms. Methodologically, she connects surveys, digital texts, and experiments employing advanced statistical methods, automatic content analyses, and network analysis, etc. Her papers were published in journals including Information, Communication & Society, Journalism Studies, The Social Science Journal, and Mass Communication and Society, etc.
Kunru Zou
Kunru Zou is a doctoral student in finance at the Nanyang Business School in Nanyang Technological University. His research interest include corporate finance, privatization, corporate social responsibility. Methodologically, he is interested in econometric analysis with geographical variation. He is also interested in textual analysis and machine learning. Before coming to Singapore, he received his bachelor degree in Maths and master degree in Finance both from Sun Yat-sen University.
Shengchun Huang
Shengchun Huang is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is is interested in digital news consumption, algorithm driven aggregators/platforms, and social effects in the high-choice media environment. Before joining Annenberg, she received her B.A. degree in communication from Renmin University of China and M.A. degree in journalism and communications from Tsinghua University.
Xinyi Wang
Xinyi Wang studies communication and media effects in the context of health and mental wellbeing. Her research aims to understand the influence of the current media environment on people’s daily and long-term health decision-making. With a focus on psychosocial individual differences, she is particularly interested in the consequence of “triggering media content” to vulnerable populations (i.e., depression, addiction). In the long term, she aims to develop persuasive media content that promotes healthier lifestyles. Her research combines a variety of methods (i.e., self-report, fMRI, physiological measures, mobile application intervention) to expand the understanding of health behavior into multiple facets.Bologna
All Participants
Filippo Andreatta
Filippo Andreatta teaches International Politics and Strategic Studies at the University of Bologna, where he is currently chair of the Department of Political and Social Science.
Giampiero Giacomello
Giampiero Giacomello is Associate Professor of Political Science. His research interests include strategic theory (mostly Clausewitz), cybersecurity and wargaming and simulation. He has extensively published on all of these topics.
Marco Albertini
Marco Albertini is Full Professor at the University of Bologna. His research interests focus on intergenerational relations; the consequences of separation and divorce; the comparative study of income inequality and social stratification; the consequences of childlessness; long-term care policies and ageing.
Matthew Loveless
Matthew Loveless is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He investigates how individuals make sense of politics in Europe, focusing on public opinion, media use, and perceptions.
Roland Adorjani
Roland Adorjani is a PhD candidate at University College Dublin in Computational Social Science, previously ESOC Sr. Research Specialist at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and also data scientist with opening.io in the domain of recruitment technology. He works on computational social science, machine learning, and cultural sociology to study the spread of fake news, trolling, and disinformation on social media.
Abdullah Almaatouq
Abdullah Almaatouq is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on the mechanisms of decision-making in networked environments where decisions are influenced by interactions with others. He holds dual MS and a PhD from MIT and a BSc from the University of Southampton.
Gian Maria Campedelli
Gian Maria Campedelli is a postdoctoral research fellow in Computational Sociology and Criminology at the University of Trento. He holds a Ph.D. in Criminology from Università Cattolica in Milan, and from 2016 to 2019 he worked as a research fellow at Transcrime - the Joint Research Centre on Transnational Crime of Università Cattolica, University of Bologna and University of Perugia. In 2018 he also held a visiting research scholar position at Carnegie Mellon University - School of Computer Science. His research interests focus on the development and application of computational methods for the study of terrorism and organized crime, with specific expertise in complex networks and machine learning.Sönke Ehret
Sönke Ehret is currently a researcher at the Universities of Bern and Lausanne. His interests touch a number of substantive areas, among them political sophistication and extremism, and the conditions under which social norms change. He is also working on new methods for online and virtual lab experiments.
Cesar Hidalgo
Cesar A. Hidalgo directs the Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute (ANITI) at the University of Toulouse. Prior to joining ANITI, he directed the Collective Learning group at MIT. Hidalgo holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Notre Dame, and is the author of dozens of peer reviewed papers and three books. His latest book is How Humans Judge Machines (MIT Press, 2021).
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is associate professor of social demography at the University of Oxford and professorial fellow of Nuffield College. Her research explores questions linked to demography and human development, including topics such as population health, gender inequality, partnerships and family, and migration. In her ongoing work in the the area of digital and computational demography, she is studying how technological changes linked to digitalisation affect population and human development processes, and the role of novel digital data sources for understanding population phenomena.
Francesco Rampazzo
Francesco Rampazzo is a Career Development Fellow in Marketing and Consumer Demography at the Saïd Business School, the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. He is a demographer with a broad range of research interests, which include digital and computational demography with applications in fertility, migration, and survey research.Rachael Tatman
Dr. Rachael Tatman is a senior developer advocate at Rasa, where she helps developers use open source software to build great conversational AI projects. Before that she was a developer advocate at Kaggle (part of Google) and recieved a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Washington, where her research focused on computational sociolinguistics.
Milena Tsvetkova
Milena Tsvetkova is Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University and postdoctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute. In her research, she uses large-scale web-based social interaction experiments, network analysis of online data, and agent-based modeling to investigate fundamental social phenomena such as cooperation, social contagion, segregation, and inequality.
Andrea Marchesi
Andrea Marchesi is a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at University of Bologna. His work applies quantitative methods to study voting cleavages in Western European countries and to investigate the social perception of Covid-19 pandemic. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in Sociology from University of Milano-Bicocca.
Giulia Ganugi
Giulia is research fellow at the University of Bologna. She holds a Joint PhD in Sociology from Unibo and in Geography from KULeuven. Her research interests concern social innovation, co-creation, governance and citizenship. Methodologically, she is studying how to merge qualitative research methods with social network analysis and text mining.
Aidar Zinnatullin
Aidar Zinnatullin is a PhD student in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He studies how political discussions evolve in the context of authoritarian politics. In the research project Aidar uses quantitative text analysis techniques and causal inference identification strategies.
Gabriele Pinto
Gabriele is PhD student at Sapienza (Rome). He is interested in understanding the determinants and the effects of the quality of the political class. Besides, he studies the diffusion and the effect of political ideologies on individual and group behaviors. He holds degrees from Erasmus University (Rotterdam), Sapienza (Rome), and Collegio Carlo Alberto (Turin).
Kamil Klosek
Kamil Klosek is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Security Studies at Charles University. In his research, Kamil concentrates on conflict economies and civil wars with a focus on corporate investments, central banking, arms trade, and natural resources. He previously worked on military interventions and frozen conflicts.
Federico Pilati
Federico Pilati is a PhD student at IULM University. Previously he has been a research assistant for the Italian national project called "Media and Terrorism". He also worked as a media analyst for the Observatory of Pavia. Currently he focuses his research on the analyses of the covid-19 infodemic.
Salsabil Mohamed Abdalbaki
Salsabil Mohamed is an Assistant Lecturer in Socio-Computing Department at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. I am a PhD student at FEPS at Socio-computing department. I am holding the Professional Diploma in Big Data and Data Science from Nile University. I am holding the Master’s degree in Socio-Computing with an excellent grade in April 2019. The thesis title is “An Extensive Survey on Social Network Analysis with An Application on Water Resources Management in Nile Basin Region”. I published a co-authored scientific paper with my supervisor from my master’s thesis in Water Policy Journal in 2019. In addition, I published another scientific paper in 2020 as a single author in the Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development. Currently, I am working on two chapters for an edited book in Springer based on an invitation from the editor. This book is bout the socio--Economic, Political, and Environmental Aspects of International Conflicts.
Vanessa Carrión-Yaguana
Vanessa Carrión-Yaguana is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Universidad de Las Americas (Ecuador). She received her PhD from Virginia Tech. Her current research projects focus on political behavior. She also maintains a strong interest in implementing policies to alleviate poverty in rural areas.
Tuğba Bayar
I completed my doctoral studies in Otto-Friedrich-Universitaet, Bamberg. Currently I am an instructor at Bilkent University, Ankara. I am working on an interdisciplianery project regarding international treaties.
Riccardo Nanni
Riccardo Nanni is PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences (International Relations) at the University of Bologna. Besides, he is in the 2020/21 cohort of the Europaeum Scholars Programme and is member to the Programme Committee of Youth Internet Governance Forum - Italy. His research interest is on Chinese stakeholders' influence in global Internet governance. Prior to his PhD, he worked as project manager at Centro Veneto Progetti Donna, a civil society organisation managing antiviolence centres in Northeast Italy, and as human rights trainee at the Political Section of the EU Delegation to China.
Christiern Santos Rasmussen
My phd project is focused on states use of disinformation campaigns and how these use fringe-media to spread specific content on social media.
Paride Carrara
Paride Carrara is a PhD student in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. His research interests are party competition, political communication and text analysis. He holds a MA in Political Science and a BA in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation, both from the University of Milan.
Oltion Preka
Oltion Preka is a researcher and an adjunct professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. Through his course ‘Big Data for the Social Sciences’ he has involved many students of political sciences in learning how to leverage Python programming skills in their studies. He also has a long experience as a data scientist covering a broad range of areas (from data wrangling to machine learning, to natural language processing). His main interests concern the application of Deep Learning techniques, especially NLP, to make sense of text data in the social sciences.Chicago
All Participants
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is a JD/PhD Candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University, a Law and Science Fellow at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and a Global Impacts Fellow at the Buffett Institute. She will be moving to Atlanta in early August to begin a position as an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Kat’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study fear, violence, and data surveillance. Her work has been published in outlets like Law & Policy, Nature Human Behavior, and Law, Technology & Humans. This is her 4th year organizing SICSS Chicago and she is 2017 SICSS Alum.
Carrie Stallings
Carrie Stallings is a doctoral student at Northwestern University and a Native and Indigenous Studies fellow. Her research interests include inequality, race & ethnicity, and computational and decolonial methodologies. Her current research focuses on inequality, particularly on the roles that government and educational institutions play in the life outcomes of Black and Indigenous peoples.
Yian Yin
Yian Yin is a Ph.D. candidate of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences at Northwestern University. He also holds affiliations with Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems and Center for Science of Science and Innovation. Yian studies computational social science, with a particular focus on integrating theoretical insights in innovation studies, computational tools in data science, and modeling frameworks in complex systems to examine various fundamental elements of innovation lifecycles. His research has been published in multidisciplinary journals including Science, Nature, Nature Human Behaviour, and Nature Reviews Physics. Yian is also a 2018 SICSS alum.
James Evans
James Evans is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the director of the Knowledge Lab and the founder/director of the Computational Social Science program at UChicago. His research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement (and dispute), accumulation of certainty (and doubt), and the texture—novelty, ambiguity, topology—of understanding. You can find his work in Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review and other outlets.
Dashun Wang
Dashun Wang is a professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. He is the founding director of the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) and a core member of the Northwestern Institute in Complex Systems (NICO). His current research focus is on Science of Science, a quest to turn the scientific methods and curiosities upon ourselves, hoping to use and develop tools from complexity sciences and artificial intelligence to broadly explore the opportunities for innovation and promises of prosperity offered by the recent data explosion in science. Dashun is a recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator award (2016) and Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors (2019).
Abigail Z. Jacobs
Abigail Z. Jacobs in a computational social scientist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems. She is also an affiliate of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC) and the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). Her research focuses on structure, governance, and inequality in sociotechnical systems; measurement; and social networks. Her work has appeared in outlets like Management Science, the Journal of Complex Networks, and Physical Review.
Adam Pah
Adam Pah is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University. He received his BS from Arizona State University, PhD from Northwestern University, and has worked industrially as a Data Scientist. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of the Systematic Content Analysis of Litigation EventS Open Knowledge Network (SCALES OKN), a NSF funded effort to transform the transparency and accessibility of court records. The SCALES OKN is a public platform that uses AI to surface insights into systematic patterns and behaviors in court records. The project's goal is to make it easy for lawyers, legal scholars, and journalists to transform difficult question about how the courts operate into easily obtainable information and answers. His primary research for the platform centers on building language models to understand how litigation proceeds, disambiguating entities, and quantifying the extent that legal outcomes vary within and between court districts.
Kristina Lerman
Kristina Lerman is a Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute, a unit of the University of Southern California (USC), and a Research Associate Professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Computer Science Department. An expert in complex multi-agent systems, Dr. Lerman has received numerous grants on social data and other topics from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Information Sciences Institute (ISI) early in her career. Her current work revolves around deciphering the structure and dynamics of social web sites such as Twitter, Digg, Flickr and Delicious. Among her goals: automatically organize collective knowledge, discover the structure of user-generated communities, and predict emerging trends and group behavior. Her empirical and experimental studies identified the importance of cognitive biases to understanding individual and collective behavior online.
Fernando Calderón Figueroa
Fernando is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto. His dissertation addresses the relationship between the built environment and social capital. Fernando is a member of the School of Cities and the Urban Genome Project. His interests are urban and political sociology, social policy, and computational methods.Hyunsik Chun
Isabel Constantino
Isabel Constantino is a PhD student in Informatics at Indiana University. Her research interests are in network science and graph embedding, and their applications to science and innovation studies.
Jordan Daley
Jordan is a doctoral student in the Northwestern University Social Psychology program, where he is a member of the Social Cognition Lab. His research explores the mechanisms that drive social biases. He hopes to apply innovative methods to improve representation, leverage naturalistic contexts, and improve theory in his field.
Chris Etheridge
Chris Etheridge is an Assistant Professor in journalism and mass communication at the University of Kansas. He researches the community effects of media representations of crime and public safety.
Leanne Fan
Leanne is a sociology PhD student with untamed research interests in expectations of the future, barriers to class consciousness, urban inequality, and digital communities. She is interested in applying textual analysis and spatial regression to understand these social phenomena better.
Alberto Guzman-Alvarez
Alberto Guzman-Alvarez is a Ph.D. student in Learning Sciences and Policy at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Education. His research focuses on applying and developing quantitative methods for evaluating the effectiveness of education policies and interventions. In particular, he is interested in college access issues affecting first-generation, historically marginalized students. He earned his B.S. in Psychology from UC Davis, and a Masters in Research Methodology from the University of Pittsburgh.Samaa Haniya
Samaa Haniya is an adult education faculty at Parkland College in Illinois, and e-Learning consultant at various institutions. Her research examines user experience, instructional models, and learning behaviors in e-Learning environments in relation to learner differences. She aims to humanize education practices through pedagogical transformation to foster equitable mastery learning.
Phyllis Johnson
Phyllis Johnson is an archaeologist whose research uses computational theory and methods, such as agent-based modeling and dynamic image analysis, to examine the dialectic relationship between social structure, ancient economies, and stone tool production. Phyllis recently defended her dissertation and will soon begin a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Kentucky.
Nick Judd
Nick Judd is a postdoctoral fellow in Sociology and the College at The University of Chicago, where he completed his Ph.D. in Sociology. Using machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and semi-structured interviews, Nick makes inferences about the social structures of political elites, and how those structures predict action in formal politics.
Devika Lakhote
As a PhD student at the Pearson Institute and Harris School of Public Policy, Devika Lakhote studies the role of social identity in access to goods in India. Originally from Mumbai, completed a BA in economics with distinction from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Following graduation, Lakhote worked at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in Bangalore, India. More recently, Lakhote was a predoctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research.
Jim Larson
Jim Larson is professor emeritus of psychology at both Loyola University Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also an associate editor of Group Processes and Intergroup Relations. He studies the interaction dynamics of small task-performing groups, including how those dynamics might be modeled computationally.
Avital Livny
Avital Livny is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the politics of religion and ethnicity, particularly the micro-foundations of identity-based mobilization and the measurement of identity and diversity, with a focus on Turkey and the Middle East.
Jolen Martinez
Jolen Martinez is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He earned B.A.s in Anthropology and History at Rice University. His undergraduate research investigated technologies associated with enumerating and constructing homelessness in Houston, Texas. His current work is on digital colonialism, histories of extraction, and embodied networks of informational/computer sciences among Latin Americans living at the borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico.
Thomas Pellet
Thomas Pellet is a doctoral student in the Northwestern Economics department. His current research examines the role of networks in the macroeconomy. He holds a masters from SciencesPo and HEC Paris. Prior to graduate school, Thomas worked at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) and the World Bank as a research assistant.
Yifan Qian
Yifan Qian is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. He will be joining Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University as a Postdoc in 2021. His research is broadly concerned with science of science and combines theories and methods from network science, sociology, and machine learning.
Shadi Rezapour
Shadi Rezapour is a Ph.D. Candidate at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests lie at the intersection of computational social science and natural language processing (NLP). More specifically, she is interested in developing computational models to better understand and explain real-world behaviors, attitudes, and cultures by combining methods from NLP, network analysis, and machine learning with social science theories.
Apollo Rydzik
Apollo Rydzik is a doctoral student in Sociology at Stanford University and a National Science Foundation Fellow. He uses mixed-methods to study transgender experiences with police violence, the crimmigration system, and social movements. He holds a BA from Stanford and an AA from Foothill Community College.
Malik Salami
Malik is a doctoral student at School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My present research areas revolve around knowledge diffusion and innovation, scholarly communication, health informatics and science of science focusing on African science and African scientific communities. I am interested in leveraging on social computational techniques to drive and understand my research and expand its frontier.Jamshid Sourati
Mengyi Sun
Mengyi Sun is a doctoral student in Jianzhi Zhang’s lab at the University of Michigan and an incoming postdoc in Luis Amaral’s lab at Northwestern University. He plans to study the research activities of biomedical scientists, leveraging his insider knowledge about biologists and his expertise in data science.
Rahardhika Utama
Rahardhika Utama is an Arryman Scholar, a Global Impacts fellow at the Buffett Institute, and a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern. His research examines historical factors that transform and sustain agrarian society by tracing domestic and international forces that shape diverging paths of development in the Asian Rubber Belt.
Binglu Wang
Binglu Wang is a doctoral student in Management & Organizations (MORS) at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, with affiliations at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). Her research involves computational social science, technology & innovation, and social networks, with a focus on understanding how community collapses from large-scale datasets. She received her bachelor's degree in management information system from Peking University in 2019.
Chelsey Wilks
Chelsey Wilks is an assistant professor of health and data science at the University of Missouri-St Louis. She received her PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Washington, and post-doctoral training in epidemiology at Harvard University. Dr. Wilks' research is at the intersection of clinical psychology, computer science, and public health with the goal of reducing self-destructive behaviors through the use of technology.
Ellie F. Yang
Ellie F. Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in mass communication at UW-Madison. She conducts research in optimizing media technology and message effects to improve well-being for vulnerable populations. Her recent work focuses on understanding mobile app support for patients living with substance use disorders and the communication dynamics in online communities. She also devotes herself to social practices related to narrowing digital divides in terms of analytical tool access.
Yiyan Zhang
Yiyan Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in advertising and economy from Peking University. Her research focuses on mediated communication between citizens, news media, and governments on digital platforms. Methodologically, she connects surveys, digital texts, and experiments employing advanced statistical methods, automatic content analyses, and network analysis, etc.
Maggie Zhang
Maggie (Mengqing) Zhang is a Ph.D. Student at Institute of Communication Research at UIUC. Maggie holds a BA in journalism from Tsinghua and an M.Phil in communication from Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are computational political communication, with particular focuses on networked communication processes and media effects.Yaxi Zhao
Enyu Zhou
Enyu Zhou is a Senior Analyst at the Council of Graduate Schools. Her research focuses on graduate education with emphasis on enrollment trends and student success. In addition to co-authoring several CGS reports, she has published in journals like Journal of College Student Retention, Library and Information Science Research, and Studies in Higher Education.
Erin F. Ochoa
Erin is a PhD student in Sociology and a Master’s student in Statistics at Northwestern University. She holds an MA in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago and a BA in Criminology from the University of New Mexico. Her research uses computational, statistical, and spatial methods and focuses on neighborhood crime and community anti-violence programs.FGV/DAPP Brazil
All Participants
Marco Aurélio Ruediger
Marco Aurelio Ruediger is the Faculty Sponsor of SICSS FGV-DAPP Brazil. He holds a PhD in Sociology and is the Director of Public Policy Analysis of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV/DAPP). His main fields of interest are political sociology, communication, social networks, and technological innovation and its impacts on democracy. He is a consulting member of the D4D initiatives of the National Democratic Institute and Social Science One. He is currently leading the creation of the School of Communication, Media and Information of Fudação Getulio Vargas and of the project “Digitalization and Democracy in Brazil”, carried out with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany and of the German Embassy in Brasília
Tiago Ventura
Tiago Ventura is a Ph.D. Candidate in Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), and an alumni of SICSS Princeton in 2019. Tiago is a researcher on comparative politics and computational social science, with a particular focus on political violence in Latin America and political communication. During the Winter and Spring of 2021, He will be the Young Talent fellow in Computational Social Science at FGV Rio de Janeiro. Tiago is also a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Computational Social Science at UMD.
Amaro Grassi
Amaro Grassi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at IESP-UERJ, and Chief Researcher at The Department of Public Policy Analysis of Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV/DAPP)
Danilo Carvalho
Danilo Carvalho is a Master student in Informatics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and coordinator of Data Science at the Department of Public Policy Analysis of Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil). He works with the monitoring of online public debate, automated behavior detection, information spreading, and machine learning in applied social sciences.
Patricia Rossini
Patricia Rossini is a Derby Fellow in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. Her work is primarily focused on digital threats to democracy, such as uncivil and intolerant online discourse and misinformation on social media and messaging applications. Her research has been funded by social media platforms such as WhatsApp (PI), Twitter, and Facebook (Co-PI). She is also co-PI on a Knight Foundation grant to study digital campaigns in the 2020 US election. Prior to joining the University of Liverpool, Dr. Rossini was a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University (USA). She has a Ph.D. in Communication from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Cezar Zucco
Cezar Zucco is a Political Scientist and Associate Professor at FGV/EBAPE, a school of business and public administration in Rio de Janeiro. He was previously Assistant Professor at Rutgers, and has held visiting appointments at Nuffield College, Princeton, Yale, and IUPERJ (currently IESP). His work focuses on Latin American politics, and He has written on executive-legislative relations, political parties, voting behavior, and the politics of public policy.
Thiago Marzagão
Thiago Marzagão is a data scientist. He uses machine learning to automate the detection of corruption in the Brazilian government. He got his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 2014.
Ernesto Calvo
Ernesto Calvo is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and Director of the interdisciplinary Lab for Computational Social Science. His research focuses on the study of comparative political institutions, political representation, and social networks. He is the author of Non-Policy Politics (Cambridge U.P, 2019) with M. Victoria Murillo; Legislator Success in Fragmented Congresses in Argentina (Cambridge U.P: 2014), and over 70 publications in Latin America, Europe, and the United States.
Rochelle Terman
Rochelle Terman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She specializes in international relations, with an emphasis on international norms, human rights, and the Muslim world. She teaches computational social science at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including Computational Tools for Social Science. She is a certified instructor with Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry.
Fernanda Scovino
Fernanda Scovino é cofundadora da Base dos Dados e trabalha como Coordenadora Técnica de Governança de Dados na Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro. Atualmente é também conselheira executiva do Laboratório de Inovação em Políticas Públicas e membro do GT da Sociedade Civil para Governo Aberto da CGU. Formada em Matemática Aplicada pela FGV-EMAp, trabalhou com ciência de dados na Impulso-gov, Elogroup e CTS/FGV.
Cecilia Olliveira
Cecilia Olliveira is an investigative journalist who focuses on drug and arms trafficking and violence. In 2016, frustrated with the lack of publicly available data, she began mapping every shooting in Rio de Janeiro. This idea turned into Fogo Cruzado, an open data platform on armed violence that is spreading to every major city in Brazil. She was the only Latin American finalist in Reporters Without Borders’ 2020 Press Awards, which celebrates intrepid and courageous voices in global media.
Cristina Tardáguila
Cristina Tardáguila is the International Fact-Checking Network’s Associate Director and also the founder of Agência Lupa, the first fact-checking initiative in her country, Brazil. As a journalist, she has worked in some of the major Brazilian media outlets: O Globo, Folha de S.Paulo and revista piauí. She graduated in journalism in Rio de Janeiro, got her master degree in Madrid and her MBA in Digital Marketing again in Rio. She has published two books: “A Arte do Descaso” (in 2016), about art crimes - and “Você foi Enganado” (2018), about presidential false claims. She’s been to TEDx’s red carpet twice and won the 2018 elPeriodico’s/Grupo award in 2018 in Spain as the best journalist of the year. Tardaguila has been nominated for the Gabriel García Marquez Award, in Colombia, and the Comunique-se Awards, in Brazil. Both in their innovation categories. She now coordinates the largest fact-checking collaborative project: the #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance
Natália Leão
Natália Leão is the Head of the Research and Data Department at Gênero and Número, and a Ph.D Student in Sociology at Iesp-Uerj. She works on issues of gender, race and class inequalities, based on data collection and analysis, since 2007.
Daniel Trielli
Daniel Trielli is a PhD student at the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern. He is researching computational journalism and how news reaches the public in our increasingly algorithmically-defined world.
Henrique Lorea
Henrique is currently a Data Analytics Tech Manager at PicPay, where he leads a team of data analysts whose purpose is to generate value for business with data. Prior to his 5-year experience in financial services, Henrique has worked as a data scientist at Pensa, a big data analytics initiative from Rio City Hall, focused on solving urban problems with data. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Architecture and Urbanism and a Master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning.
Daniel Mariani
Formado em ciência biológicas em 2009 pela USP. Trabalhou em estudos genéticos e de transtornos psiquiátricos no Hospital das Clínicas até 2015 quando iniciou carreira no jornalismo de dados no Nexo Jornal. Em 2017 foi para a Folha de São Paulo onde formou o DeltaFolha editoria focada em dados do jornal.
Amanda Domingos
Amanda is a PhD student in Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco. Her areas of research have focused on the subnational variation of public policies and distributive politics in Brazilian municipalities. She is also interested in open and reproducible research. And is a co-director of the Métodos em Pauta initiative.
Beatriz Milz
Beatriz Milz is a doctoral student in Environmental Science at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil. Her research is about the transparency of information on water resources management. Beatriz holds an MS in sciences from the Federal University of São Paulo, and a bachelor's degree in environmental management from the University of São Paulo. She is involved with some projects, communities, and events related to the R programming language, such as R-Ladies, Latin-R, useR! 2021, satRday São Paulo, and so on.
Davi Moreira
Researcher and M&E Specialist. In 2017 I was awarded the CAPES Ph.D. Thesis Prize in Political Science and International Relations. My academic work addresses Political Methodology, Data Science, Text as Data, and Comparative Politics.
Fernanda Alvares Freire
Fernanda Alvares Freire is currently pursuing a PhD in Ancient History at the University of Münster, Germany. Her research employs Social Network analytical methods to investigate the patterns of social interaction represented in the documents of a large archive of papyri from the 3rd century BCE. She holds a BA and MA degree in History from the University of Brasília, Brazil.
Gabriel Suchodolski
Gabriel L. Suchodolski is a PhD candidate in sociology at UCLA. He is broadly interested in development, politics, and collective action. His dissertation uses comparative-historical methods to explain land titling outcomes in Brazil and India. His other work uses ethnography to understand patronage, contention, and deforestation in the Amazon.
Guilherme Marques
Guilherme Marques is a political scientist, researcher, and consultant at Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) and a doctoral student at Brazilian Army Command and General Staff College. His primary research interests concern defense economics, data-driven policymaking, and the interrelationship between military spending and development.
Jonas Araujo
Jonas holds a master's degree in the Graduate Program in Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. His main research agenda focuses on the quality of democracy, particularly on the police ombudsman in Rio de Janeiro. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the same program researching perceptions about meritocracy in Brazil.
Jean Prado
Jhey! I'm Jean, passionate about data science, strategic communication and in facilitating great conversations. I currently work at Greenpeace Brazil, where I'm responsible for developing audience research and social media analysis. I'm also a co-organizer of R-Ladies São Paulo. I've graduated in Journalism at the São Paulo State University (Unesp) with an exchange program at the University of Victoria (Canada), where I studied media, politics and technology & society. My research interests include social networks, misinformation and audience analysis.
Juliana Brandão
Juliana Brandão is a Graduate Student at the University of Pará at the Economics Post Graduation Program, CAPES scholarship. Also, She has experience in prediction models in the state bank of Pará, and VAR models for comparative analysis in international macroeconomic data and public data, using R and time series econometrics. Nowadays, is a participant in the Social Equity Laboratory of University of Pará, developing models and impact analysis of public policies on income.
Larissa Galdino de Magalhães Santos
Larissa is a researcher in Digital Policies, Data, and Democracy at CyberBRICS, Faculty of Law of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, Rio de Janeiro. Her research is located in the area of government technology and innovation, with a special focus on open data, smart cities, and political implications. Larissa holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the State University of Campinas and analyzed open government in the city of São Paulo.
Leonardo Nascimento
Leonardo F. Nascimento is a professor at the Federal University of Bahia where he coordinates the Digital Humanities Laboratory (LABHDUFBA). His research interests include digital sociology, digital humanities and computational social science. He is the author of the book Sociologia Digital: uma breve introdução - EDUFBA - 2020
Lorena Giuberti
Lorena is a Phd fellow in Economics at UNU-MERIT/Maastricht University. She holds an MA and a BA degree in Economics from the University of Brasilia, Brazil. Her research examines the impacts of technology and automation in decision-making and their implications for policies, using experimental and quasi-experimental approaches. Prior to her doctoral studies, she served at the Secretary of Trade in Brazil for more than 5 years.
Luana Calzavara
Luana Calzavara is a PhD student in Political Science at State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). She holds a BA in Social Sciences in Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and a MSc in Political Science at UERJ. Her research interests includes electoral systems and party systems, with focus on party fragmentation of Brazilian National Congress.
Luiz Paulo Carvalho
My name is Luiz Paulo Carvalho and I am a PhD student in Informatics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Currently researching Computational Ethics and Ethics of Resistance, my scope is to analyze, evaluate and improve the Ethics and Computing scenario in Brazil, with social justice, inclusion, sustainability and human emancipation
Marcela Canavarro
Marcela Canavarro is a researcher at FGV DAPP. Her background is in Journalism, having worked for different media outlets in Brazil and abroad. She has applied computational methods to her doctoral research, focused on networked political mobilization, and is now interested in internet regulation and political economy approaches to data, platformization, and digital labor.
Marcelo Alves
Professor at the Superior School of Propaganda and Marketing and associated researcher at Lamide (Media & Democracy Lab). Marcelo holds a doctoral degree in Communication from the Fluminense Federal University, Rio de Janeiro. He has published original papers on on several journals, including Information, Communication and Society and New Media and Society, focusing on political communication, digital culture and datafication. Recently he was co-author of an article on Brazilian alternative media, published in TripleC. He is the author of the book #VaipraCuba: a gênese das redes de direita no Facebook, which investigates the early formation of far-right movements during the Brazilian presidential election of 2014.
Marcus Torres
Marcus is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco. He researches political determinants for local social outcomes. He is particularly interested in applying text-as-data analysis, machine learning, and network analysis to measure and analyze political dynasties' effects on gaining federal resources in Brazilian municipalities.
Marina Merlo
Marina Merlo is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science at University of São Paulo Her work covers gender inequality in democracy, focusing on political parties, and currently investigates how the new technologies of communication might have changed democracy and political participation. Natalie received her BA in Social Sciences and MSc in Political Science from University of São Paulo.
Marisa Vasconcelos
Dr. Marisa Vasconcelos is a research scientist at IBM Research in Brazil. Her research focuses on societal problems such as misinformation dissemination, hate speech, and underrepresented minorities. She co-authored several papers analyzing misinformation dissemination on WhatsApp groups during the Brazilian elections.
Matheus Ferreira
Matheus Ferreira is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Political Behavior Studies (CECOMP). Him current research examines the evangelical vote for Bolsonaro in 2018 Brazilian elections. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in Social Science from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora.
Nicolás Llano Linares
Nicolás Llano is a graduate student in the MBA Data Journalism program at the Brazilian Institute of Education, Development and Research (IDP). He received his PhD and M.Sc. in Communication Sciences from São Paulo University. He was an exchange student at the University of Copenhagen in the Department of Film and Social Sciences, and a participant of the first Code Societies course at the School for Poetic Computation. His current research focuses on media infrastructures, datafication and civic tech. His past research examined the effects of the mediatization of cultural fields on the creation and management of media capital, specifically on urban food networks.
Otávio Vinhas
Ph.D. Student in Information and Communication studies at University College Dublin. Researcher at the MIDIARS research lab.
Paola Guerra
Lawyer and university professor. Master's and Doctorate in Law from PUCSP. PhD from the Università del Salento (Italy). Post-doctorate from EGS/Switzerland, from the University of Coimbra, CES, from the Law School of USP, and from PUCSP- TIDD. Collaborating researcher at UNICAMP, IEA/USP, Lawgorithmics, Advanced Institute of AI, and LGPD. Visiting fellow - European University Institute /It. Visiting researcher - Scuola Normale Superiore de Pisa - Italy and University of Lisbon/Pt. Post-doctoral student - New Technologies and Law - PROGRAMMA DI POST-DOTTORATO, unirc.it.
Patricia Pavessi
Antropóloga, Docente e Pesquisadora dos DCSO e PGCS /UFES, coordenadora do Laboratório de Estudos de Identidades e Tecnologias (LEIDTEC/UFES), integrante do Grupo Interinstitucional de Estudos de Cibercultura e do Grupo Estudos do Consumo. Tem experiência e interesse em Etnografia Digital e Computacional, Ciência Social Computacional, Consumo de Tecnologias de Informação e Propaganda Computacional.
Tanise Brandão
Tanise Brandão Bussmann is Professor of Macroeconomics at Federal University of Pampa, but currently works at the department of Economic Studies at the Brazilian Antitrust Authority (CADE). Previously made a bootcamp of webdevelopment and now is in a data science bootcamp. Like working with brazilian databases, specially with microdata, like Census and PNAD.
Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello
Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello is pursuing a master's degree in experimental psychology at the University of Toronto. She received her BA in psychology from the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Currently, she is interested in how individual differences relate to social media use and the consequences of social media use for well-being and affective polarization.
Lucas Roberto
Lucas Roberto is a Master student in Informatics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), where he researches natural language processing. He is a data scientist at the Department of Public Policy Analysis of Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil), where he works with machine learning for developing tools and procedures for social media analysis.
Polyana Barbosa
Polyana Barboza is a researcher at the Department of Public Policy Analysis of Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil), where she works with data extraction and analysis from social media. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics by Getulio Vargas Foundation and is a Master student in Informatics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Her research interests are social network analysis in digital media and multi-agent systems in software engineering
Thiago Meireles
Thiago Meireles is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at University of São Paulo and researcher at Solidary Research Network. His research deals with the impacts of artificial intelligence on the labor market and income inequality. Other research interests also include distributive conflicts and their impacts on inequality as well as methodologies for causal inference.HSE University
All Participants
Elizaveta Sivak
Elizaveta Sivak is a director of the Center for Modern Childhood Research at Higher School of Economics. She uses qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods to study childhood and parenting. Her main research interests are concerned with modern parenting cultures, children’s behavior and social networks, factors influencing children’s psychological well-being, and how we can study behavior, attitudes and psychological well-being using digital traces. She is also interested in gender and educational inequality.
Sofia Dokuka
Sofia Dokuka is Research Fellow and Associate Professor in the Computational Social Science lab at Higher School of Economics. Her research interests include social network analysis, agent-based models and computational social science. In her recent research Sofia is investigating the relationship between individual well-being and digital traces.
Ivan Smirnov
Ivan Smirnov is a research fellow at the Chair for Computational Social Sciences and Humanities at RWTH Aachen University and scientific advisor of Laboratory for Computational Social Science at Higher School of Economics. He employs data science to better understand human behavior and complex social phenomena. His main research focus is on inequality and well-being in the digital age.
Munmun De Choudhury
Munmun De Choudhury is an Associate Professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Dr. De Choudhury is best known for laying the foundation of a line of research that develops computational techniques to responsibly and ethically employ social media in understanding and improving our mental health. To do this work, she adopts a highly interdisciplinary approach, combining social computing, machine learning, and natural language analysis with insights and theories from the social, behavioral, and health sciences. Dr. De Choudhury has been recognized with the 2021 ACM-W Rising Star Award, 2019 Complex Systems Society – Junior Scientific Award, over a dozen best paper and honorable mention awards from the ACM and AAAI, and extensive coverage in popular press like the New York Times, the NPR, and the BBC. Earlier, Dr. De Choudhury was a faculty associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, a postdoc at Microsoft Research, and obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Arizona State University.
Rene Kizilcec
Rene Kizilcec is an Assistant Professor of Information Science and field member in Physics at Cornell University, where he directs the Future of Learning Lab. He studies the use and impact of technology in formal and informal learning environments (college classes, online degree programs, mobile learning, professional development, MOOCs, and middle/high school classrooms, etc.) and scalable interventions to broaden participation and reduce achievement gaps. Prior to joining Cornell, he spent a year as a research assistant professor at Arizona State University and as a research director at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Kizilcec is known for his research on understanding and supporting learners in online courses. He also works on developing methods for the design and analysis of experiments. His recent work examined the consequences of social identity threat, self-regulation, trust, and cultural differences on individual behavior and performance using longitudinal field experiments. He leverages techniques from data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing to examine behavior and motivation, reveal heterogeneous treatment effects, and inform user-centered design.
Sune Lehmann
Sune Lehmann is a Professor of Networks and Complexity Science at DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark. He is also a Professor of Social Data Science at the Center for Social Data Science (SODAS), University of Copenhagen. His work focuses on quantitative understanding of social systems based on massive data sets. A physicist by training, his research draws on approaches from the physics of complex systems, machine learning, and statistical analysis. He works on large-scale behavioral data and while his primary focus is on modeling complex networks, his research has made substantial contributions on topics such as human mobility, sleep, academic performance, complex contagion, epidemic spreading, and behavior on twitter. In the past, he has worked at Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeasthern University, Laszlo Barabasi Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University and the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Iuliia Alieva
Iuliia is a doctoral candidate and a research associate at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She is a multilingual media professional and a researcher with experience in international media communication and data science. Her research focuses on media effects and political communication. Iuliia is about to start her role as a post-doctoral associate at Carnegie Mellon University.
Ali Behrouz
Ali Behrouz is a master's student in the Computer Science department at the University of British Columbia. He has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology. He has previously worked on the relationship between green space and happiness in developed countries as well as a project in modelling complex networks. His primary research interests are network analysis, machine learning, and computational social science.
Jesse Bryant
Jesse Callahan Bryant is a Doctoral Student in Sociology at the Yale School of the Environment. He is interested in using computational and mixed methods approaches directed toward the study of environmental policymaking, extremism, and myth-making. Before beginning his Ph.D. at Yale, Jesse received a professional Master's degree in Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry and before that was an educator and mountain guide throughout the American West.
Irina Busurkina
Irina Busurkina is currently pursuing a PhD in sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg. She holds both a MA in Sociology from Higher School of Economics University and a MA in Cultural Studies from Saint Petersburg University. Her past research projects were related to the studies of customers’ opinion dynamics and polarizing in Russian media regarding migrants using techniques from natural language processing. Her doctoral thesis focuses on online platforms as institutions for the production of valuation practices.
Elizaveta Evmenova
Elizaveta Evmenova is a PhD student in applied mathematics at Saint Petersburg State University (SPSU) and works at ITMO University. Her research interests include problem of community detection in graph structures, especially attributed networks. Elizaveta also studies analysis of directed signed graphs and node ranking problem of signed graphs. She is also interested in edge predictability classification problem in ordinary graphs.
Ksenia Eritsyan
Ksenia Eritsyan is an Associate Professor in Sociology Department at HSE University - Saint-Petersburg and holding a Ph.D. in Social Psychology. She is also affiliated with several NGOs where she's responsible for research activities and integration of their results in prevention interventions.
Linna Fu
Linna Fu is a master student at the Higher School of Economics. She earned one M.Sc. in the Applied Psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) in 2020. Now her research focuses on the comparative social research about gender inequality and Asian cultural values.
Farnoosh Hashemi
Farnoosh Hashemi is a graduate student in the Computer Science department at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology. Her research interests include computational social science, social networks, and machine learning. She also previously studied the impact of green space on happiness in developed countries and work on projects in influence maximization and modelling complex networks.
Mengzhen Jia
Mengzhen Jia is a master student majoring in sociology in Sun Yat-sen University. Her research interests are centered around field experiments and human-robot interaction (HRI). Currently, she is exploring the emotion mode of social interaction utilizing text mining and video analysis methods. Mengzhen has a background in psychology. She also uses agent-based modeling to better understand the micro-level underpinning of macro-level social interaction patterns such as social conflict and social protest.
Nora Kirkizh
Nora Kirkizh is a doctoral researcher at GESIS, Department of Computational Social Science and a PhD student at TU Munich, Chair of Computational Social Science and Big Data. Her interests include political behavior, experiments and computational methods. Nora uses digital trace data to study peoples' political attitudes, polarization, and media diets.
Hanna Marhunova
Hanna Marhunova holds a MA in political science from the Moscow Higher School of Economic and Social Sciences/ University Of Manchester. She is currently pursuing a MA in digital humanities at the HSE University. Her research interests include social and political issues in Belarus and Russia: labor rights, migration, language and discourse.
Timur Naushirvanov
Timur Naushirvanov is a first-year Master of Public Administration student at Central European University in Vienna. His research interests are related to international development and impact evaluation, education, populism, big data, and quantitative research methods. He holds a BA in Political Science from the HSE University, Moscow.
Timur Osmanov
Timur Osmanov is a lecturer at the Higher School of Economics and the Moscow School of Economics and Economics. He is developing a methodology for sociological research in the Public Opinion Foundation (Moscow). His research interests include methodology for constructing samples for surveys, telephone survey methodology, combining survey data with big data.
Yuri Rykov
I am a research fellow at the Centre for Population Health Sciences, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). I have background in quantitative social science, digital health, and internet studies. I am interested in digital phenotyping research using behavioral and physiological data from wearable sensors for detection of cardiometabolic and mental disorders.
Sangam Kumar Singh
Sangam Kumar Singh is a Product Owner at Ericsson, who works on Zero-Emission Product fulfilling Environmental Commitments for Sustainable Operation, offering Improved Network Connectivity for a Superior User Experience and delivering Substantial Savings. He is also a Professional Member of the British Computer Society (BCS), The Chartered Institute for IT. He has a Double MSc in Big Data Systems and E-Business & Innovation from Higher School of Economics, Russia and Lancaster University, U.K. His past research revolved around Computational Social Science - Social Network Evolution and Social Media link Prediction, and his future interest lies in leveraging Identification Technologies and AI in Social Science.
Ilya Sulzhytski
I am a sociologist, PhD in Sociology from Belarus with the research focus in computational social science and digital sociology, with an interest in memory studies and cultural sociology . I have skills in data science, machine learning, and the Python programming language.
Angelika Tsivinskaya
Angelika Tsivinskaya is a junior researcher in Center for Institutional Analysis of Science & Education, European University at Saint Petersburg (Russia). Her research interest lies at areas such as statistical analysis, science of science and CSS with focus on Higher education institutions.
Olga Vilkova
Olga Vilkova is currently pursuing a PhD in Economic Sociology at Higher School of Economics, Russia. Her research interests lie in the field of inequality and professional success on online labor markets. Her studies are based on mixed approach where conventional sociological methods are balanced with computational techniques (web-scraping).
Nan Zhang
Nan Zhang is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. He is primarily interested in the study of group relations, language and identity, social norms, and civic behavior. Major applications of his research include immigration, ethnic diversity, and state- and nation-building. Nan holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University, a J.D. from Stanford Law School, and a double B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Alex Knorre
Alex Knorre is a Ph.D. student in Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also an affiliated researcher for the Institute for the Rule of Law at the European University at Saint Petersburg. Alex is interested in illegal online drug markets, gun violence, and Russian criminal justice, and extensively uses R for his research.
Saydash Miftakhov
Saydash entered the Skoltech Masters program in Data Science after finishing the joint bachelor's program of Higher School of Economics (HSE) and New Economic School (NES). He was a teaching assistant for many mathematical and data science courses at HSE and NES. He is interested in machine learning and its implications for solving real-world problems.Helsinki
All Participants
Matti Nelimarkka
Matti Nelimarkka leads the Helsinki Social Computing Group, an interdisciplinary group examining both computers and society. They explore digital democracy and politics in the digital era as well as computational techniques in social sciences, especially workflows and connections between social science theories and code. He is affiliated with the Faculty of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Aalto University and Futurice, a Finnish software consultancy. He is about to publish a new computational social science text book Coding Social Science via SAGE Publishing.
Markus Himanen
Markus Himanen (M.Soc.Sc in political science) is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Helsinki and works as a researcher in the project Social exclusion, polarization and security in the Nordic welfare state (SEPOS) that is funded by the Nordforsk. Himanen’s research interest include racial and ethnic discrimination in policing, ethnic profiling, internal immigration policing, and non-discrimination training in the public security sector.
Johannes Johansson
Johannes Johansson is a PhD candidate in political communication at the University of Gothenburg, SE. His research concerns media-effects on perceptions, and he previously worked at the laboratory of opinion research and SOM Institute. He holds a MA in Political Science from Universities of Gothenburg, SE and Konstanz, DE.
Elisa Kannasto
Elisa Kannasto is a Senior Lecturer of Communications in the Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences and a PhD Candidate in the University of Vaasa, Finland. Her research focuses on personal brands in political campaigns in social media. Her other research interests are personalization of politics on hybrid media, social media, and information seeking behaviour in social media. She is also a board member in a research community Rajapinta.
Angela La Colla
Angela La Colla holds a B.A. in Political Science and a MSc in International Relations from the University of Milan (Unimi), and a Master’s Degree in Governance and Human Rights from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). She aspires to become a PhD candidate. Her research interests include the way computational social sciences will be applied to a multimodal analysis of texts and images aimed at a consequential reasoning of the conceptual ways politicians, media and social media communication influence, affect and bend the common-understanding and awareness of climate change.
Jana Lasser
Jana Lasser is a postdoctoral researcher of Computational Social Science in David Garcia's lab at Graz University of Technology. Her research interests include digital health, emotion dynamics and agent based modelling of human behaviour in small communities. Next to her research, Jana cares deeply about openness and reproducibility in research.
Virve Marionneau
Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki Faculty of Social Sciences. My research focuses mainly on sociological and comparative approaches to gambling and the political economy of gambling.
Hasti Narimanzadeh
I'm a PhD candidate at the department of Computer Science, Aalto University. I hold a BSc in Software Engineering and an MSc in Communications Engineering. My research interests range from graph theory, algorithms, to machine learning and computational social science.
Yi Ming Ng
Yi Ming is an incoming Master's student in Urban Science at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He has done research in computational policy and quantitative political science, and is interested in data-driven approaches for political and urban sociology. He graduated with a BA in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics from Yale-NUS College.
Hanna Ojanen
Hanna Ojanen is a Master's student at the University of Helsinki. Her research focus is platform governance. Her previous research has focused on disinformation. Before her Master's she worked as a Project Manager at Nordic West. She is currently a Planning officer at the Finnish Government.
Joni Oksanen
Joni Oksanen is a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki. At the Centre for Social Data Science (CSDS), he researches colloquial online discussions related to health and well-being using natural language processing and text mining methods. He holds a MSc in statistics from the University of Helsinki and he has previous experience of working in the field of epidemiological research.
Sina Özdemir
PhD candidate in Political Science. I am interested in how social and political values are discursively created and contested. Specifically, what do people find acceptable and proper for political authorities. I try to incorporate automated and manual analysis as well as quantitative and qualitative methods in my research.
Henna Paakki
Henna Paakki is a doctoral candidate at Aalto University, working in projects related to automated disinformation and trolling, and crisis narratives. With a background rooted in linguistics, her research focuses on disruptive behavior in social media interaction, using applied approaches to computational conversation analysis.
Matias Piispanen
Matias is pursuing a PhD at the Facing Narcissism project at the University of Helsinki, in collaboration with Aalto University. He holds a Master’s degree in Human Neuroscience and Technology from Aalto University. His research examines self, narcissism and social interaction using methods of sociology, experimental psychology and neuroscience.
Virpi Salojärvi
Virpi Salojärvi is Assistant Professor in the School of Marketing and Communication at the University of Vaasa and is affiliated in the discipline of Political Science at the University of Helsinki. She is a work package leader in two Academy of Finland -funded projects on populism and polarization. Her research interests include populism and media, polarisation, social movements, visual analysis and Latin American studies.
Sonja Savolainen
Sonja Savolainen is a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki Doctoral School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her current research uses computational methods to examine how social movements adjust to open and closed media systems, and on the other hand tactically use opportunities provided by social media and technological development.
Laura-Elena Sibinescu
Laura-Elena Sibinescu is a post-doctoral researcher at the Helsinki Hub on Emotions, Populism and Polarization, where she studies political polarization and marginalized communities on social media. She holds a PhD from the University of Helsinki, where she is also affiliated as a researcher and instructor since 2019. Her research interests include digital democracy, computational methods in political science, and data feminism.Hong Kong
All Participants
Han Zhang
Han Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at Princeton University in 2020, under the supervision of Matthew Salganik. He obtained His B.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in History, 2013, from Peking University. His research spans computational social science, social movements, and quantitative methods.
Jaemin Lee
Jaemin Lee is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at Duke University in 2018. His research aims to understand various substantive topics including political polarization, product diffusion, friendship segregation, and intergroup relations. Methodologically, he uses agent-based modeling, field experiments, and longitudinal network analysis.
Haohan Chen
Haohan Chen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Social Media and Politics at NYU. He received his PhD in Political Science and MS in Statistical Science from Duke University in December 2019. His substantive research focuses on political behavior and political communication under both authoritarian and democratic contexts. His methodological research focuses on machine learning methods for text and network data from social media. Before his appointment with NYU, Haohan was a postdoctoral fellow at UPenn's Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He earned a Bachelor of Social Sciences from the University of Hong Kong with First Class Honors. In Fall 2021, he will re-join the University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Administration.
King-wa Fu
Dr. King-wa FU is an Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of The University of Hong Kong. His research interests include China’s information governance, media and political participation, computational social sciences, health and the media, and media use by the younger generation. He was a visiting Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and Fulbright-RGC Hong Kong Senior Research Scholar in 2016-2017. He is the Principle Investigator of Weiboscope, WeChatscope, and ANTIELAB Research Data Archive. He was a journalist at the Hong Kong Economic Journal before turning to academia. His CV can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/fukingwa/.
Yongren Shi
Yongren Shi is a computational sociologist working in the areas of social networks, organizations, social psychology, and culture. He is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa. The foundation of his research is the sociological study of human behavior and group dynamics. He uses extensively large-scale digital trace data and a wide range of computational methods, including network analysis, computational textual analysis, agent-based computational models, machine learning, online experiments and sequence analysis. His research appeared in outlets such as American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Nature Human Behavior, Social Forces, and Sociological Methods & Research, among others. His work was supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF 1409593 and NSF 1922906), and was covered by popular media outlets such as Wired, the Guardian, BBC News, Huffington Post, and LA Times.
Hai Liang
Hai Liang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). His research interests include computational social science, political communication, and public health. Currently, he is working on several interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of computational social science (analytical approach) and social media studies (data source). He has published numerous articles in top journals such as Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, among others. He is the recipient of CUHK's Young Researcher Award 2018.
Yuan Yuan
Yuan Yuan is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will join the Purdue Krannert School of Management (MIS area) as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2021. Before coming to MIT, he studied at Tsinghua University where he received Bachelor's degrees with honors in Computer Science and Economics. He researches social interactions and social networks for social good, especially interested in how to utilize social preference and social contagion to promote positive social interactions, and how social networks have shaped human behavior and can be reshaped by digital technologies. His research also aims to advance the methodology in Computational Social Science. He is broadly interested in machine learning, causal inference, experimental design, and network science. Currently, he advocates two research methodologies: complex explanatory models and causal data mining.
Ziwei Wang
Ziwei Wang is a fresh graduate student in mathematics and economics from Hong Kong University. Her research focuses on belief formation, social learning and computational social science.
Haohan (Lily) Hu
Lily Hu is an incoming PhD student at the University of Hong Kong. She is interested in Chinese computational propaganda, incivility in cyberspace, and immersive technology (VR) intervention on human behaviour. She attained a Bsc in Creative Media from the City University of Hong Kong and experienced in 3D natural interaction of modelling, animation and programming. Lily is currently using supervised machine learning to train an incivility discourse classifier of WeChat public account articles.
Zhenghan Zhang (Harry)
My name is Harry, or Zhenghan Zhang, and I am going to start my PhD studies in Information Systems at HKUST this year, mainly focusing in innovation, entrepreneurship and human-AI interaction. My previous training mainly focused on Data Analytics and Business Computing, with a masters degree in Data Analytics and Business Computing from NYU Stern/Shanghai and bachelor's degree in Data Science and Business and Finance.
Calvin (Yixiang) Cheng
Calvin (Yixiang) Cheng is an MPhil student of communication studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests centre around misinformation issues in the digital age. Currently, he is enthusiastic about applying computational methods to study the evolution and diffusion of conspiracy theories on social media. Before this degree, he had worked as a data journalist in China Business Network for two years.
Nick Or
Nick Or is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong. Prior to that, Nick was a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Exeter. Nick’s research interests lie in the field of public policy, comparative politics and authoritarian regimes by drawing insights from behavioural and complexity sciences, using quantitative techniques and experimental methods. His latest research and scholarly activities can be found from the link of his name..
Danni Chen
Danni is a current Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests broadly focus on social cognitive neuroscience and sleep, with particular attention to the formation and updating of social knowledge and attitude via social learning, cognitive control, and sleep. She is fascinated with combining multiple different methodologies, including but not limit to neuroimaging techniques, social media big data and behavioral experiments, to unravel the mystery of human behavior. Another line of her current research tries to explore the relationship between prosocial behavior and traumatic memories.
Chuyao Wang
Chuyao (Julian) WANG (email: chuyao.wang@connect.ust.hk) is an MPhil student in Social Science at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), where he also received an MSc in Global China Studies with Dean's Award. His interests include computational political communication, social network politics and machine learning. While focusing on methodological training in the MPhil program, he is currently exploring visual sentiment in media depiction and network dynamics of political communities in Bilibili.
Yujie Li
LI, Yujie is an incoming PhD student in Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include computational social science, political communication, and social networks. He is currently using the LIHKG forum data to understand the relationship between online social network structure and offline protests.
Dakeng Chen
CHEN Dakeng is a PhD student in political science at Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his BA from University of International Relations, China, and his MSc from CUHK. Dakeng’s research focuses on the intersection of politics, technology advancement, and social psychology. He is now working on digital surveillance in China with ZHAN Vivian Jing.
Wenting Yu
Yu Wenting is a PhD candidate from Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong. She is interested in public opinion, computational social science, and health communication. Her research broadly studies the social impacts of new media and uses both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Jiaqian Ni
Jiaqian is a MPhil student at the University of Hong Kong (M.Phil., Oxford). She studies international relations with a focus on the intersection of public opinion, political behavior and political psychology. Among others, she is working on a project on Japanese war apologies to China where she uses text-as-data methods to analyze public narratives and nationalistic frames related to the war apology controversies.
Wanjiang Jacob Zhang
Wanjiang Jacob Zhang is a PhD student in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, majoring in computational social science. His current research interests include social media, social time and rhythm, collective memory, emotion, health communication, environmental communication, and celebrity news.
Ehsan ul Haq
Ehsan ul Haq is a doctoral student in Computer Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on online communities' analysis, political polarization in online social networks and its implications on offline events. He is also studying rumors and misinformation propagation, and social media communications from organizational perspective.
Olga Boichak
Olga Boichak is Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney, Australia. She holds a Master of Public Administration and a PhD from Syracuse University’s interdisciplinary program in social science (USA), and her research interests span networks, narratives, and cultures of activism in the digital age. She is Editor of the Digital War journal and has a track record of publications on digital war, legitimising state power, transnational mobilisation, and algorithmic surveillance, and her work has appeared, among others, in Big Data & Society, International Journal of Communication, Media, War & Conflict, Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Digital Media, and the Journal of Intelligence and National Security.
Yuemin Li
Yuemin Li is a PhD candidate in the sociology department at University at Albany, SUNY. She studies the rise of the phenomenon of financialization and how institutional interactions have shaped its development under different political economy. She earned B.A. from HKU and M.A. from Dartmouth College.
Li Liao
Li Liao is a PhD student at the University of Hong Kong. He studies authoritarianism. He’s interested in data visualization and social network. He is now working on a visualization project about Political Selection in China.
Alvin Junus
Alvin Junus is currently a PhD student in Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Hong Kong. He obtained his BEng and MPhil in electronic engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and had spent 3 years in the tech industry before finally deciding to pursue a career in academia. He is broadly interested in the interplay between social network dynamics & mental health, with youths as the primary subject focus, and seeks to integrate computational methods with elements of psychosocial epidemiology & network science in his research. He is particularly drawn towards Internet-enabled social contagions among youths, such as social mechanisms, individual factors, and network structures that drive or inhibit the spread of non-cooperative behavior on team-based Internet gaming platforms that are highly popular today.
Hanying Wei
Hanying Wei is an MPhil student in the Divison of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). She is interested in the application of computer technology in social science, recently she is focusing on some projects by using text analysis and machine learning methods on social media data.Howard/Mathematica
All Participants
Terri Adams, Ph.D.
Terri Adams, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, and Interim Director at the NOAA Cooperative Science Center for Atmospheric Sciences & Meteorology at Howard University. She is also the lead investigator of the decision-support team for the “Building Extreme Weather Resiliency Through Improved Weather and Climate Prediction and Public Response Strategies” project supported by the National Foundation’s Partnerships in International Research and Education Program. Dr. Adams’ research takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine issues that have both theoretical and practical implications. Her specific research interests include emergency management, policing, gender studies, and the impact of trauma and disasters on individuals and organizations. Her most recent work centers on the decision-making processes of both individuals and organizations in the face of natural disasters. In addition to her academic work, she has served as a research consultant for a number of agencies and non-profit organizations including: The Police Executive Leadership Program at Johns Hopkins University, the Williams Institute, the DC Metropolitan Police Department, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, the Prince George’s Center for Youth and Family Research, the Young Ladies of Tomorrow Inc., and the Fraternal Order of Police Metropolitan Police Labor Committee.
Naniette H. Coleman
Naniette H. Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of California Berkeley and a UC-National Lab In-Residence Graduate Fellow at Los Alamos National Lab. Since 2016 Naniette has directed the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy at Berkeley. Naniette is an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Center for Long-term Cybersecurity, and the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at Berkeley as well as the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. Naniette’s research sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically Naniette’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as work for two international organizations, and two universities.
Bahiyyah Muhammad, Ph.D.
Dr. Bahiyyah Muhammad is an Associate Professor of Criminology in the Department of Sociology at Howard University (HU) in the District of Columbia (DC). She is an expert on mass incarceration and the collateral consequences on families, specifically focused on resilience among children of incarcerated parents. Her recent work explores the culture among families and children who maintain bonds during long-term imprisonment and death by incarceration. Her future research agenda includes ethnographic methodologies to uncover the “culture of mass incarceration”.
Wayne A. I. Frederick, M.D., MBA, F.A.C.S.
Dr. Wayne A. I. Frederick was appointed the seventeenth president of Howard University in 2014. He previously served as Provost and Chief Academic Officer. Most recently, the Howard University Board of Trustees selected Dr. Frederick to serve as the distinguished Charles R. Drew Professor of Surgery. A distinguished scholar and administrator, Dr. Frederick has advanced Howard University's commitment to student opportunity, academic innovation, public service, and fiscal stability. Early in his tenure as president, Dr. Frederick pursued initiatives to streamline and strengthen university operations. He has overseen a series of reform efforts, including the expansion of academic offerings, establishing innovative programs to support student success and the modernization of university facilities. As an undergraduate, Dr. Frederick was admitted to Howard University's B.S./M.D. dual degree program. He completed the requirements for both degrees in six years, allowing him to earn his Bachelor of Science degree and his medical degree by the age of 22. He also earned a Master of Business Administration from Howard University's School of Business in 2011. Following his post-doctoral research and surgical oncology fellowships at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Dr. Frederick began his academic career as associate director of the Cancer Center at the University of Connecticut. Upon his return to Howard University, his academic positions included associate dean in the College of Medicine, division chief in the Department of Surgery, director of the Cancer Center and deputy provost for Health Sciences.
Timnit Gebru, Ph.D.
Timnit Gebru is a computer scientist whose work explores algorithmic bias and the ethical implications of data mining projects. Timnit is an advocate for diversity in technology and is the cofounder of Black in AI, a community of black researchers working in artificial intelligence. She seeks both to increase diversity in the field of AI and to reduce the negative impacts of racial bias in training data used for human-centric machine learning models.
Paul Decker, Ph.D.
Paul Decker is a nationally recognized expert in policy research, data analytics, education, and labor policy. For three decades, he has been working to improve public well-being through the use of evidence to improve programs and policy. As president and CEO of Mathematica, Decker sets the company’s vision and strategy, oversees its operation and management, and shapes its values and standards. During his tenure as CEO, Decker has expanded and diversified the company’s operations and maintained its commitment to rigor and objectivity in new and evolving areas of research and analysis. Decker is Associate Editor for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and a past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, where he also co-chaired the organization’s strategic planning committee and served on the policy council. He serves as a trustee and chair for the Committee for Economic Development’s Subcommittee on Workforce Issues. Decker writes and speaks regularly on trends in the policy research field, chairs the government relations committee of CEO Connection, and has testified before Congress, served as an expert adviser to both the U.S. and Canadian governments, and published widely in peer-reviewed journals. Decker holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Johns Hopkins University and serves as chair of development on the board of advisers of the Thomas Jefferson Public Policy Program at the College of William and Mary, his undergraduate alma mater.
Ruha Benjamin, Ph.D.
Ruha Benjamin is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. Ruha earned a BA from Spelman College, MA and Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics and Harvard’s Science, Technology and Society Program. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation 2020 Freedom Scholar Award, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.
Laura Nelson, Ph.D.
Laura Nelson is an assistant professor of sociology at Northeastern University, soon to be an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley, and has been a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University and UC Berkeley Data Science and Digital Humanities. She uses computational tools, principally automated text analysis, to study social movements, culture, gender, institutions, and organizations. She has published in outlets including such as Sociological Methods & Research, Mobilization, Gender & Society, and Poetics.
Naomi Sugie, Ph.D.
Naomi F. Sugie is an Associate Professor in the Criminology, Law and Society Department (and by courtesy, the Sociology Department) at the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine). Her research focuses on issues of punishment, inequality, and new technologies for research with traditionally hard-to-reach groups. Her recent projects focus on reentry from prison and the consequences of criminal justice contact for employment, mental health, and political participation. In a recent study, the Newark Smartphone Reentry Project, she used a phone application to examine daily job search and employment experiences of men recently released from prison in Newark, NJ. This project collected data through real-time surveys, GPS location estimates, and call/text logs. Currently, she is collaborating with an interdisciplinary team to develop a phone application to understand housing needs among precariously housed and homeless Veterans. She is also working with faculty and students at UC Irvine, through the PrisonPandemic Project, to document and disseminate stories from incarcerated people in CA about living through COVID-19. Her work is published in journals including American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Criminology, Demography, Social Forces, Social Problems, and Sociological Methods and Research, and has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Justice, and National Science Foundation. Sugie earned a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy, as well as a specialization in Demography, from Princeton University.
Chris Wheat, Ph.D.
Chris Wheat is the Co-President for the JPMorgan Chase Institute. Prior to joining JPMCI, he served as the Director of Analytics at a financial technology startup, where he led the development of advanced analytics algorithms. He previously was an Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and at the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development at Rutgers Business School. As a faculty member, he taught and researched topics in strategy, entrepreneurship, global microfinance, economic sociology, and social network analysis. Chris earned a B.S.E. in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, an M.A. in Sociology from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University.
Howard University
Howard University has long held a commitment to the study of disadvantaged persons in American society and throughout the world. The goal is the elimination of inequities related to race, color, social, economic and political circumstances. As the only truly comprehensive predominantly Black university, Howard is one of the major engineers of change in our society. Through its traditional and cutting-edge academic programs, the University seeks to improve the circumstances of all people in the search for peace and justice on earth.
Mathematica
Mathematica is the insight partner that illuminates the path to progress for public- and private-sector changemakers. We apply expertise at the intersection of data, methods, policy, and practice, translating big questions into deep insights that weather the toughest tests. Driven by our mission to improve public well-being, we collaborate closely with our clients to improve programs, refine strategies, and enhance understanding.
SICSS-Howard/Mathematica
The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS) were created to provide free training to the next generation of researchers at the intersection of social science and data science— and to incubate cutting-edge research across disciplinary boundaries. Participants at each institute a) hear lectures by leading scholars in the field on a range of subjects from automated text analysis to experiments on social media platforms; b) participate in group training exercises; and c) launch interdisciplinary research projects. SICSS thus aims to provide open, high-quality training in computational social science to researchers around the world in order to accelerate the growth of the field and ensure that it develops practices that are in the long-term interests of science and society. Lectures are live-streamed to all SICSS sites from a central location and supported via a vibrant online community that includes open-source education materials that can be used for further self-study or as a model for computational social science courses within other organizations.
Black in AI
Black in AI is a place for sharing ideas, fostering collaborations and discussing initiatives to increase the presence of Black people in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
vary CSS
Computational Social Science is an exciting new field of research, and we think it should be diverse and inclusive as it grows. To this end, we provide links to resources, which are intended to support new and emerging CSS scholars currently underrepresented in the field. We also maintain a database of these scholars, which can be used for collaboration and networking, or for finding new voices to speak at conferences, on panels, and in workshop tutorials. These resources are compiled and updated by the CSS community.
The Data Nutrition Project
Our belief is that deeper transparency into dataset health can lead to better data decisions, which in turn lead to better AI. Founded in 2018 through the Assembly Fellowship, The Data Nutrition Project takes inspiration from nutritional labels on food, aiming to build labels that highlight the key ingredients in a dataset such as meta-data and populations, as well as unique or anomalous features regarding distributions, missing data, and comparisons to other ‘ground truth’ datasets.
The California Policy Lab
The California Policy Lab is a non-partisan research institute based at the University of California. Our mission is to improve the lives of Californians by generating evidence that transforms public policy. We do this by forming lasting partnerships between government and California’s flagship public universities to harness the power of research and administrative data.
The University of California's Publisher Negotiation Team
"Open access publishing is fundamental to what we do and to our mission. We’re a public research university, and our research is largely funded by public dollars, from residents of California and the U.S. So, we feel an obligation to make the results of our research available to those worldwide who will benefit from our advances, without having to pay to read them." - Jeffrey MacKie-Mason
FactSpace West Africa and FakeNetAI
Synthetic media, or deepfake technology is advancing rapidly and developing into a powerful disinformation tool, and few organizations or individuals are protected against this evolving threat. FactSpace West Africa and FakeNetAI, backed by Facebook, The International Fact-Checking Network, and UC Berkeley have partnered to combat deepfake attacks. Their deepfake detection solution, powered by cutting edge artificial intelligence technology, accurately and quickly detects deepfakes, protecting users against the economic and societal harms that deepfakes pose.
Wiki Education
Wiki Education serves as the bridge between academia and Wikipedia. A small 501(c)(3) nonprofit, we run programs that seek to build connections between universities and Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in the United States and Canada. In our most established program, Wiki Education supports the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada. Since 2010, university instructors participating in the program have assigned their students to add content to course-related articles on Wikipedia. Students gain key 21st century skills like media literacy, writing and research development, and critical thinking, while content gaps on Wikipedia get filled thanks to students’ efforts.
Abiodun Atoloye
Abiodun Atoloye is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, University of Connecticut. She studies the interactions between individual and environmental factors both as determinants of and solutions to poor nutrition outcomes using a mixed-method research approach, community-based research approach, geo-narrative, policy analyses, and innovative measurement tools. Her interest spans addressing access to affordable and nutritious food in different settings including the food pantry and banking system, farmers’ market, and family childcare homes. She is also interested in using advanced data analysis techniques as an alternative method to understand factors influencing food-related decisions among low-resource individuals.
Kimberley Baxter
Kimberley Baxter (she/her/hers), is a rising fourth-year Ph.D. student in NYU’s Linguistics department. She earned two MA’s in Forensic Linguistics (Hofstra University) and in Sociolinguistics (University of Essex), and studied Spanish at NCA&T State University. Her current interests are Syntactic Variation in AAVE and Syntax in Jamaican Patwa.
Richmond Danso
Richmond Danso is a 2020 Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Political Science at Howard University, where he majored in international relations and American Government (and minored in Public Policy). His research focuses on developing nations, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on development, leadership, and good governance. He holds a master’s degree in Public Administration from Montana State University and an undergraduate degree in political science (minor in sociology and social work) from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana.
Troy Dildine
Troy Dildine is a Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience within the Graduate Partnership Program between the National Institutes of Health and Karolinska Institutet. His research aims for greater health equity by assessing pain expression and decision making and by providing interventions to improve pain assessment.
Janeria Easley
Janeria Easley is an assistant professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Dr. Easley is trained as a sociologist and a demographer. She studies neighborhoods, wealth, and other racialized barriers to economic well-being.
Regina Ebo
Regina Ebo is pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology at UC Berkeley. Her work examines how cultural intersections impact emotion regulation, emotion beliefs, and empathy. Previously, she was the Lab Manager for the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at MIT and received her BA in cognitive science from Vassar College.
Benjamin Fields
Benjamin Njila Fields is a 2nd year Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in the sociology of health and nutrition, focusing his studies on the United States and Cameroonian contexts.
Todd Hall
Todd is a Ph.D. student in education policy at the University of Virginia. He studies early childhood education and discipline in both early childhood and K-12 settings. Previously, Todd worked at J-PAL North America and the ed-tech startup, Empatico. He holds a BA in Political Economy from Williams College.
Nicole Jenkins
Nicole is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University. She received her Doctoral degree from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in the Department of Sociology in 2020. She obtained an M.A. in Sociology in 2017 and B.A. in Sociology in 2015 from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. In 2013, she received an A.A. in Criminal Justice after serving six years of active duty in the United States Air Force as Military Police. She is a proud advocate for social justice and is committed to teaching with such emphasis in topics such as race and ethnic studies, sociology of poverty, problems of the black community, and research methods.
Erika Meza
Erika is a doctoral student in Epidemiology and Translational Science at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work applies causal inference methods to evaluate social determinants of cognitive aging in older adults. Erika holds a BS in Applied Mathematics from Loyola Marymount University and an MPH from Columbia University.
Rashun Miles
Rashun Miles is a Ph.D. student in social welfare at the University of Mississippi. He has a MA from Columbia University and a MSW from the University of Michigan. His research integrates urban complex systems and feminist pedagogy (ethics of care) to address compassion fatigue among helping professionals.
Yondu Mori
Yondu is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication Sciences and Disorders at McGill University. She completed a BSc in Psychology from the University of Alberta. She uses quantitative experimental methods and theories from cognitive and social psychology, and linguistics. She is interested in how applied research and data can inform societal decisions.
Ayorinde Ogunyiola
Ayorinde Ogunyiola is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at South Dakota State University. His research focuses on understanding the socio-ethical implication of emerging technologies in agriculture. He is also interested in macroeconomics, governance of artificial intelligence, technology ethics, climate change risk and resilience, and computational analysis. He holds a BS in economics from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria, an MS in Economics from University of Ibadan, Nigeria, an MS in Mathematics (finance) from Jomo Kenyatta University and Pan Africa University, Institute of Basics Science, Technology and Innovation, Kenya.
Ibukun Osunbunmi
Ibukun Osunbunmi is a Ph.D. candidate at the department of Engineering Education, Utah State University, USA. He holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His current research uses mixed method approach in exploring college students’ experiences, their learning habits and factors that influences learning in their environment.
Felix Owusu
Felix Owusu is a doctoral candidate in Public Policy at Harvard University. Trained as an economist, Felix’s research blends data science, quasi-experimental research methods, and deep substantive knowledge to understand the application of law and bureaucratic processes in law enforcement agencies and their impacts across race and class. He has recently served as a Data Scientist and Fellow at The Lab @ DC and the Metropolitan Police Department.
Jeremy Prim
Jeremy Prim is a current fifth year Sociology doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis. His current program of research focuses in the areas of race, inequality, policing, and school discipline. His dissertation research attempts to understand how mechanisms of the carceral state permeate schools and the relationship the carceral state has to educational outcomes. Jeremy previously received his BA in Sociology at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Ebony N. Russ
Ebony N. Russ is a Fellow at Harvard University within the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. She is a Professor of Sociology at George Washington University and the Director of the Rethinking DC Youth and Policing Program. Her research interests include decreasing cardiovascular diseases among marginalized populations, and uplifting the health narratives of oppressed individuals. She is passionate about empowering the next generation of scholar activists.
Regis (R.A.) Saxton
Regis (R.A.) Saxton is a doctoral student in sociology at George Mason University, interested in anti-Blackness and futurism. His dissertation examines antiracist chronopolitics on Twitter in the #blacklivesmatter movement. As a DuBoisian, he employs multiple methods to address the question of how we may create futures safe for black life.
Marisa Smith
Marisa Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations and the School of Journalism. Her work highlights that a critical component for understanding the sociopolitical implications of digital information environments involves examining its implications for racial attitudes. Her research investigates the effects of mediated messages on stereotype endorsement and policy support.
Sri Yeswanth (Yash) Tadimalla
Sri Yeswanth (Yash) Tadimalla (He,Him,His) is a doctoral student at UNC Charlotte, under the Interdisciplinary track in the College of Computing and Informatics. His research explores understanding various forms of inequities in the fields of computing and education through an intersectional lens. He is currently assisting various research projects under the Center for Education Innovation (CEI) in CCI and is also a member of the HCI Lab. He holds a B.Tech in Computer Engineering from Hyderabad Institute of Technology and Management. Prior to his advocacy work in the North Carolina Region, he served under various UN SDG related initiatives advocating for equitable education practices across multiple countries in South-east Asia.
Maxine Van Doren
Maxine Van Doren is a licensed speech-language pathologist currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation examines the effects of language structure on voice quality in speakers with and without voice disorders. Clinically, she is interested in developing linguistically-informed diagnostic tools for culturally and linguistically diverse patients with voice disorders.
Soazic Elise Wang Sonne
Soazic Elise WANG SONNE is an Economist/Statistician (Young Professional) in the Social Development Global Practice of the World Bank Group supporting the data analytics program on forced displacement. She is a Ph.D. fellow in economics at the United Nations University (UNU) in the Netherlands and received the UC Berkeley Leamer-Rosenthal Prize in the category of Emerging Researcher for her strong advocacy towards research transparency and reproducibility in Social Sciences.
Jinghui Zhang
Elaine Jinghui Zhang is a doctoral candidate in social psychology at Claremont Graduate University. She studies group behaviors such as motivations for social interaction, bi-partisan attitude formation and social movement. Her most recent work examined the role of national identity certainty in conspiracy theory beliefs and derogation of outgroup members.
Naniette H. Coleman
Naniette H. Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of California Berkeley and a UC-National Lab In-Residence Graduate Fellow at Los Alamos National Lab. Since 2016 Naniette has directed the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy at Berkeley. Naniette is an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Center for Long-term Cybersecurity, and the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at Berkeley as well as the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. Naniette’s research sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically Naniette’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as work for two international organizations, and two universities.
Akira Bell
Akira Bell is Mathematica’s senior vice president and chief information officer. She oversees technology infrastructure and governance and leads strategy for delivering innovation in support of client and internal business function needs. Before joining Mathematica in 2018, Bell led the IT function for Aramark’s higher education business unit. Previously, she served as a divisional chief information officer within the Hess Corporation and held various program management, application development, and technology consulting roles with UnitedHealth, IBM Global Services, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. While at Hess, she guided IT strategy during the acquisition of its retail division by Marathon Speedway and was part of the team recognized by CIO magazine with a CIO100 Award for delivering innovative IT solutions during Hurricane Sandy recovery. Bell earned a B.S.E. in operations research from Princeton University, where she serves as an alumni mentor for women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Calvin Hadley
Calvin J. Hadley serves as the Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the President at Howard University. Hadley works to broker strategic partnerships that advance the University's mission: Truth and Service. Since joining Howard in 2014, he's negotiated numerous partnerships along several student programs. The most notable of these include: Howard's partnership with Google and Amazon Studios to create the Howard West Campus in Silicon Valley and the Howard Entertainment Campus in Hollywood, a partnership with the District of Columbia Public Schools which led to the creation of a dual-enrollment program that allows high school juniors and seniors to earn college credit at Howard University, and a lecture series with Congressman Elijah Cummings, former Director of the FBI James Comey, former Mayor of Washington, D.C. Vincent Gray, and others.Istanbul
All Participants
Akın Ünver
“Akin Ünver is an associate professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University, specialising in conflict research, computational methods and digital crisis communication. He is the Resident Fellow of Cyber Research Program at the Centre for Economic and Foreign Policy Research (EDAM), a Research Associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs, Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow at GUARD (Global Urban Analytics for Resilient Defence) at the Alan Turing Institute.”
Yunus Emre Tapan
“Yunus Emre Tapan, a graduate of SICSS-Helsinki-18, is a Ph.D. Student in Political Science at Northeastern University. Emre earned his B.A. in Economics from Bogazici University and his M.Sc. in Middle East Studies from METU. His research sits at the intersection of data science and social sciences. He specializes in social network analysis and computational text analysis to study online extremist communities and non-state actors with a particular focus on how they radicalize. He is a graduate of ICPSR Summer Program in 2020 as one of the recipients of the Scholarship for Political Science Research.”
Ahmet Kurnaz
“Ahmet is a PhD candidate at Çanakkale 18 Mart University’s Department of Political Science. Ahmet comes from a computer science background and has advanced knowledge of R. He works on polarisation and political communication online and specialises in text mining and analysis. He was a visiting researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute in 2017 and 2018, and the University of Maryland, College Park in 2015. He was a teaching assistant of SICSS-Istanbul in 2019.”
Doğuş Kuran
Doğuş Kuran is the CEO of SabancıDX, overseeing the company’s digital transformation operations in the field of advanced analytics, cloud services and cyber security. Previously he served in senior executive positions at Cisco, Microsoft, Ericsson and Accenture, before being appointed as the Executive Vice-President and Chief Customer Officer at Turkcell in charge of the company’s customer and business analytics, data scientist development program, and artificial intelligence-based customer engagement projects. He specializes in large-scale business applications of A.I.-driven data science, as well as mass-training of data scientists for a large portfolio of advanced business and industry analytics roles.
Kemal Oflazer
Kemal Oflazer received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and his MS in Computer Science and BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering degrees from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Heis currently a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University – Qatar, where he is also the Associate Dean for Research. He has held visiting positions at Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University, and at the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Prior to joining CMU-Qatar, he was on the faculties of Sabanci University in Istanbul Turkey and Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, 19 years. Kemal Oflazer is currently serving as an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and ELEKTRIK(Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences), and has served or is currently serving on the Editorial Boards of Computational Linguistics, Journal of AI Research, Machine Translation, Research on Language and Computation, Natural Language Engineering and Language Resources and Evaluation. He was a Book Reviews Editor for Natural Language Engineering and a member of the advisory boards of John Benjamins NLP Book Series and Springer Briefs in NLP. He also served as the Program Co-Chair of ACL 2005 -- 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, in 2005 and as a Senior Area Chair or Area Chair for ACL EMNLP, EACL and COLING conferences. Over the last 30 years, Kemal Oflazer has worked extensively on developing NLP techniques and computational resources for Turkish with his collaborators and graduate students and has published over 150 papers. He has recently edited a compendium of work on Turkish language and speech processing which has been published by [Springer](https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319901633)- [for a table of contents](http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ko/toc.pdf). In addition to his long-standing interest in Turkish NLP, he has recently been working on applying NLP in educational settings on techniques such as interactive reading, question generation, question similarity detection and question answering on technical domains with an eye towards developing automated course assistants.
Ceren Budak
Ceren Budak is an Assistant Professor of Information at the School of Information and an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Her research interests lie in the area of computational social science. She utilizes network science, machine learning, and crowdsourcing methods and draws from scientific knowledge across multiple social science communities to contribute computational methods to the field of political communication.
Erdem Yörük
Erdem Yörük is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University and an Associate Member in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at University of Oxford. He is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project Emerging Welfare [The New Politics of Welfare Towards an 'Emerging Markets' Welfare State Regime] (emw.ku.edu.tr). He is also a member of Young Academy of Europe and an associate editor of EuropeanReview. He holds a PhD from the Department of Sociology at Johns HopkinsUniversity (2012), an MA in Sociology and a BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Boğaziçi University. His work focuses on social welfare and social policy, social movements, political sociology, and comparative and historical sociology. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, European Commission Marie Curie CIG, European Research Council, European Commission Twinning Action Grants (socialcomquant.ku.edu.tr), and the Science Academy of Turkey BAGEP. His articles have appeared in World Development, Governance, Politics & Society, New Left Review, Current Sociology, South Atlantic Quarterly, International Journal of Communication, Social Policy and Administration, Social Indicators Research, among others. His book, ‘The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey’ is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
Tuba Bircan
Interdisciplinary researcher, data-lover by birth and social scientist by choice. She currently works as an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and is the research coordinator of the Interface Demography research group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. She is also affiliated as a senior research associate at HIVA (KU Leuven). Her scholarly interests cover a wide range from migration, refugees, inequalities, equal opportunities, social and public policies to new methodologies and use of Big Data and AI for studying societal challenges. She believes in open science and science for society.
Özge Öner
Özge Öner is an Assistant Professor in Real Estate and Spatial Economics at the Land Economy Department and Fellow in Economics at Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Research Fellow at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) in Stockholm. Öner earned her PhD in Economics with a focus on Urban and Regional Economics in Jönköping, Sweden, in 2014. She completed part of her PhD studies at the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory (REAL), University of Illinois. Özge’s research deals with migration and labour mobility, micro-geography of segregation and ethnic enclaves, retail and service geography, the geography of entrepreneurship, as well as political geography. She is a former recipient of the Handelsbanken Wallander postdoctoral scholarship in Sweden (2015), Young Investigator Award in Italy (2018), and she is the 2019 recipient of the Young Researcher Award in Sweden. Özge writes monthly columns at the newspaper Swedish Daily (Svenska Dagbladet).
Ali Hürriyetoğlu
Dr. Ali Hürriyetoğlu is a postdoctoral research fellow at Koc University in the ERC projects “Emerging Welfare” (EMW) and “Social ComQuant: Excelling in Computational and Quantitative Social Sciences in Turkey”. He is performing research and coordinating the work-package related to automatically collecting a multi-country and multilingual protest events (contentious politics) database from local news sources in EMW. He is responsible from computational social science aspects in the Social ComQuant Project. He teaches text mining and Social Sciences and Computing related courses. Mr. Hürriyetoğlu performed research on extracting actionable information from social media in the scope of his Ph.D. studies. He has been working in industrial, governmental, and academic settings to process news and social media text in various domains throughout his career. His recent research focus is on the robustness and the generalizability of text processing systems across contexts.
Burak Ozturan
Burak Özturan is a Ph.D. Student in Network Science at Northeastern University, a graduate of SICSS-Istanbul-20. He will receive a master degree in Data Science at the University of Konstanz (Germany) this summer. He completed a bachelor in Economics at Boğaziçi University with honours. Currently, he is investigating the online vaccine disinformation on Twittersphere, where he exploits the social network analysis and the computational text analysis techniques. He has given numerous lectures on programming languages, statistics, and social science research methods. He presented his research at ECPR-20 (European Consortium for Political Research) and will present at the Networks 2021 conference.
Hossein Kermani
Hossein Kermani, PhD in Social Communication Science (University of Tehran), is studying social media, digital repression, computational propaganda, and political activism in restrictive contexts, with a especial focus on Iran. His research mainly revolves around the discursive power of social media in making meaning, shaping practices, changing the microphysics of power and playing with the political, cultural and social structures in Iran. Hossein will join POLCOM research group at University of Vienna soon.
Aybuke Atalay
“Aybuke Atalay is a PhD student in Politics at the University of Edinburgh. She holds a MSc in International Relations. Her research focuses on disinformation and computational propaganda in Turkey. She is particularly interested in political bot networks in Twitter.”
Ege Ötenen
“Ege Ötenen is a cognitive psychology master’s student at Sabanci University, Istanbul. She is interested in phenomenological characteristics, and visual imagery of autobiographical memories. She loves to read and learn about big data and how to combine it with memory.”
Özgür Can Seçkin
“Özgür Can Seçkin is a MSc Data Science student at Sabancı University. He started working on sentiment analysis with NLP, other machine learning algorithms and web scraping while he was doing his undergraduate in Galatasaray University Economics. After graduation, he got a job at İş Bankası as a credit analyst, where he was involved in projects about credit risk evaluation, monitoring and loan automation. His objective is to create a better understanding about how society works, using data.”
Erman Ermihan
“Erman Ermihan is currently pursuing a PhD in International Relations at Kadir Has University. Erman’s research interests revolve around EU-Turkey relations, Turkish foreign policy, emotions and identity, and climate security. He is interested in developing his thesis through computational methods. He received his MA from Sabancı University.”
Venia Veselovsky
“Venia Veselovsky recently completed his undergraduate degree in mathematics and international relations at the University of Toronto, and next year will start his MSc at EPFL in Digital Humanities. Venia’s research at the CSS Lab at UofT has focused on social media and music sharing. In the future, he hopes to study computational international relations.”
Umut Duygu
“Umut Duygu is a Political Science M.A. Student at Sabancı University. He holds BA degrees in International Relations and History from Koç University. He worked as an intern for several organizations including United Nations, Istanbul Policy Center and Hürriyet.His His research interests include social networks, media studies, digital diplomacy, misinformation and voter behavior.”
Hakan Ozalp
“Hakan Ozalp is an Assistant Professor in the Knowledge, Information & Innovation (KIN) Research Group. His research explores the impact of industrial and technological change on the platform ecosystems and on the firms, as well as the antecedents of these changes. He taught various courses on innovation, strategy, and research methods.”
Elif Sozer
“Elif Sozer is a Phd student in the Psychology Department at the New School for Social Research. She is broadly interested in human memory, focusing on how communities form and maintain shared representations of the past, particularly via media and communications.”
Didar Tutan
“Didar Tutan is an MA student in Comparative Studies in History and Society at Koç University. Her research interests are sociology of crime and punishment, prison studies, and political economy. She has previously worked on natural language processing projects and seeks to develop her programming skills further to apply quantitative text analysis methods to her research. Didar holds BA degrees in Philosophy and International Relations from Koç University.”
Gizem Kaya
“Gizem Kaya is a master’s student in the International Relations department at Kadir Has University. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from Yildiz Technical University. Her research interests include civil war, armed groups, and post-conflict peacebuilding. Currently, she aims to employ computational text analysis and network analysis methods in her research by focusing on natural resources’ role in the Colombian peace process. She is also a passionate Spanish and R learner.”
Ahmet Yusuf AYDIN
“Ahmet Yusuf AYDIN is a postgraduate student at the Department of Economics, University of Warwick. He holds BA and MA degrees in Economics from Bogazici Unveristy. His research interests are applied microeconomics, firm dynamics, and environmental economics.”
Büşra Mahmutoğlu
“Büşra Mahmutoğlu is currently a research assistant at New York University Abu Dhabi’s Social Research and Public Policy Program. She has a Master’s degree in Political Science from Sabancı University and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University. Her research areas include political sociology, social movements and culture. She is also broadly interested in computational social sciences methods.”
Çiğdem Ünal
“Çiğdem is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include terrorism, its impact on voting behavior and political parties, and political participation in post-conflict societies. She completed her masters at the Sabanci University in the same field.”
Selim Yaman
“Selim Yaman is a Political Science PhD Student at American University’s School of Public Affairs, specializing in political methodology and comparative politics with a focus on text analysis. Substantively, his research revolves around political violence and military coups. He’s also a Fellow in the Center for Data Science at American University, doing editorial assistantship for Political Analysis.”
Yasemin Taskin-Alp
“Yasemin Taskin-Alp is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. In her dissertation, she examines Islamic preschools in Turkey using mixed methods. She has a background in economics, history, and mathematics. Prior to graduate school she worked in policy and research centers in Istanbul.”
Fuat Kına
“Fuat is a PhD candidate at the Sociology Department of Koç University, and a researcher at the European Commission funded Social ComQuant project. He graduated with a B.S. degree in Economics from Boğaziçi University (2015) and received his master’s degree with quantitative research on the relationship between anti-immigrant attitudes and labor precarity in Europe (2018) from İstanbul Şehir University. He currently works on the relationship between social movements, their targets and social assistance programs. He is interested in advanced quantitative techniques on causal inference.”
Oğuzhan İzmir
“Oğuzhan İzmir is a master’s student in International Relations. He is interested in the use of computational methods in Border Studies.”Law
All Participants
Rūta Liepiņa
Rūta Liepiņa is an Assistant Professor in Digital Legal Studies at the Faculty of Law and a SICSS-Duke 2020 alumna. She holds a PhD degree from European University Institute. Her research interests revolve around the topics of legal reasoning, argumentation, and data science. She is an active member of the AI and law community and participates in the leading conferences and workshops on these topics including ICAIL, JURIX, NLLP, ASAIL, and others.
Monika Leszczyńska
Monika Leszczyńska is Assistant Professor of Empirical Legal Research at the Maastricht University Faculty of Law, Netherlands. She received her PhD in law from University of Bonn (Germany). In her research, she uses laboratory and online experiments as well as content analysis to deliver evidence-based insights to legal decision-makers on the impact of law on human behavior. Among others, she has researched how gender quotas influence group cooperation. She also studies how individuals make decisions in the online environment, i.e., how zero-price offers affect people’s decisions about their contractual rights and privacy. This research project has been funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship.
Catalina Goanta
Catalina is Assistant Professor in Private Law at Maastricht University and co-manager of the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab. Her current research addresses decentralization and Internet governance, with projects such as the regulation of social media influencers, where she looks at monetization and content moderation on social media. During February 2018 - February 2019, Catalina was a Niels Stensen fellow and visited the University of St. Gallen (The Institute of Work and Employment) and Harvard University (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society). Catalina is also a non-residential fellow of the Stanford Transatlantic Technology Law Forum, and was a visiting researcher at the Stanford Law School during September 2017.
Angela Dorrough
Dr. Angela Dorrough is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Social Psychology at the University of Cologne. She started her academic career as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and finished her PhD at the University of Goettingen in 2017. Her research can be divided roughly into two main areas: One the one hand she investigates the determinants of cross-cultural cooperation behavior; on the other hand, her research is dedicated to discrimination (e.g., in selection processes) and potential interventions (e.g., quota rules) to reduce discrimination. For her research she combines methods of economics and psychology to test social psychological theories. Furthermore, she is committed to transparency and replicability in research and communicates these principles as part of her teaching activities.
Jens Frankenreiter
Jens Frankenreiter is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Empirical Law and Economics at the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School. His research and teaching focus on business law, in particular corporate and contract law, and the functioning of legal institutions. Much of his work uses quantitative methods and other computational tools such as automated text analysis and machine learning. His writing has appeared in leading academic journals, among them the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review. Jens holds a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and a LL.M. from Harvard Law School. Before coming to Columbia, he was a Senior Research Fellow at Max Planck Bonn and a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.
Michael A. Livermore
Michael A. Livermore is a legal academic whose research focuses on regulatory review, environmental law, cost-benefit analysis, and the application of data science techniques to legal texts. He frequently collaborates on interdisciplinary projects with researchers in other academic fields, including economics, computer science, neurology, and the humanities. He is a graduate of New York University School of Law and clerked for Judge Harry T. Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Gijs van Dijck
Gijs integrates legal, empirical, and computational analysis in order to improve the description, application, understanding, and evaluation of the law. He has taught courses on tort law, contract law, property law, empirical legal research, and computational legal research. Gijs has published in top journals including the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. He has been a speaker at various conferences, including ones at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Duke and Cornell. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2011. Gijs is Professor of Private Law, (co-)director of the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab, Principal Investigator at Brightlands Institute for Smart Society (BISS), and researcher at M-EPLI.
Abdurrahman Erol
Abdurrahman is a PhD researcher at the Department of International and European Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Prior to starting his doctorate, he received an LL.M. on International and European Law and completed Research Master in Law, both at Tilburg University. His research interests lie at the intersection of international investment law and human rights law. His PhD project focusses on the formulation of investor obligations in international investment agreements and the potential translation of principles from the business and human rights domain into investment agreements in the form of obligations upon investors.
Anna Kovács
Anna Kovács is a PhD Researcher in the European Doctorate in Law and Economics (EDLE) program, which is organized by three universities: Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the University of Bologna, and the University of Hamburg. She holds an LL.B. degree in International and European Law from the University of Groningen, and an MSc. degree in International Relations and Diplomacy from Leiden University. Her research areas of interest include (international) climate change law and policy, environmental law, geoengineering, and collective action problems. In her dissertation, she analyzes the impact of behavioral factors on the emergence of international action on large-scale collective action problems.
Anna Sekuła
Anna is a PhD candidate in Comparative Analysis of Institutions, Economics and Law at the University of Turin and Collegio Carlo Alberto, Italy. In her work she focuses on the dynamics of change in legal pluralism and studies developments in human and environmental rights litigation across jurisdictions. She is also interested in methodology and philosophy of law and economics.
Antonella Zarra
Antonella Zarra is a doctoral researcher at Hamburg University within the European Doctorate in Law and Economics (EDLE), a joint programme by Erasmus University Rotterdam, Bologna University and Hamburg University. Her doctoral project deals with the regulation of artificial intelligence. Through the lenses of law and economics, she scrutinizes the economic and legal incentives that would justify any policy intervention in the use of automated decision-making systems, with a specific focus on liability issues, data ownership and AI trustworthiness. Her further research interests include empirical legal studies, sustainability and gender equality. She holds a Master's Degree in Economics of International Institutions and a Bachelor's Degree in Economics and Management from Bocconi University, Italy. She was a visiting student at the Chengchi University of Taipei, Taiwan.
Antonio Davola
Dr. Antonio Davola, LLB with honors (University of Pisa, 2015), LLM (Yale Law School, 2018) PhD with honors in “Law and Technology” (Sant’ Anna School of Advanced studies, Pisa, 2019) is Adjunct Professor and Post-Doc Research Fellow at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, and Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. His main areas of interest involve financial markets regulation, competition law, consumer protection and the governance of new technologies in the European framework. He devotes significant attention to the application of experimental and empirical analysis to consumer protection, consistently with a research approach strongly focused on Law &Economics. His Marie Curie project “Fair Personalisation” investigates how the use of online personalised and tailored offers affects individual propensity to consume, in order to ultimately redefine the normative thresholds and conditions under which targeted commercial practices may be deemed unfair or manipulative under EU law, laying the foundations for framing a harmonized regulation.
Choky R. Ramadhan
Choky R. Ramadhan is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington School of Law. He is a lecturer at the Faculty of Law University of Indonesia who teaches anti-corruption clinic and criminal procedure law. Choky obtained a bachelor of law (LL.B.) from the University of Indonesia and a master of Asia and Comparative Law (LL.M.) from the University of Washington. His research interest is criminal justice policy, drug policy, criminal procedure, anti-corruption, and judicial reform. He has worked with Indonesian agencies, international organizations, national NGOs, and Universities to provide research and policy papers on those topics in Indonesia.
Delia Lucía Martínez Lorenzo
Lucía Martínez Lorenzo holds a Bachelor Degree in Law from Deusto University (Spain), with a minor in Public Law, and an LL.M. in Legal Practice from Universidad de Nebrija (Spain). She successfully passed the national Bar qualification exam in March 2018, and later that year, she became a registered lawyer at the ICALugo. In September 2018, Lucía started as a PhD researcher jointly with the Faculties of Law of Hasselt University and Maastricht Universtity. Her PhD research is entitled “The impact of public procurement law on horizontal and vertical teaming of economic operators in construction projects. Reconciling effective and undistorted competition and the free market”. She has recently written about the consequences of digitalisation for public procurement law developments.
Giovanni De Gregorio
Giovanni De Gregorio is postdoctoral researcher working with the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. Within the framework of the ERC ConflictNet project, his research focuses on content moderation and artificial intelligence; hate speech and disinformation in conflicts; digital policy in the global south. His research interest deals with constitutional law, human rights, Internet law, privacy and data protection law. He completed his PhD in Constitutional Law at the University of Milano-Bicocca. His doctoral study has investigated the rise of European digital constitutionalism as a reaction and strategy against the predominance of digital private normativities.
Ilya Ilin
Ilya is a Junior Research Fellow in IT Law and Ph.D. student of the School of Law at the Tartu University (Estonia). He holds a Master’s degree in Information Technology Law from the University of Tartu and a Specialist’s degree in Law from the St. Petersburg State Engineering and Economic University (Russia). His area of research concerns the legal aspects of Natural Language Processing (NLP) development. Within research, he explores the application of various NLP techniques and their components, such as speech and voice, in the information technology sphere from the perspective of intellectual property and data protection law.
Joanna Strycharz
Joanna Strycharz is an assistant professor of persuasive communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research. Her research focuses on how insights gained from data can be used to adjust communication between organizations and consumers. She is also interested in how such data-driven communication impacts cognitions, attitudes, and behavior of consumers as well as what unintended effects such communication has on individuals and the society. Joanna has completed a PhD in Persuasive Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, in an interdisciplinary cooperation with the Institute for Information Law. In her PhD project, she examined consumer knowledge of data-driven personalized marketing and its influence on consumer privacy behaviors and consumer empowerment. Additionally, Joanna was a visiting scholar at the Hubbart School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota.
Katharina Luckner
Katharina is a PhD student at the Institute of Law and Economics, University of Hamburg. She is part of an interdisciplinary research group on international law and behavioral economics. In her dissertation, she is interested in the influence of social movements on international law; she studies the interdependencies of the law, social norms and people through social simulations and experiments.
Łukasz Szoszkiewicz
Łukasz Szoszkiewicz is a research assistant in Poznan Human Rights Centre (Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences). He obtained his Ph.D. in law at Adam Mickiewicz University. His research is focused in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and human rights as well as children’s rights. Since 2018, he has been actively engaged in the preparation of the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty (as the Data Coordinator) and currently leads one of its follow-up projects on data related aspects of immigration detention of children (funded by the Global Campus of Human Rights). In 2019, he undertook a half-year internship at the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (Research and Data Unit).
Noam Kolt
Noam Kolt is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. His research focuses on contract law, computational text analysis, and the governance of artificial intelligence. Noam was appointed an inaugural Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society Graduate Fellow and held an Ethics of AI Graduate Research Fellowship at the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics. Noam’s scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Yale Law & Policy Review, International Journal of Constitutional Law, and Melbourne University Law Review.
Sandra Hahn
I am a PhD candidate in Economic Sociology at the Lisbon School of Economics and Management (ISEG), which is part of the University of Lisbon. I studied Journalism and I have a Master's Degree in Latin America Studies with concentration in Political Science.
Siyun Jiang
Siyun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government and an M.A. in Statistics student in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the University of Texas at Austin. She broadly studies political economy and judicial politics with causal inference methods and text analysis. Her dissertation is on the impact of political centralization and local bureaucratic resistance in China’s judicial system. Before joining in UT, she lived and studied in Mainland China, Taiwan, Thailand and Hong Kong.
Wojciech Giemza
Wojciech is a PhD Researcher at the Department of Law of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He earned an MA in law at the University of Warsaw and an LL.M. in international law at the EUI. His main research interests are public international law (in particular international economic law), international adjudication, legal sociology, anthropology and history. He is a founding member of the International Economic Law and Policy Working Group and a former Researchers’ Representative at the EUI. His PhD project concerns the use of references to the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of International Justice in investment arbitration. The project involves doctrinal and empirical approach to the texts of judicial decisions, including citation network analysis and causal inferences, combined with socio-legal and historical insights.
Wu Hao
Wu Hao is a PhD student in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses on automatising the justification process of the query result in an argumentation system and optimising the efficiency of related algorithms. His interests also lie in functional programming and data analysis.
Bogdan Covrig
Bogdan Covrig is a Research Assistant at the Maastricht Law&Tech Lab (Maastricht University). He is currently following a computer science bachelor degree (Saxion University), which contributes to the interdisciplinary research conducted at the Lab. He is passionate about building infrastructures that support the development of digital legal frameworks. His research interests include human computer interaction (HCI) from the perspective of user behavior and consumer protection. In particular, his current projects focus on social media consumer profiling and influencing, as well as the impact of recommender systems on the commercial activities of influencers/content creators.
Thales Bertaglia
Thales is a PhD Candidate at Maastricht University, working jointly with Studio Europa and the Institute of Data Science. His current research focuses on characterizing the opinion of youth on European issues using Artificial Intelligence techniques for social media analysis. He is passionate about Computational Linguistics and Machine Learning. Thales received his Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Computational Mathematics from the University of São Paulo.Lisbon
All Participants
Qiwei Han
Qiwei Han is currently an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Business Analytics at Nova School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE), Portugal. He is an affiliated faculty with the Data Science Knowledge Center of Nova SBE. He received Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy and M.S. in Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon University. His research is at the intersection of econometrics and machine learning, using complex data-driven approaches on a variety of projects with societal impacts. He served as the Technical Mentor for Data Science for Social Good Europe program jointly offered by Nova SBE and the University of Chicago in 2017 and 2018. His research appeared in data science and information systems conferences and received the Best Paper Award from International Conference on Social Computing.
Filipa Reis
Invited Assistant Professor of Data Science at Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics. Filipa holds a PhD in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University, a MSc from CLSBE, and bachelor's degree from Nova SBE. Her research focuses on media consumption patterns and the impact of digitization and convergence technologies on consumer choices and behaviors. She has also participated in experiment-driven business analytics consulting projects for policy formulation and evaluation in the telecommunications sector. Her work has been published in Management Science and presented at top peer-reviewed research conferences such as the International Conference of Information Systems and the Economics of Digitization Seminar Series of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Filipa teaches quantitative and data analysis courses at the undergraduate level including Statistics I, Statistics II, Statistics for Business and Economics, and Business Research Methods.
Joana Gonçalves de Sá
Joana Gonçalves de Sá is an Invited Associate Professor at the Physics Department of Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa and the leader of the Social Physics and Complexity (SPAC) research group at LIP. Before that, she was an Associate Professor at Nova SBE and a Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), where she remains as the Director of the Graduate Program Science for Development (PGCD), aiming at improving science in Africa. Her current research uses data analytics and machine learning to study complex problems at the interface between Biomedicine, Computation, Policy, Social Sciences, and Mathematics. These include epidemiology, critical thinking, network dynamics, political discourse, and their applications to human-behavior, with a large ethical and societal focus. Joana has a degree in Physics Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico – University of Lisbon, and a PhD in Systems Biology from NOVA – ITQB, having developed her thesis at Harvard University, USA. In 2019, she was the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant to study human behavior using the online spread of “fake news” as a model system.
Moinul Zaber
Moinul Zaber (PhD) is currently a Senior Academic Fellow at the United Nations University (UNU-EGOV). He is also a data and computational social scientist. His research focus is technology and public policy. He uses machine learning, statistical inference, econometrics techno-ethnographic analysis and design thinking to harness data for policy insights and intervention design. Dr. Zaber recieved is PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He is currently on leave from his position as an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Previously he worked as a Research Fellow at Economics and Management Department of Chalmers University, Sweden and LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka. Dr. Zaber, has also served as a visiting Associate Professor at CSIS, Tokyo University, Tokyo. His recent research was on using Big Data to understand energy usage, use of GPS data traffic pattern recognition, network analysis for communication pattern recognition digital inclusion at educational hubs, use of Satellite data on land use land cover, Spectrum Management policy, voice over IP regulation, regulatory governance, usable privacy and usable security. He has published in various international peer reviewed journals, regularly gives invited talks at major conferences on telecommunications and Internet policy and regulation.
Anika Kamilla Clausen
Anika Kamilla Clausen is a Danish PhD student working at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland in the Business Communication department under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Laura Illia since February 2020. In 2019, she graduated from the University of Lausanne with a Master of Arts in English and German. Her PhD will focus on Open Access as a business model. The goal of my PhD is to better understand the model in different domains, i.e., academic journal publishing, open AI agents, and data sharing (social media data). The aim is to develop a project that includes a theoretical understanding of the concept, and a practical aspect. The practical part of her thesis will hopefully be to develop a social media lab that makes it possible to share large amounts of data with other researchers.
Antonia Hmaidi
Antonia Hmaidi is a Research Associate and PhD Candidate at the Mercator School of Management and the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, where she works on Chinese economic development and the Internet Economy. She studied East Asian Politics and Economics at Ruhr-University Bochum and International Relations/Political Science at The Graduate Institute in Geneva. Her papers are concerned with the economic impact of Internet Censorship, the role political relations play in Chinese Outward Direct Investment and the Social Credit System in China. In her research, she uses novel approaches from Machine Learning and Data Science, scrapes open data from the Internet, and employs agent-based modelling. In her spare time, she works freelance as a data scientist. In addition, she is also active at the Chaos Computer Club, where she mentors people in coding in Python.
Ashur Parham
Ashur Parham is currently a Ph.D. student at emlyon business school. He is interested in identifying patterns through longitudinal large datasets using computational linguistics approaches such as structural/semantic embedded topic modeling. He is currently looking at the discussions related to gain of function research and study how different categories of expertise – legal scholar, ethicist, epidemiologist, etc – shape the debate and final report. He is born in Tehran, Iran, and graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a Master of Science in Economics, and from Skema Business School with a Master of Research in Management and Innovation. I have been involved in research projects at LSCP, a psycholinguistic laboratory at École Normale Supérieure (ENS), the psychology department of Paris Descartes University, and the Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision Making (CREED) in Amsterdam.
Bernardo Forbes Costa
Bernardo Forbes Costa is a PhD candidate in Economics and teaching assistant at Nova School of Business and Economics. He has a background in consulting, having worked as a Senior Consultant at Deloitte, and has served as a technical advisor to the Portuguese Directorate General of Health. He is interested in using real-world as well as experimental data to explain and positively influence human behavior, leveraging on disciplines of behavioral and data science. His current research focuses on (1) explaining mobility patterns using news information and, (2) explaining heterogeneity in attack rates in nursing homes, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chun Shao
Chun Shao is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. As a data-driven researcher, his research uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the intricate relationship between social media, digital audiences, and political communication. Specifically, he employs diverse methodologies such as surveys and computational analysis to understand the structural and psychological aspects of users’ online behaviors, as well as the role of social media in civic life. As an active researcher, Chun has received several academic awards, including a Top Paper Award from the Broadcast Education Association, and a Fellowship from the Knight Foundation. His prior works have appeared in multiple journals, including American Behavioral Scientist, Telematics and Informatics, Social Media & Society, and Journal of Information Technology & Politics.
Dan Tran
Dan Tran is currently a research fellow & adjunct professor at the Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics. He holds a PhD in Economics with a focus on financial stability and computational modeling. Dan’s current research focuses on data modeling and machine learning in finance.
David Bazan
David Bazan is a PhD student in Sociology at Lund University. He is interested in algorithms, cultural dimensions of contemporary class divisions and inequality. In his PhD project, he focuses on the class assumptions and categorizations embedded in algorithmic recommendations, how people interact with algorithmic processes and how they participate in the (re)production of social inequalities. David holds an MSc in cultural sociology from the University of Amsterdam and a BA in sociology from the University of Barcelona.
Laura Brandimarte
Laura Brandimarte is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona. She joined the Eller College of Management in 2015 after two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also earned her PhD in public policy and management at the Heinz College. Laura is a privacy and security researcher, specifically interested in the psychology of self-disclosure, the social dynamics of privacy and security decision making, and the social and ethical issues of technology.
Martina Santia
Martina Santia is a Ph.D. candidate in Media and Public Affairs in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. She has an M.A. in Global Development and Peace (2017) and a B.A. in Mass Communication and International Political Economy & Diplomacy (2014) from the University of Bridgeport. Her research agenda focuses on identifying the psychological underpinnings motivating public attitudes and behaviors in response to certain media stimuli. More specifically, Martina is currently working on her dissertation testing agenda-setting effects after exposure.
Mercy Erhi Makpor
Mercy Erhi Makpor is a Junior Researcher at the United Nations University Operating Unit on Policy-Driven Electronic Governance. She is also a Research Associate in the School of Economics and Management, University of Minho, Portugal. Her research area is in e-Governance with a keen interest in Digital Inclusion, Gender Equality and Diversity. She is also interested in Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility with specificity to the supply chain mapping, third party relationships, stakeholder engagements, and effective CSR integration in the Oil and Gas sector. Her other interest is in the area of human development at micro and macro levels where she focuses on individual and institutional responses to social, economic and environmental issues with the possibility of reaching and sustaining mutual grounds for human growth and development. She has also researched Gender advocacy and Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights. She takes great interest in counselling, programme facilitation, leadership and team-building practices. She has had years of experience conducting research and working with professionals from some of the biggest research teams in Canada under the Teasdale-Corti Team Grant, and a host of others from Europe under the European Commission.
Mohammad Ali
Mohammad Ali is a doctoral candidate in Mass Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, United States. The areas of his research include strategic communication using both social science and computational research methods. As a Computational Social Science (CSS) researcher, his work involves both the quantitative and qualitative approaches with a combination of data science methods. Specifically, his research foci include brand crisis, brand-consumer interaction, visual messages, fake news, persuasion, social media, news media credibility, and Artificial Intelligence. A former journalist in Bangladesh, Ali received his M.A. in Communication at The University of Texas at Tyler, USA. He also has another master's degree and a bachelor's degree in Public Administration at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Ali has published and presented his research works in reputed journals and conferences, including Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and International Communication Association (ICA).
Shenglan Qing
Shenglan Qing is Ph.D. candidate in communication at Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her dissertation focuses on online discussions about reality talent shows in China and Spain. This dissertation applies Supervised Machine Learning model to analyze texts on Twitter and Weibo. Her research interests span from cultural studies, globalization, to digital and computational methods.
Simona Ciappei
Simona Ciappei is a second-year Ph.D. Candidate enrolled in the program “Development Economics and Local Systems” jointly offered by the Universities of Trento and Florence. Her research project examines digital technology diffusion in manufacturing systems and the role played in these processes by local interactions and proximity effects. She graduated from the University of Florence in 2015 with an MS in Economic Sciences. Prior to enrolling in the Ph.D., she worked for almost two years as a digital business consultant at Accenture. Subsequently, she joined the Foundation for Research and Innovation (Florence), first as a junior researcher and then as a technology transfer agent. During this period, she was seconded to the University of Birmingham for a year to work on the European project MAKERS, which focused on Industry 4.0 and regional transformations.
Alessandro Gambetti
Alessandro Gambetti is currently a Research and Teaching Assistant of Data Science at the Nova School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE), Lisbon, Portugal. He recently received an MSc in Finance from Nova SBE, majoring in Data and Business Analytics, and he holds a BSc in Economics & Finance from the Alma Mater Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy. His research interests span from applied data science in both social and business sciences in which data may be considered as a driving factor in decision-making. Aside from research, he is currently involved in tutoring MSc students in data-based subjects with the goal of easing the overall learning process.
Eduardo Hidalgo García
Eduardo Hidalgo is a Data Scientist at the Data Science Knowledge Centre of NOVA SBE university (DSKC), where he also collaborates as a Teaching Assistant for the bachelor’s course: “Introduction to Programming”. He also collaborates as an instructor in le wagon data science’s bootcamps. Prior joining the DSKC, he worked at Mastercard, there he collaborated on a broad set of projects, in three areas: Loyalty Analytics, Operations & Technology and Sales. Eduardo has six years of international experience, adding value to complex data related projects in banking, education and research, involving information analysis and communication to ensure an effective implementation of solutions with business impact.London
All Participants
Andrea Baronchelli
Andrea is a Reader in Mathematics at City, University of London and Economic Data Science theme lead at The Alan Turing Institute. Andrea researches self-organisation and emerging phenomena in social and economic systems. In particular, coordination and spreading phenomena on social networks, behaviour change, blockchain and cryptos, online marketplaces, human mobility, and fundamental problems in network science.
Joshua Becker
Joshua is an Assistant Professor at the UCL School of Management, University College London. Joshua received their PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Kellogg School of Management. Prior to graduate school, Joshua worked professionally in mediation and conflict resolution, spent some time managing training and coaching for a customer service department, and now serves as a pro-bono mediator with the Chicago Conflict Resolution Center. Joshua's research focuses on communication networks and collective intelligence.
Nicola Perra
Nicola is an Associate Professor (Reader) in Network Science at the Business School of Greenwich University, London, UK. Nicola's research focuses on human dynamics, big-data analytics, network science, and mathematical/digital epidemiology. In particular, his interests lie on the characterization and modeling of dynamical processes unfolding on time-varying and multiplex networks, human adaptive behaviors, data-driven modeling of infectious diseases, and the study of Online/Offline Social Networks.
Milena Tsvetkova
Milena is an Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, Milena was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science at the Oxford Internet Institute. Milena uses large-scale online experiments, network analysis, and computational modeling to study fundamental social phenomena such as cooperation, contagion, segregation, and inequality.
Mike Yeomans
Mike is an Assistant Professor in Strategy and Organisational Behaviour at Imperial College Business School. In their research, Mike uses natural language processing to study decision-making in conversation.London/Oxford Joint Seminar Series
More info coming soon.
Viktoria Spaiser
Viktoria is an Associate Professor in Sustainability Research and Computational Social Sciences. She is also affiliated with the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA) and the Priestley International Centre for Climate in Leeds. Before her time at Leeds, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Stockholm Institute for Futures Studies and at the Department of Mathematics, Uppsala University in Sweden. Viktoria's current research focuses on how societies can make a rapid, fair and empowering transition to zero-emissions / zero-pollution and specifically how normative change initiated by climate change movements such as Fridays for Future can contribute to social tipping in the response to the climate crisis. In her research she uses computational social science approaches such as Agent Based Modelling, Natural Language Processing of large-scale textual data e.g. from Twitter, Dynamical Systems Modelling etc.
Ken Benoit
Kenneth Benoit is Professor of Computational Social Science in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Professor (Part-time) in the School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University. He has previously held positions in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin and at the Central European University (Budapest). He received his Ph.D. (1998) from Harvard University, Department of Government.
Peaks Krafft
Dr Peaks Krafft (they/them) is Senior Lecturer and MA Internet Equalities Course Leader at the UAL Creative Computing Institute. Dr Krafft undertakes critically-oriented computer science research, academic organising, and community organising, especially recently on four issues in higher education and tech: social impacts of technology; personal and institutional accountability; anti-racism in organisations, and conflicts of interest from tech funding. Dr Krafft participates in several tech justice groups including NoTechForTyrants, United Tech and Allied Workers, and the Movement for Anti-Oppressive Computing Practices.
Alejandro Hermida Carrillo
Alejandro studies the self, role identities, and contemporary work arrangements in his PhD at the Munich School of Management of the LMU Munich. In his projects he uses surveys, experiments, and digital traces. He holds a BSc and an MSc in Psychology from the UNAM (Mexico) and the LMU respectively.
Ana Macanovic
Ana Macanovic is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology, Utrecht University and ICS. She has a background in sociology and behavioural economics. Her research is concerned with cooperation of agents in extra-legal environments. Currently, she is exploring reputation systems in cryptomarkets utilizing text mining methods.
Anastasia Menshikova
I am from Russia, I started studying sociology and computational social science there and continued in the Netherlands. I am currently doing a PhD in Analytical Sociology in Sweden, at the Institute for Analytical Sociology. In my research I apply NLP methods to study anti-immigration discourse
Aradhna Kaushal
I am a public health epidemiologist at UCL evaluating the role of social media interventions for promoting cancer screening and early diagnosis of cancer. I am increasingly coming face-to-face with very large data sets which require computational methods to analyse and process.
Damiano Maria Morando
Damiano Maria Morando is a PhD candidate in Management at Imperial College Business School. Before joining Imperial College, Damiano did an internship in a venture capital firm in Milan, focused on technology transfer. His Doctoral Thesis focuses on online networking behaviour as a tool for entrepreneurs to facilitate the accrual of early stage financing.
Darren Cook
Darren Cook is a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool. He has masters degrees in both Investigative Psychology and Decision Making under Uncertainty. His doctoral thesis combines psychology and computer science, where he uses data science and domain expertise to develop scalable social science models to examine conversations.
Dominik Schindler
Dominik Schinder has studied mathematics and digital media in Heidelberg, Berlin and London and is going to start a PhD project in Applied Mathematics at Imperial College London. Drawing from dynamical network analysis and machine learning, Dominik will analyse far-right digital countercultures in collaboration with the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin.
Jason Burton
Jason is a PhD student in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London. He uses agent-based modelling, online experiments, and digital trace data to research decision-making in social networks. Jason holds a BA in psychology from UC Santa Barbara and an MSc in organisational psychology from King’s College London.
Judah Axelrod
Judah Axelrod is an MSc student in Data Science at the London School of Economics. His research interests are centered around fairness and bias in machine learning and natural language processing applications. Judah previously studied Economics at Rutgers University and worked in antitrust economics and competition policy.Katharina Lawall
Katharina Lawall is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics. She works on political behaviour, campaigns and gender. Katharina uses survey and field experiments, and has experience partnering with civil society organisations, political parties and campaigns. She is interested in combining computational social science approaches with online experiments.Lanabi La Lova
Lanabi La Lova is a PhD Candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a researcher at Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding project. She uses text as data methods to study political communication and mass media. She has a background in political science, international relations, and mathematical economics.
Luc Rocher
Luc is a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London, using large-scale computational modeling to study the transformation of digital societies by algorithms. Luc's research directions include the limits of privacy and anonymity in the modern age, challenging the technical and legal adequacy of current de-identification techniques; the reliability of machine learning for stylometry in social media; the rise of pricing algorithms in online markets.
Luning Sun
Luning Sun is a Research Associate at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He received his PhD from the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge. Luning is interested in the development of psychometric tests and their applications in educational, occupational and clinical settings. His post-doctoral research has been focusing on the new forms of assessment that are enabled by the advancement in psychometric theories and techniques.
Manuel Tonneau
Manuel is a data science consultant at the World Bank and a research engineer in the CSS team of the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. He holds an MSc in Statistics from ENSAE Paris and an MSc in Economics from Humboldt University of Berlin.
Maria del Rio Chanona
I am a JSMF postdoc at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. Previously I did my PhD at INET, Oxford. My research topics are on networks, shock propagation, and labor market
Melody Sepahpour-Fard
Melody Sepahpour-Fard is an incoming PhD student at the Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science, University of Limerick. Her research interests broadly lie in between Social Psychology and NLP. For her doctoral thesis, she will explore opinion-based networks on social media to better measure social polarisation around immigration. She has previously studied Psychology and Language Sciences, and is currently finishing a Social Psychology European master's programme (named Global-MINDS).
Michael Geers
Michael Geers is a PhD student in Psychology at the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. His work leverages insights and methods from behavioral science and computational social science to understand important digital challenges and to develop interventions to mitigate them. Specifically, he studies how to reduce the impact of misinformation and how to increase cognitive resilience to microtargeting.
Renáta Topinková
Renáta Topinková is a PhD student at the Charles University and a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her dissertation examines homophily patterns in online dating. Her research interests include big data, experiments, and social networks, especially in relation to partner selection.
Vince Straub
Vince is a graduate research assistant at the Science of Intelligence Cluster working on a project that seeks to understand the development of intelligent behavior. He is particularly interested in the phenomena of collective intelligence and combining biological and social data; he is open to PhD programs in this area.
Vsevolod Suschevskiy
Vsevolod is pursuing a Ms in HCI at HSE University, but he is also affiliated with the University of Bergen's Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology as a research intern. His research interests include computational sociology and agent-based modeling, but he has not published any papers in this field yet.
Zsofia Zador
Zsofi (she/her) is a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Greenwich, London, and an external researcher at ANET Lab, Budapest. She is enthusiastic about networks, data science for gender equality, and all things spatial. Her current research is a network analysis of international trade.Samuel Dupret
Sam is a cognitive science student, currently working as a research assistant at the UCL School of Management. Sam is passionate about good and impactful science, even more so if it involves multiplayer experiments!
Nicolò Gozzi
Nicolò is a PhD student at the University of Greenwich, London. His current research interest revolves around the interplay between behaviours and the spread of infectious diseases. More broadly, Nicolò is interested in the modeling of epidemics, temporal networks, and data mining in general.Los Angeles
All Participants
Alina Arseniev-Koehler
Alina Arseniev-Koehler is currently a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles pursuing a PhD in Sociology. Substantively, her research interests include culture, cognitive sociology, language, and health and illness. Methodologically, she is interested in computational social science and machine-learning, with a focus on the computational analysis of language. Her Master’s research aimed to provide a cognitively plausible, computational account of the schemata activated by news reporting on obesity. Alina also enjoys learning and teaching new computational techniques and helps coordinate the Computational Sociology Working Group at UCLA.
Jennie E. Brand
Jennie E. Brand is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is Director of the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) and Co-Director of the Center for Social Statistics (CSS) at UCLA. She is Chair-Elect of the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and an elected Board Member of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committte on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28). Prof. Brand is a member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey (GSS) and a member of the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She received the ASA Methodology Leo Goodman Mid-Career Award in 2016, and honorable mention for the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility William Julius Wilson Mid-Career Award in 2014. Prof. Brand studies social stratification and inequality, mobility, social demography, education, and methods for causal inference.
Pablo Geraldo Bastías
Pablo Geraldo Bastías is a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) affiliated to the California Center for Population Research (CCPR). His research examines how institutions influence inequality in education and the labor market, with a particular focus on skill formation systems and school-to-work transitions. He is interested in the intersection of causality, machine learning, and network analysis.
Bernard Koch
Bernard is a sociology graduate student at UCLA. He developed research interests in culture, science, and computational methods through previous experiences in comparative genomics/bioinformatics and science education research. His master's thesis adapted models from macroevolutionary biology to explain the historical trajectories of cultural populations like music genres, scientific fields, and industries. For his dissertation, he'd like to focus on how deep learning can be applied to network and causal inference problems to help identify how we can make science more efficient, productive, and equitable. Bernard is passionate about collaborative science and teaching, and has given workshops on programming, machine learning, and/or computational social science for the National Human Genome Research Institute (NIH), the UCLA Library, and the UCLA Sociology Department.
Lily An
I am a PhD student in Education Policy and Program Evaluation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I am interested in improving the use and interpretation of educational measures, such as student test scores, in causal inference methods. I hope to study how educational agencies can best deploy the administrative, achievement, and student outcome data that they have to identify which students need what targeted supports across varied contexts.
Carolina Aragão
Carolina Aragão is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and a Population Research Center graduate trainee at the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests are at the intersection of family demography, race, and stratification in Latin America and the United States.
Colin Bernatzsky
Colin Bernatzky is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation draws on ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and survey data to examine the sociocultural determinants of vaccine skepticism, with a particular focus on the interactional dynamics, group norms and metaphors that foster and sustain opposition to vaccination. In collaborative projects, he has studied the effects of exposure to right-wing virtual extremism, perceptions of social movement framing and source credibility, and the causes, costs and consequences of homelessness in Orange County.
Isha Bhallamudi
Isha Bhallamudi is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC Irvine. Her research interests are in gender, technology, work, culture and inequality in India. She holds an Integrated MA in Development Studies from IIT Madras and an MA in Social and Demographic Analysis from UC Irvine. Broadly, she is interested in studying how digital technology shapes society, and is passionate about studying and addressing gender inequality using participatory methods. Her dissertation will focus on the gender dynamics of app-mediated work in India.Laura Breen
Laura Breen is Provost’s Fellow in the Social Sciences and a Ph.D. student in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on international law, global governance, and non-state actors. Her previous work has focused on the transformation and subsequent governance effects of the movement to pass the nuclear ban treaty, as well as the network structure of actors attempting to address the humanitarian implications of lethal autonomous weapons systems. Laura received her BA from Pomona College in International Relations and an MPhil in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge, where she attended as a Rotary Global Grant Scholar in Conflict and Peace Promotion. When not thinking about international relations, Laura enjoys making the most of all L.A. has to offer, including seeing live comedy, going to the beach, and failing to recognize celebrities in the wild.
Myrna Cadena
Myrna is a PhD student in the Animal Biology graduate group at UC Davis, where she earned her BS in Animal Science and MS in Avian Sciences. Her goal is to combine her interests in animal health, epidemiology and social science to increase vaccine compliance in backyard poultry and game fowl flocks in Southern California.Amit Haim
JSD Candidate, Stanford Law School
Nicole Han
Nicole Han is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UCSB. Her main research interest lies in understanding the mechanisms, both shared and distinct, that humans and machines use to perform visual tasks. She has worked on investigating the degree to which different facial features contribute to the guidance of the first (and most critical) eye movements onto faces. She utilized deep-learning techniques to improve the quality of visual prostheses with limited resolutions. Her dissertation topic is aiming to understand how our perception of another person's direction of gaze affects where and what we attend to in real-world environments. In addition, she is working on training computer vision models to understand human visual attention (gaze direction). In general, she is interested in combining measurements of human behavior (psychophysics, eye tracking), computational neuroscience, and machine learning techniques to identify the neural, cognitive, and perceptual mechanisms underlying critical visual tasks.
Michelle Io-Low
My name is Michelle Io-Low. I am a PhD candidate Stony Brook University's Department of Political Science. Broadly speaking, my research interests centers around public opinion and political behavior. Much of my work centers around understanding how people form opinions related to economic inequality. I am studying how political ideology, political emotions, and political identities affect beliefs about inequality and redistribution, and the relevant political behaviors.
Joyce Yanru Jiang
I'm Joyce Yanru Jiang, current PhD student in Communication at UCLA, specialize in the intersection of political communication and computational method. I’m interested in understanding how social media could positively or negatively affect the marginalized communities in a democratic society. I also emphasize on using social movement as an empirical approach for my research. The computational methods I commonly use include NLP, computer vision, network analysis, clustering, etc.
Yunxin Li
Yunxin Li is a Ph.D. Candidate in the history department of Stanford. Her research focuses on the political, social, and gender history of early China, as well as classical Chinese texts and manuscripts. She is interested in using digital methods for historical research, especially network, spatial, and text analysis.
Amy Mahler
I am a PhD student at the Department of Economics, University of Southern California (USC) and a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR). My research interests are in studying public systems in the U.S., particular the criminal justice and healthcare systems.
Kathryn McConnell
Kathryn is a PhD candidate at Yale School of the Environment where she studies environmental sociology. Her dissertation examines the effects of wildfire damage on migration and settlement patterns across the United States, and draws on both geospatial and qualitative methods.
Geidy Mendez
Geidy Mendez is a rising second year Ph.D. Political Science student at the University of California- Irvine. Her research concentrates on Race and Ethnicity Politics, focusing on Latinx identity politics. She is interested in observing the relationship between socialization, immigration, and political behavior among different generations of Latinx identifying people in the United States. She hopes to use both qualitative and quantitative methods to tell the story of generational political thought and behavior. She received her undergraduate from Rutgers University - New Jersey. She is a first-generation Guatemalan from East Orange, New Jersey.
Ann Obadan
Ann Obadan is a doctoral candidate at the Harry S. Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, University of Missouri-Columbia where she is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Non-profit management. Ann received a master’s degree in Public and International Affairs from the University of Lagos, Nigeria and a has a bachelor’s degree in French Language from the University of Benin, Nigeria. Her research focuses on evaluating policies and programs affecting immigrants and underserved population. In her dissertation, Ann quantitatively examines how policies and programs like school finance reforms, financial aid and immigration enforcement policies impacts immigrants’ secondary education outcomes as well as college choice. A key component of her research agenda apart from outcome evaluation is using new data and tools like text analysis to demystify program and policy implementation.
Viki Papidakis
Viki is a Ph.D candidate in social psychology at UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on culture and close relationship development. Specifically, Viki studies the ways in which our cultural backgrounds (e.g., national culture, socioeconomic status culture) influence our relationship-building behaviors and, subsequently, the relationships we form.
Morgan Rogers
Morgan Rogers is a PhD student in Urban Planning at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research falls within social-environmental systems scholarship and uses a combination of geospatial, machine learning, and participatory research methods to investigate urban biodiversity and ecosystem service outcomes such as microclimate regulation. She is particularly interested in the relationship between urban built form and avian biodiversity outcomes. Her work as a graduate student researcher at the Luskin Center of Innovation focuses on the differential impacts of urban form on microclimate regulation.
Debanjan Roychoudhury
Debanjan Roychoudhury is a Ph. D. candidate and Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellow in the department of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Originally from Queens, New York, Debanjan attended Middlebury College in Vermont on the full-tuition Posse Foundation Leadership Scholarship and participated in the Leadership Alliance Summer Research-Early Identification Program at Columbia University in 2015, setting him on the path to graduate school. Debanjan has participated in activist organizing and has performed as a spoken word/Hip Hop artist around the country since adolescence and his dissertation focuses on historic police violence and protest in the community of Jamaica, Queens.
Aspen Russell
Aspen Russell is currently a PhD student studying information science at Cornell University. Aspen studies the emergence and maintenance of norms in online spaces. Specifically, she studies the impact of harassment and hate speech as it relates to identity. Her research is founded on an intersectional framework primarily using surveys, interviews, and content analysis. Currently, she is studying how online groups create and maintain prosocial spaces while dealing with conflict, with the intention to use results to inform platform moderation and public policy.
Steven Schmidt
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Irvine. I research housing searches, family wellbeing, and social support.
Roberto Velazquez
Roberto Velazquez is a PhD student in Sociology at UC (Chile). His main research interests include social network analysis, historical sociology, economic sociology, and the sociology of arts. His dissertation explores how state-level economic regulations shape aesthetic dispositions, cultural markets, and art socialization in Chile and Argentina. His methodological work focuses on measuring the transmission and circulation of aesthetic values in contemporary Latin America. As of today, he intends to apply unsupervised machine learning techniques such as text analysis and topic modeling to study narrative networks and small-world effects.
Hanning Wang
I am a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. I am interested in using text analysis and media data to study framing and social movements. I investigate how social movements are portrayed or “framed” in the mainstream media across political contexts and news outlets, as well as how mainstream media shape the way we perceive political conflicts.
Jonathan Ware
Jonathan Ware is a third year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at UC Irvine. Their research primarily occupies the intersection between social psychology and network analysis where they pursue questions around identity construction and identity maintenance within group settings.
Christina Wilmot
Christina is a PhD student in sociology at UCLA. Previously, she studied computer science and worked as a software engineer at Google. She is interested in the varying intersections of technology and society, including using novel computational methods to analyze social information, studying online social behavior, and looking at the effects of the adoption of new technologies on a society. She also aims to make computational methods more accessible to social researchers from a variety of substantive and methodological fields.
Shira Zilberstein
Shira Zilberstein is a doctoral student in the department of sociology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on cultural sociology, sociology of knowledge and science and technology studies using computational and qualitative methods. She is interested in the production, circulation and interpretation of ideas. To this end, she has conducted research on grassroots artists, international non-governmental organizations and American college students. Currently, she is researching how journalists and academics use new media platforms as part of their professional activities and the implications of digital platforms for the dissemination of information, legitimation of expertise and structure of the public sphere.Montréal
All Participants
Vissého Adjiwanou
Vissého Adjiwanou is a professor of Demography and quantitative and computational methods in the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and adjunct professor at the Department of Demography (Université de Montréal). He directs the Lab on quantitative and computational social science. He is also affiliated with the Centre on Population Dynamics (McGill University). He received an M.A in Statistics from the National School of Statistics and Applied Economics (ENSEA-Cote d’Ivoire), an M.A in Economics of Development at the Centre for Studies and Research on International Development (CERDI- France) and a PhD in Demography from the Université de Montréal (Canada). His research focusses on population issues in sub-Saharan Africa and in Canada, including fertility, family dynamics, gender inequality, reproductive health, and integration of immigrants from SSA in Canada.
Ashton Anderson
Anderson Ashton is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he is also a Faculty Affiliate with both the Vector Institute and the Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2015 and completed a postdoctoral appointment at Microsoft Research NYC in 2017. His research in computational social science encompasses a diverse range of questions at the intersection of AI, data, and society. His work has appeared in top-tier venues including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Management Science, and the International Conference on Machine Learning. He received a best paper runner-up award at WWW 2014, was invited to the 2016 TKDD Special Issue of Best Papers of KDD 2016, and won the 2012–2015 Google PhD Fellowship in Social Computing. His presentation for this Summer school will focus on The Cultural Structure of Online Platforms.
Golnoosh Farnadi
Golnoosh Farnadi is an assistant professor at the decision sciences department at HEC Montréal and a core academic member at Mila (Quebec AI Institute). She develops novel machine learning and AI models to tackle fairness and ethics in AI. Her recent work has mainly focused on addressing bias and algorithmic discrimination in decision making models. Golnoosh completed her PhD in Computer Science at KU Leuven and Ghent University in 2017, and then she became a postdoctoral researcher at the Statistical Relational Learning Group (LINQS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2021, Golnoosh was appointed a Canada AI CIFAR chair. She has significant collaborative experience with both academia and industry including Microsoft research, UCLA, University of Washington, and Tsinguha University. These successful collaborations are reflected in over 40 publications in international conferences and journals. Among her numerous accomplishments, Golnoosh has received two paper awards for her work on statistical relational learning frameworks. For this Summer School, She will present on Fairness in Machine Learning.
Anatoliy Gruzd
Gruzd Anatoliy is a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Privacy-Preserving Digital Technologies, an Associate Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management and the Director of Research at the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University. He is also a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, a co-editor of a multidisciplinary journal on Big Data and Society, and a founding co-chair of the International Conference on Social Media and Society. As a computational social scientist, Dr. Gruzd’s research broadly explores how social media platforms are changing the ways in which people and organizations communicate, collaborate, disseminate information and misinformation, conduct business and form communities online, and how these changes impact society. Dr. Gruzd’s expertise lies in studying online communities and social networks, and developing new computational methods and tools to study public discourse on social media sites in a wide variety of domains. For this Summer School, He will present on Computational Approaches to Studying Anti-Social Behavior in Social Media.
Éric Lacourse
Lacourse Éric est professeur titulaire au Département de sociologie à l’Université de Montréal. Il est présentement Responsable du Baccalauréat bidisciplinaire psychologie et sociologie et anciennement directeur du Microprogramme en statistiques sociales. Il s’intéresse dernièrement à l’intégration des approches en apprentissage automatique aux données complexes. Il arbore une perspective multidisciplinaire qui intègre des concepts théoriques provenant de la psychologie développementale et de l'éducation, de la psychiatrie, de la criminologie et de la sociologie. Dans le présent projet, il offrira une expertise méthodologique dans l’analyse des données, ainsi qu’une expertise théorique sur les impacts sociaux du changement en lien avec l’identité et la personnalité. Sa présentation pour cette école d'été portera sur Algorithmes d’apprentissage et modèles statistiques.
Peter McMahan
Peter McMahan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago. His work centers on the ways that communication and other interaction informs and reinforces knowledge and cultural domains. He specializes in statistical modeling and computational methodologies, with particular focus on network analysis and methods for social inference on large, unstructured datasets. For this Summer School, He will present on Culture, knowledge, and data.
Roxana Arana
Roxana Arana is a PhD student in demography at the University of Montreal (UdeM), she holds a master’s degree in science and a bachelor’s degree in statistics. Her work focuses on the analysis of the Mexican demographic transition, the change in family dynamics and the evolution of indigenous populations from the beginning of the 20th century to its current state. She is also interested in the operationalization of social phenomena such as human development, rurality, socioeconomic development, social inequity, education, violence, and gender equity. She is a teaching assistant in the Department of Demography at UdeM as well as a research assistant in the Research Program in Historical Demography group of the Canadian Population (PRHD). She is also a Senior Research in the Social Statistics group of the Statistics Department at the Universidad Autónoma Chapingo in Mexico.
Alhiani Brahim
Alhiani Brahim est enseignant chercheur à l’Université Cadi Ayyad, Marrakech et membre du laboratoire: Sciences Sociales et transformations sociétales. Il a décroché son doctorat de Sociologie en 2018. Ses intérêts de recherche portent principalement aussi bien sur la sociologie du travail et des entreprises à savoir l’égalité des genres au sein des coopératives féminines, la formation et la culture organisationnelle chez les jeunes entrepreneurs, que sur la question de l’enseignement des méthodes de recherche, la modélisation et l’analyse des données en Sociologie.
Yingying Chen
Yingying Chen is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the College of Information and Communications, University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on understanding the relationship between news media, political actors, and publics in spreading information about a variety of social issues in the digital media landscape. She is passionate about integrating her studies with computational social science methods, such as text mining, supervised/unsupervised machine learning, data mining, and network analysis. She is also interested in exploring approaches to produce theoretical contributions with computational social science methods. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Information and Media from Michigan State University, a M.S. degree in Integrated Marketing Communications from Medill School of Journalism from Northwestern University, a M.A. degree in International Journalism and Communication from Tsinghua University, a B.A. degree in English Language and Literature, and a minor in Corporate Finance from Nankai University, China. Prior to entering academia, she was Nairobi bureau chief for China’s Xinhua News Agency.
Maria Alejandra Costa
Maria Alejandra Costa est candidate au doctorat de Sciences Politiques à l'Université de Montréal. Elle est affiliée au Centre Interuniversitaire de recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST) et au Centre de Recherche sur les Politiques et le Développement Social (CPDS). Elle a une maitrise en sciences politiques de l'Universidad Torcuato Di tella (UTDT) de Buenos Aires et une maitrise en marketing quantitatif de l'Université Technologique de Buenos Aires (ITBA). Ses recherches portent sur la dynamique de l’agenda politique en Amérique du Sud et le rôle des groupes d’intérêts et des médias dans la politique publique.
Khaoula El Khalil
Khaoula is a graduate student in political science under the supervision of Frédérick Bastien and Samuel Tanner (Department of Criminology) at the Université de Montréal. She is also a research assistant in the department of political science and a member of the GRCP (Groupe en communication politique) and CECD (Centre pour l'étude de la citoyenneté démocratique). Her research interests focus on online radicalization and right-wing extremism. In particular, she is interested in how the radical right frames its discourse during the Covid-19 period.
Roland Narcisse Elandi
Roland Narcisse Elandi is a research assistant at the Institute for Training and Demographic Research (IFORD). He participated as Data Analytics in the realization of several projects and studies. He is interested in reproductive health, gender-based violence and modeling of demographic dividend. His thesis project seeks to understand how gender inequalities linked to domestic violence interact with household and community characteristics to influence the use of family planning in the countries of the Lake Chad Basin.
Ryder Gillespie
Ryder Gillespie est doctorant en sociologie à l’Université de Montréal. Intéressé par la nature, les sciences et par la dimension politique et morale des phénomènes humains, il rédige actuellement une thèse qui interroge les difficultés des sciences sociales et notamment de la sociologie, à être reconnu comme des sciences. Matérialiste, il considère que les développements technologiques actuels, orientés à des fins de connaissances, seront à même de révéler aux chercheurs des dimensions collectives de la réalité qui leur étaient jusque-là inaccessibles. Néanmoins, conscient des enjeux éthiques et des limites pratiques liés à la mise en œuvre et à l’usage de ces technologies, son travail se concentre dans un premier temps à essayer de formuler et si possible de démontrer les conditions de possibilité d’une science du social.
Wenqing Huangfu
Wenqing Huangfu is an incoming graduate student in Social Research Methods at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She earned a bachelor's degree (Honours) in Political Science from the University of Macau. She studies comparative politics with a focus on China. She is also interested in political methodology.
Emmanuel Idohou
Emmanuel Idohou est doctorant en Démographie à l'Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgique) et affilié au laboratoire DEMO (centre de recherche en Démographie) en cotutelle avec l'institut national (français) des études démographique (INED). Ses recherches portent sur la mortalité infanto-juvénile (MIJ) des enfants d'immigrés et des natifs français et belges. Il s'agira d'analyser la MIJ selon l'origine migratoire et selon le statut administratif des immigrés à partir de deux sources différentes: le registre belge de population et l'échantillon (français) démographique permanent (EDP).
Anne Imouza
Anne Imouza is a M.A student in political science at the Université de Montréal (Canada). She also completed her Honours B.A in political science at Université de Montréal. Her research interests include quantitative methods and public opinion in Canada and in the United States. Her research project focuses on using artificial intelligence for the study of social bots and public opinion in social media environments.
Soro Kassoum
Soro Kassoum est un étudiant en Master 2 Démographie à l'Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD) Yaoundé-Cameroun. Il est titulaire d'une Licence en Mathématiques et d'une Maitrise en Probabilité-Statistiques à l'Université Nangui Abrogoua (UNA-Côte d'Ivoire). Ses recherches en sciences de la population portent sur les tendances de la non-vaccination des enfants de 12 à 23 mois en Côte d'Ivoire.
Yao Jean Kouadio
Yao Jean Kouadio est admis en doctorat de sociologie au département de Sociologie à l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il est actuellement Assistant de Recherche à l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Statistique et d'Economie Appliquée (ENSEA) à Abidjan où il participe à la mise en œuvre de plusieurs études notamment en santé. Il est consultant en Analyse des données à Jhpiogo Côte d'Ivoire. Il a obtenu un master en démographie à l'IFORD. Ses champs de recherche sont santé maternelle et infantile, inégalité sociale, genre et transformation des familles en Afrique à l'aire du numérique.
Didier Stéphane Legbre
Didier Stéphane Legbre est étudiant en Master 2 à l’Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD). Il a obtenu en 2016 à l’Université Felix Houphouët Boigny, sa licence en géographie humaine. Il s’intéresse aux questions relatives à la santé maternelle et infantile. Son mémoire de Master porte sur « Facteurs individuels et contextuels de la discontinuité des soins néonatals biomédicaux ». Il a aussi obtenu, le prix du meilleur poster scientifique dans le cadre de la deuxième journée de sensibilisation sur le suivi des ODD en Afrique.
Rabelai Marchal Aka
Rabelai Marchal Aka est un étudiant en deuxième année de Démographie à l'Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD) de l'Université de Yaoundé II (Cameroun) et titulaire d'une Licence en analyse des phénomènes économiques, puis d'un Master Recherche en économie option Politique Economique et Modélisation de l'Université Alassane Ouattara de Bouaké (Côte d'Ivoire). Son mémoire de fin de formation porte sur : Pratiques alimentaires et état nutritionnel des enfants de 0 à 23 mois en Côte d'Ivoire.
Miranda Melson
Miranda Melson is a PhD student of Sociology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research examines social inequality and globalization, which includes transracial adoption, sexual violence, and gender equity. Miranda employs mixed research methods of social network analysis, text analysis, and qualitative coding. She is currently a graduate research assistant for a National Science Foundation-funded project on the diffusion of gender equity ideas among ADVANCE program networks. Miranda has previously published in PLOS One journal.
Rafael Mesquita
Rafael Mesquita is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Political Science Department of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE, Brazil), researcher at the 'Núcleo de Estudos de Política Comparada e Relações Internacionais' (NEPI, UFPE) and Associate Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA, Hamburg). He has conducted his undergraduate and graduate studies at UFPE, Sciences-Po, GIGA-Hamburg and Oxford. He is presently the coordinator of the research project 'The Global South in Numbers' and publishes on Regionalism, Emerging Powers, Brazilian Foreign Policy and the UN, mainly applying quantitative methods. His work has been featured on Third World Quarterly, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Global Society, Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, among others.
Soumya Mishra
Soumya Mishra is a PhD Candidate in International Development, University of Oxford. Her research uses ethnographic methods to understand various exclusions that internal migrants face within India when they migrate in search for work and employment. Her other research interests include urban-rural divides in India and its implications on democratic politics and she aspires to use mixed methods and computational methods to analyse networks of migration, map exclusions or integration into local cultures and its impact on political preferences for future research.
Jackson Engala Moduka
Jackson Engala Moduka est étudiant en master en démographie à l'Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD). Ses recherche portent sur la violence entre les partenaires intimes.
Exaucé Ngadandé
Exaucé Ngadandé est doctorant en démographie à l'université de Montréal. Ses activités de recherche portent sur l'influence du niveau d'éducation de la femme sur les rapports de genre au sein du ménage et le processus de préparation à l'accouchement en recourant à une approche méthodologique multiniveau. Ses centres d'intérêt se concentrent essentiellement sur la santé de la reproduction, le genre et l'éducation dans le contexte africain, précisément l'Afrique subsaharienne.
Vanessa Amina Ngamtiate
Vanessa Amina Ngamtiate est titulaire d’un Master Professionnel en Démographie à l’Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD)/Université de Yaoundé II (Cameroun), d’une Licence en Géographie Physique à l’Université de Yaoundé I (Cameroun). Ses centres d’intérêt portent sur l’égalité de sexes et l’autonomisation des femmes, la migration et le développement, la dynamique démographique et les approches méthodologiques en sciences sociales. Elle est membre de l’Association Internationale des Démographes de la Langue Française (AIDELF) et de l’Union pour l’Etude de la population Africaine (UEPA).
Rose Ngo Mandjeck
Ngo Mandjeck Rose est diplômée de l'Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographique (IFORD) et une licence en sociologie option population et développement. Elle est en service au Ministère de l'Économie, de la Planification et de l'Aménagement du Territoire au Cameroun. Lauréate à la Bourse ARES, pour le ''Master de spécialisation en science de la sante publique-méthodes appliquées à la santé globale'' pour le compte de la rentrée 2021-2022, elle est intéressée à l'application des méthodes computationnelles dans le cadre de la santé publique. Aussi, elle porte un intérêt particulier sur la santé de la population en générale et celle des populations vulnérables en particulier ceci dans la continuité de son mémoire de master en science de la population, qui s'est appesanti sur la recherche des déterminants de la survie des enfants de moins de 5 ans au Cameroun.
Aoudou Njingouo Mounchingam
Aoudou Njingouo Mounchingam is a PhD candidate in quantitative and computational social sciences at the Université du Quebec à Montréal. His research project focuses on the application of machine learning and deep learning methods in the study of mortality child in low and middle income countries. He is currently completing a M.A in applied mathematics, statistics at Aix Marseille University (France) and received an M.A in demography at the Institut of Training and Demographics Research (IFORD-Cameroon), as well an M.A in mathematics at the Higher Teacher Training College of Yaounde (Cameroon).
Catharina O'Donnell
Catharina O'Donnell is a PhD student in the sociology department at Harvard. She completed her BA in sociology and political science at McGill. She is interested in using mixed methods to study social movements. In particular, Cat is interested in right-wing social movements as well as interactions between movements.
Idrissa Ouattara
Idrissa Ouattara est un doctorant en mesure et évaluation à l’université Laval. Son projet de recherche porte sur l’effet des facteurs de l’admission en médecine sur les performances des étudiants dans une perspective de parcours de vie. Il s’intéresse aussi à la santé de la reproduction des adolescentes et le genre. Avant qu’il s’engage dans un parcours doctoral, M. Ouattara a travaillé sur plusieurs projets comme le cinquième recensement général de la population et de l’habitation du Burkina Faso et le projet 'Sahelian women empowerment and demographic dividend (Projet SWEDD)'. Il travaille toujours sur ces deux projets, notamment en ce qui concerne le traitement et l’analyse des données en même temps qu’il poursuit ses recherches doctorales.
Angelina Parfenova
Angelina Parfenova is a graduate student in Data Science at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. She has been a speaker at a number of conferences, including the International Conference on Computational Social Science in Amsterdam (ICSS 15) and already has several publications in Q1-Q2 journals. Having a BA in sociology, she plans to work on introducing sophisticated analytical methods from computer science to the social studies.
Angos Avelin Peguy
Angos Avelin Peguy has a Master's degree in Demography at the Institute for Training and Demographic Research (IFORD). Currently, he is a statistician and computer scientist trained respectively at the Sub-regional Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics (ISSEA) and at the University of Yaoundé I and in service at the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Regional Development of Cameroon. He uses computational methods in particular within the framework of these consultations in data collection and analysis for Non-Governmental Organizations and her individuals research.
Aurora Perego
Aurora Perego is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and Social Research at Trento University (Italy). She holds a Research Master’s degree in Gender and Ethnicity from Utrecht University (the Netherlands) and a Bachelor’s degree in Peace Studies, International Cooperation, and Development from the University of Pisa (Italy). Aurora’s RMA thesis examined the legal status of LGBT asylum seekers in Spain and was awarded the 2018 Best Research Master’s Thesis Prize of the Humanities at Utrecht University. Her Ph.D. project investigates how LGBTQIA* civil society organisations interact in the online sphere. Her research interests broadly concern digital activism and alliances between social movement organisations, with particular attention to inter-organisational relations taking place at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.
Houlio St-Preux
Houlio St-Preux is a PhD candidate in Demography at the Université de Montréal (UdeM). He received a master in Population and Development at Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences of Mexico (Flacso-México) in 2016. He participates in research activities as part of Trajectories of Immigrant Participation in Quebec Society (TrajIPaQ) project in the Department of Demography. He has more than five years of progressive experience around Monitoring and Evaluation and Health Information System Management. His thesis project focuses on the differential fertility between women Haitian immigrant and natives of Haitian descent in Quebec.
Cesinio Tangman
Cesinio Tangman est étudiant en Master II Démographie à l'Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD) et titulaire d'une Licence en Économie Mathématique à l'Université de Dschang (Cameroun). Il est Technicien Supérieur de la Statistique à l'Institut Sous Régional de Statistique et d’Économie Appliquée (ISSEA) Yaoundé-Cameroun. Il s’intéresse aux questions de la sexualité des adolescents.
Swapna Thorve
Swapna Thorve is a PhD student in the Computer Science department at University of Virginia. She completed her Masters in Computer Science at Virginia Tech. She has a graduate certification in the Urban Computing program at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on building models and simulations for understanding residential energy consumption behavior and frameworks to enhance the smart grid.
Claude Kondo Tokpovi
Claude Kondo Tokpovi is a PhD candidate in the demography department at the Université de Montréal. He has a background in Economics before doing a Masters in Demography. I am currently preparing my thesis at the PRONUSTIC (Programme en Nutrition, Santé Transnationales et Intercontinentale) laboratory and it focuses on gender inequalities within family structures and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.
Pierre Djonrebele Wangmene
Wangmene Pierre Djonrebele, est étudiant en Master 2 à l 'Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD) à Yaoundé. Ses recherches portent sur les niveaux, tendances et déterminants individuels et contextuels de l'anémie dans les régions septentrionale et orientale du Cameroun. Il a activement participé à plusieurs autres activités de recherche comme le séminaire de formation sur les statistiques du genre organisé par l'ONU Femmes. Il a également acquis de connaissances à travers certaines journées scientifiques en l'occurrence de la deuxième journée sur le suivi des Objectifs de Développement Durable (ODD) bâtie sur le thème: assurance qualité des données dans le contexte de crise sanitaire de la Covid-19 pour un meilleur suivi des ODD en Afrique: défi pour un Démographe et un Statisticien.
Robert Djogbenou
Robert Djogbenou is a PhD candidate in Demography at the Université de Montréal. He is also student in Data Science and Machine Learning at the McGill University and in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. His research uses computational approaches to study immigrants’ socio-cultural integration in Canada. His other interests include reproductive health and family dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa. He is affiliated with the Lab on quantitative and computational social science at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Nima Zahedinameghi
Nima Zahedinameghi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Lab on quantitative and computational social science at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Laval University. His current research agenda revolves around the combined application of social and complex systems theory and formal methods such as agent-based modelling and computational techniques. Methodologically, he is interested in using artificial intelligence for the study of human behavior in large-scale social systems.
Georges Alain Tchango Ngalé
Georges Alain Tchango Ngalé is a PhD candidate in demography at the Université de Montréal. He participates in research activities as part of Trajectories of Immigrant Participation in Quebec Society (TrajIPaQ) project in the Department of Demography. His thesis project focuses on the relationship between the health of immigrants and their participation/integration into Quebec society, using a mixed methodological approach. More generally, his heuristic fields of interest focus on population health and gender-based violence, trying to follow as much as possible a cross perspective between life course and intersectionality. He has participated in several international conferences and is the author/co-author of a scientific article and book.Oxford
All Participants
Chris Barrie
Christopher Barrie is a political sociologist specializing in the study of protest, conflict, and communication. His regional specialism is the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). He is Lecturer in Computational Sociology at the School of Social & Political Science, University of Edinburgh.
Charles Rahal
Charles is a social science methodologist and applied social data scientist with a background in high-dimensional econometrics, having completed his PhD in 2016. He is particularly interested in unique data origination processes, be they unstructured or otherwise, and is an advocate for open source and reproducible academic research. He presently teaches 'Python for Sociologists' and 'Replication', both in Michaelmas term, although he has also recently given workshops and guest lectures on the themes of 'An Introduction to Machine Learning' and 'An Introduction to the Command Line'.
Francesco Rampazzo
Francesco Rampazzo is a Career Development Fellow in Marketing and Consumer Demography at the Saïd Business School and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. He is also a Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College. He is completing a PhD in Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Southampton and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. His PhD thesis focuses on the use of digital traces combined with traditional data sources to estimate the number of migrants. Francesco is a demographer with a broad range of research interests, which include digital and computational demography with applications in fertility, migration, and survey research.
Tobias Rüttenauer
Tobias Rüttenauer is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on environmental inequality, selective migration trajectories, and spatial demography. Furthermore, he is interested in quantitative spatial methods, longitudinal regression models, and the use of geographical information systems to connect different sources of administrative data.
Ken Benoit
Ken Benoit is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Methodology, LSE. His research focuses on automated, quantitative methods of processing large amounts of textual and other forms of big data – mainly political texts and social media – and the methodology of text mining. He is the creator and co-author of several popular R packages for text analysis, including quanteda, spacyr, and readtext.
David Brazel
David is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociologyat the University of Oxford working on the ERC funded CHRONO project anda Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College. His current research interests include the genetics and genomics offertility and substance use, chronobiology, the development of scalabledigital phenotypes, and the integration of geospatial data intosociogenomics.
Emanuele Del Fava
Emanuele Del Fava is a quantitative researcher with a Ph.D. in statistics, with a highly multidisciplinary research perspective (biostatistics, epidemiology, demography, health economics) and interest in computational methods anddata. His expertise is mainly in statistical modeling of infectious diseases data and international migration data.
Eszter Hargittai
Eszter Hargittai is Professor in the Institute of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich where she heads the Internet Use and Society division. She is also Fellow of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Hargittai's research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media with a particular interest in how differences in people's Web-use skills influence what they do online.
Ilya Kashnitsky
lya Kashnitsky is a Postdoctoral researcher atthe Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics. His researchfocuses on regional variations in population age structures,their dynamics and the demographic processes shaping them. His researchhas been published in The Lancet, World Development, Population Studies, Demographic Research, Genus. The earlier focus of his studies was on migration of the youths, published in Cities, Geojournal. Ilya’sinterests include topics relating to demography, population geography,spatial analysis, research evaluation, and data visualization.
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is an Associate Professor of Social Demography at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her research explores the interaction between social inequalities and demographic processes. She is particularly interested in how digital and computational innovations, both as a set of models (e.g agent-based models, microsimulation) and new types of data sources (e.g digital trace data), can contribute to social science. As an example, she has worked with other social and computer scientists to explore how digital trace data can be leveraged to measuredevelopment and gender inequality indicators.
Peaks Krafft
Dr Peaks Krafft (they/them) is Senior Lecturer and MA Internet Equalities Course Leader at the UAL Creative Computing Institute. Dr Krafft undertakes critically-oriented computer science research, academic organising, and community organising, especially recently on four issues in higher education and tech: social impacts of technology; personal and institutional accountability; anti-racism in organisations, and conflicts of interest from tech funding. Dr Krafft participates in several tech justice groups including NoTechForTyrants, United Tech and Allied Workers, and the Movement for Anti-Oppressive Computing Practices.
David Lazer
David Lazer is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, and Co-Director of NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. He is among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation and computational social science and has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, and associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science.
Robin Lovelace
Robin Lovelace is Associate Professor of Transport Data Science at the Leeds Institute for Transport Studies where he researches, develops and teaches free, open, reproducible and internationally scalable techniques for working with data to support evidence-based policies. He is author of papers and books on transport planning, energy, geographic data analysis and modelling. He leads the Transport Data Science module, which is available to students taking Data Science and Data Analytics and Data Science and Urban Analytics courses at the University of Leeds.
Laura K. Nelson
Laura Nelson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. She uses computational methods to study social movements, culture, gender, institutions, and the history of feminism. She is particularly interested in developing transparent and reproducible text analysis methods for sociology using open-source tools.
Saul Newman
Saul Newman is an interdisciplinary researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Research with a career spanning genomics, medicine, plant science, and demography. Coming from a background in medical science but a strong focus on statistics and methods, Dr Newman has a history of pursuing research questions outside of his field. This has led to disruption, but also a deeply enriching career path through academia.
Noah Waterfield Price
Noah Waterfield Price is Research Scientist at Optellum. His research specialisms include machine learning, computer vision; computer-aided diagnosis, and condensed matter physics.
Tom Robinson
Thomas Robinson is an Assistant Professor in Quantitative Comparative Politics at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Experimental Social Science (CESS) at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research interests surround representation, direct democracy and campaign finance, as well as issues within experimental methodology and computational social science.
Alexandra A. Siegel
Alexandra Siegel is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is also a nonresident fellow at Brookings in the Center for Middle East Policy and the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, as well as a faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) and New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP). Her research uses original datasets of hundreds of millions of socialmedia posts, text and network analysis, machine learning methods, and experiments to study mass and elite political behavior in the Arab Worldand other comparative contexts.
Viktoria Spaiser
Viktoria is an Associate Professor in Sustainability Research and Computational Social Sciences. She is also affiliated with the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA) and the Priestley International Centre for Climate in Leeds. Before her time at Leeds, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Stockholm Institute for Futures Studies and at the Department of Mathematics, Uppsala University in Sweden. Viktoria's current research focuses on how societies can make a rapid, fair and empowering transition to zero-emissions / zero-pollution and specifically how normative change initiated by climate change movements such as Fridays for Future can contribute to social tipping in the response to the climate crisis. In her research she uses computational social science approaches such as Agent Based Modelling, Natural Language Processing of large-scale textual data e.g. from Twitter, Dynamical Systems Modelling etc.
Mary Abed Al Ahad
Mary Abed Al Ahad is a PhD student in Geography at the University of St Andrews, UK and she is also an affiliated PhD student in the IMPRS-PHDs program at Max Planck institute. Her research interests include air pollution, weather variations, health, mortality, morbidity, and ethnic inequalities in health.
Reham Al Tamime
Reham Al Tamime is a PostDoc Researcher at Qatar Computing Research Institute.
William Allen
William Allen is a teaching fellow in Politics at St. John’s College, University of Oxford, and a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS). He examines the causes and consequences of citizen engagement with economic and political information on migration-related issues in Europe and Latin America. He holds a DPhil in Politics from Oxford, is an Associate Editor for the journal Evidence and Policy, and advocates for developing social science impact as a Public Engagement with Research Fellow at Oxford.
Hannah-Marie Büttner
Hannah-Marie Büttner is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen. Her research focuses on computational methods for the study of social movements and political communication. She holds a Research Master in Social Sciences from the University of Amsterdam.
Elis Carlberg Larsson
Elis is a doctoral student at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University. He has a MSc in Computational Social Science (Linköping University) and a BA in Sociology (Stockholm University). He investigates the formation, changes, and consequences of attitudes in three projects: 1) investigating xenophobic attitudes, 2) secularization, and 3) sexuality utilizing computational approaches like machine learning, agent-based modeling, and computational text analysis.
Hao Cui
Hao Cui is a PhD candidate in Network Science at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. Her work applies computational methods and mathematical modeling to practical data-driven problems. Her primary research interest concerns the connection of network science and social media, towards understanding the emergence of hot topics, evolution patterns of repost networks, attention dynamics, and ranking in online social networks.
Tom Edbrooke
Tom is currently studying for his MSc in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He hopes to map how vaccine narratives and actors interact on Twitter, to support better engagement strategies from medical authorities. His research interests are computational social science and social network analytics.
Ellen Frank Delgado
Ellen Frank Delgado is a doctoral student in Sociology at University of Edinburgh. Ellens research focuses on measuring inclusion in organisational settings as it pertains to historically underrepresented groups, such as racial minorities and women. Her research primarily relies on computational social science methodologies, including computational text analysis and organisational network analysis.
Mobarak Hossain
Mobarak is a doctoral candidate in Social Policy at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His work examines how different macro institutional mechanisms reinforce or offset educational and labour market inequalities by social origins focusing on developing countries. He is also interested in gender inequality, youth and well-being.
Timo Koch
Timo is a doctoral student in psychological methods at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen. His research focuses on the collection and analysis of language and behavioral data with mobile sensing technologies and machine learning. He is passionate about applying the insights to tackle societal issues (e.g., mental health, misinformation, authoritarianism).
Rhodri_Leng
Rhodri I. Leng is ESRC Fellow in the Sociology of Science at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on how findings spread through the scientific literature and shape understanding. An important element of his work involves developing methods to detect citation bias and distortions in the literature.
Yuru Li
Yuru Li is a first-year PhD candidate in the lab of “Digital Communication and Diversity of Information” at the University of Bremen. She has broad interests in computational communication, political communication, digital media and social media, false news research, image recognition communication, refugee study, discourse power, the third level of agenda setting, etc. The current research she is doing focuses on the network agenda setting on the European refugee crisis, in which mixed innovative methods, such as topic modelling, social network analysis, Quadratic Assignment Procedure (QAP), Granger Causality Test based on time series, will be adopted.
Hannah Phillips
Hannah is a Social Policy DPhil student at the University of Oxford where she researches gender-based violence against politicians. She is experienced in advancing strategic priorities including at the House of Commons and United Nations. She previously studied at Harvard University and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Hayley Pring
Hayley Pring is an Australian PhD Candidate in International Relations at Nuffield College, Oxford University. Her research interests are in political economics, political psychology and organisational behaviour. Methodologically, shes interested in using causal inference techniques through computational methods. She has a BPhil in International Relations, Political Science and History from the Australian National University and an MPhil in International Relations from Oxford.
Marti Rovira
Marti Rovira is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Sociology Department and a Non-stipendiary Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Nuffield College. His research examines questions about the intersections between social inequalities and the criminal justice system.
Nicole Schwitter
Nicole is a PhD student based at the University of Warwick. In her thesis, she investigates the effects offline gatherings between Wikipedians have on their online behaviour. She holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Leipzig and a BA from the University of Bern.
Michael Skvrnak
Michael is a PhD student at Charles University and works at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the behaviour of political elites, elections and politics in East-Central Europe. Before his PhD, he studied political science at Masaryk University and worked at Czech Radio.
Tasos Spiliotopoulos
Tasos Spiliotopoulos is a Human-Computer Interaction researcher with a focus on social technologies and human-centered design. Tasos is a postdoctoral research associate at the Newcastle University Business School in the UK, where he currently researches trust in the financial industry.
Katharina Tittel
Katharina Tittel is a doctoral student in sociology at Sciences Po Paris, where she also obtained her MA in Economic Policy. Her work applies quantitative and computational methods to questions of media framing and migration coverage. Furthermore, Katharina conducts research on class-based digital inequalities, and misinformation beliefs. Before joining Sciences Po, she worked for a German-Israeli tech start-up.
Deivyd Velasquez
Deivyd is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Bordeaux. His research focuses on the operationalization of innovation strategies in a territory, in particular on the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. He is particularly interested in the gap between the ideal recommendations proposed by researchers and the actual expectations of policymakers. His methodology combines in-depth, qualitative fieldwork with multivariate spatial analyses. Deivyd holds an MRes in Economics of Innovation and Strategic Intelligence from the University of Bordeaux, and a BA in Economics and International Relations from the University of Rosario (Colombia).
Jiani Yan
Jiani is currently an MPhil student in Sociology and Demography at the University of Oxford. Her research interest lies in improving the computational methods for forecasting mortality and morbidity. She is particularly interested in machine learning algorithms.
Fatima Zahrah
Fatima Zahrah is a Cyber Security DPhil student at Exeter College, University of Oxford. She received a BSc (Hons) degree in Computer Science from the University of Bradford. Fatima’s research interests focus around online hate and how various platforms are strategically used by cyber criminals and hate groups to form resilient networks of hate. Her work combines insights drawn from social sciences and uses methods from computer science, including natural language processing, machine learning and social media analysis.
Fanqi Zeng
Fanqi is a PhD candidate in Complex Systems at the University of Bristol. He has broad interests in complex social and natural systems. His work lies in cross-disciplinary research, such as applications in ecology, complex networks, collective dynamics, complexity economics, data science for social good, etc.
Jingwen Zhang
Jingwen Zhang is a PhD student in Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. Having a background in demography and social medicine, she is mainly interested in social determinants of health, ageing, domestic violence, and life course theory with a focus on quantitative methods. Her PhD project is on the longitudinal dynamics of rural-urban health disparity in later life in China.
Maksim Zubok
I am reading the MPhil in Politics (European Politics and Society) at Oxford University in my first year. For my main research project, I use computational text analysis to assess what citizens of the European Union think of European integration in different areas of core state powers.Princeton University
All Participants
Matthew Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he serves as the Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He is also affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers including the Office of Population Research and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.
Chris Bail
Chris Bail is 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 the Duke Population Research Institute. His research examines political polarization, culture and social psychology using tools from the field of computational social science. He is the author of Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream.
Munmun De Choudhury
Munmun De Choudhury is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where she leads the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab (SocWeB) and is affiliated with the Graphics and Visualization Center (GVU), Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), and the Machine Learning Center (ML@GT). Trained as a computer scientist, she is passionate about problems at the intersection of computer science and social science. In her 15 year research career this far, she has therefore built numerous computational methods and artifacts to make sense of human behavior and psychological state, as manifested via our online digital traces. Her research has been motivated by how the availability of large-scale online social data, with the amalgamation of advances in machine learning and grounding in human-centered approaches can help us answer fundamental questions relating to our social lives.
Sandra Aguilar Gomez
Sandra Aguilar-Gomez is an incoming postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Global Transformation (CGT) at UC San Diego. Next year (Fall 2022), she will join Universidad de Los Andes as an Assistant Professor of Economics. She holds a Ph.D. in Sustainable Development from Columbia University. She works mainly on environmental and development economics. Her interests lie primarily in understanding the consequences of environmental change and the challenges governments face in implementing policies in contexts with underlying structural inequalities or weak institutions. She is currently working on the economics of air pollution control and the impacts of temperature on financial outcomes and hospital management. On the development economics side, she is currently studying gender disparities in labor markets both in Mexico and the United States, as well as women’s health in Tanzania and Mexico.
Jacy Anthis
Jacy is a PhD student at University of Chicago and co-founder of Sentience Institute. His 2018 book, The End of Animal Farming, analyzes plant-based and cell-cultured food technologies. He has presented his research in over 20 countries, and it has been featured in The Guardian, Forbes, Vox, and other media.
Carolina Coimbra Vieira
Carolina is a Ph.D. student at Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil. Carolina’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary between computer science and the use of social media data to study the bidirectional relation between migration and cultural diffusion.
Ari Decter-Frain
Ari is a doctoral student in Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. He works on using new kinds of data to study demographic processes, and on methods for measuring political behavior. He was a 2020 Data Science for Social Good Fellow at the University of Washington. He also holds an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA from the University of Winnipeg in his home country of Canada.
Sebastian Deri
Sebastian is interested in anything that involves using data to understand issues at the intersection of the internet and society. He’s a PhD student at Cornell in psychology, and considers himself a generalist social scientist. Check out his website for some of his recent projects.
Ajua Duker
Ajua Duker is a fourth-year PhD student at Yale University primarily working under Dr. Jennifer Richeson. Ajua's research is primarily focused on the link between discrimination and health disparities. In her most recent work, she leverages the emotion regulation literature to test different emotion regulation strategies as interventions that might offset the deleterious affective outcomes that follow contending with past experiences of discrimination.
Marcos Gallo
Marcos Gallo researches the neuroscience of poverty and discrimination. His motivation directly stems from his experiences growing up in a disadvantaged neighborhood in Brazil. He has a background in Economics, including an MSc from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. When he started his studies at Brigham Young University, he became determined to dedicate his career to helping inform and create effective policies to lift those in poverty.
Orestes Hastings
Orestes “Pat” Hastings is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Pat's research broadly explores the mechanisms and processes through which economic inequalities become social inequalities, especially in the contexts of the families and parenting.
Matt Hauer
Matt Hauer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University. His research focuses on the demographic implications of climate change with a focus on how sea-level rise will influence future human migration patterns. His research merges large georeferenced social and census data with large georeferenced physical science datasets.
Andrey Indukaev
Andrey Indukaev is a postdoctoral researcher at Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki. He received his PhD in Sociology from École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay. He combines perspectives of STS, economic and political sociology to study policies promoting innovation and digitalization, as well as political action mediated by digital technology. He also works on making machine-learning workflows compatible with the research approaches of qualitative social science and humanities.
Olivia Johnson
Olivia Johnson is an Assistant Professor in Retailing and Consumer Science in Human Development and Consumer Sciences in the College of Technology at the University of Houston. She is the primary investigator on several interdisciplinary teams that focus on the intersection of social movements, consumption, and social media.
Anne Kavalerchik
Anne is a fellow of the Complex Networks and Systems NSF Research Traineeship program and a doctoral student in the departments of sociology and informatics at Indiana University. She uses social network analysis and other quantitative methods to study knowledge production and scientific innovation.
Katherine Keith
Katherine Keith is a final-year PhD student in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Working with her advisor, Brendan O'Connor, her research expands methods in machine learning and natural language processing to social data science goals including: obtaining social measurements from text data, aggregating said measurements in a statistically rigorous manner, and improving causal estimations from text. She has also applied these NLP methods to applications such automatic event extraction from news archives and studying the language of economic decision making.
Allison Koh
Allison Koh is a PhD candidate at the Centre for International Security, Hertie School in Berlin. Broadly construed, her research interests include (1) contentious politics in the digital age and (2) applications of natural language processing in political science research. Her dissertation research examines how state-sponsored online harassment campaigns factor into the repression-dissent nexus, with a focus on the Philippines.
Jeffrey Lees
Jeffrey Lees is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub. He studies the psychology of inaccurate beliefs across social and organizational contexts, and is currently pursuing varied interdisciplinary projects on misinformation. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Organizational Behavior and Social Psychology in 2020.
Felicia Loecherbach
Felicia Loecherbach is a PhD Candidate in Political Communication Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is studying the diversity of issues and perspectives in (online) news and how it is affected by recommender algorithms and selective exposure. Her other research interests include inventing new tools for studying online news consumption - such as tracking people within a news recommender system and developing a platform for data donations. Felicia obtained a Research Master in Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam (2018), and a Bachelor in Communication Science and Philosophy from the University of Erfurt (2016).
Yalidy Matos
Yalidy Matos is an assistant professor of political science and Latino and Caribbean studies at Rutgers University, NB. She earned her Ph.D. from Ohio State University. Matos’ scholarly work examines the intersections between race, ethnicity, and immigration. By drawing on theoretical frameworks from various disciplines, she uses a mixed methods approach (survey, experiments, content analysis) to understand the racialized nature of immigration politics.
Killian McLoughlin
Killian McLoughlin is a PhD student in psychology at Yale. His research focuses on the application of computational methods in moral psychology. Killian holds a BA in philosophy and an MSc in social data analytics, both from University College Dublin. He also holds a psychology H.Dip. from Trinity College Dublin.
Mario Molina
Mario D. Molina is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Social Science Division at New York University Abu Dhabi. His research centers on reward systems, prosocial behavior, and cultural integration, using a diverse statistical and computational toolkit that includes online experiments, multilevel models, machine learning, and NLP. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University, an M.A. in Sociology from Universidad Catolica de Chile, and B.A. in Philosophy from Universidad de los Andes, Chile.
Nozomi Nakajima
Nozomi is a PhD candidate in Education Policy & Program Evaluation at Harvard University. She studies how families, schools, and policymakers make educational decisions, and the consequences of these decisions on social inequality. Previously, Nozomi worked at the World Bank. She holds a master’s degree in Statistics from Harvard University.
Matthew Osborne
Matthew Osborne is a post-doctoral researcher at the Ohio State University and the Head of PhD Career Programming at the Erdős Institute. He earned his PhD in mathematics from the Ohio State University in 2020. His research focuses on the intersection of public health and digital behavior. In his role with the Erdős Institute he crafts educational content to help graduate students learn data science.
Luca Maria Pesando
Luca Maria Pesando is an Assistant Professor in Demography and Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Centre on Population Dynamics at McGill University. Luca holds a PhD in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MA and BA in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. His research lies in the areas of social, economic, and digital demography and explores the interactions between family change and educational inequalities in low- and middle-income countries. More recently, he has conducted research using social media data from Google and Facebook. Having worked with JPAL, the OECD, UNICEF, and other NGOs, Luca has extensive experience in the policy world.
Madeline Reinecke
Madeline Reinecke is a doctoral student in the Psychology Department at Yale University. Her research intersects cognitive psychology, social psychology, and moral philosophy (e.g., examining how beliefs about moral standing emerge and shift across development). Madeline earned her BSc in Psychology & Philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Tamara van der Does
Tamara van der Does is a program postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. To understand belief change at the individual and societal level, she develops and tests theoretical models grounded in statistical physics. In addition, she investigates how social boundaries between groups develop and change over time within a variety of textual corpora. She earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from Indiana University, where she also received an M.S. in Applied Statistics.
Briana Vecchione
Briana is currently a third-year PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University, where she is honored to work with Solon Barocas and Karen Levy. Her work is supported by a Facebook Fellowship and Google Women Techmakers scholarship. She is interested in the measurement and evaluation of sociotechnical systems, with particular attention to systemic issues of algorithmic bias and equity in public policy and human-centered domains. In the past, she has spent some time at Microsoft and Spotify. She is also an affiliate of AI Policy and Practice initiative and Mechanism Design for Social Good.
Tyler Walton
Tyler Walton is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is interested in using computational methods to measure culture and understand the mechanisms that generate cultural change. Tyler is currently using word embeddings to understand changes in online political discourse leading up to the 2020 election.
Jordan White
Jordan White is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Morgan State University. He received his DrPH from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, his MS in Social Work from Columbia University and his BA in History and Political Science from Case Western Reserve University.
Jia Xue
Jia Xue is an co-appointed Assistant Professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and Faculty of Information at University of Toronto. She is the founding director of the Artificial Intelligence for Justice (AIJ) lab and affiliated with Schwartz Reisman Institute at the U of T.
Renzhe Yu
Renzhe Yu is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in educational data science. His research leverages large-scale behavioral, textual and institutional analytics to understand and support the success and well-being of young adults in college contexts, and scrutinizes the fairness and equity of such analytical processes. His current work looks into online behavioral inequalities among college students at different types of institutions. Previously, Renzhe has worked as Social Good fellows at the Alan Turing Institute and IBM Research. He received a master’s degree in education policy and two bachelor’s degrees in artificial intelligence and economics, all from Peking University.
Shu (Victoria) Zhang
Victoria Zhang is an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison. Her research focuses on social networks, norm-violating practices, and behavioral change. She adopts a social networks lens to investigate how micro-level interactions shape norm-violating practices that sustain professional deviance. She obtained her PhD from Yale School of Management.
Fatima Alqabandi
Fatima Alqabandi is a doctoral student in Sociology at Duke University. She is part of the Polarization Lab, the Duke Network Analysis Center, and, more recently, she has co-founded the Duke Computational Social Science Working Group. Her current projects include running online social experiments to explore self-censorship and political polarization, as well as using agent-based modeling to better understand the dynamics of radicalization. She hopes to continue to integrate computational methods and machine learning into social scientific research.
Emily Cantrell
Emily Cantrell is a doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. She received her bachelor’s degree from Denison University in 2017, where she designed her own major in Human Development and Social Policy with a focus on socioeconomic inequality in the United States. Prior to beginning her graduate work, Emily worked at Child Trends, a research organization that evaluates programs and policies to improve the lives of children and families. Her current projects include a collaboration to assess the predictability of life trajectories using hundreds of machine learning strategies, building on findings from the Fragile Families Challenge.
Andrés Castro Araújo
Andrés Castro Araújo is a doctoral student in Sociology at Duke University. Before coming to Duke, he received an MA in Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences at Columbia University. His research interests include culture, economic sociology, and social networks. Currently he is using computational methods to understand the evolution of legal precedent in Colombia. He used to work as a researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia) in Bogotá.
Megan Kang
Megan Kang is a PhD student in Sociology at Princeton University. She studies the consequences of violence on disadvantaged communities, with the goal of identifying effective and humane ways of reducing inequality in safety and well-being. Prior to joining Princeton, she was a Teach for America corps member in Detroit and then worked on a large-scale RCT aimed at reducing gun violence at the UChicago Crime Lab. Megan is interested in how computational social science can leverage qualitative insights, and is committed to finding ethical applications of AI in public policy. Her current projects involve using in-depth interviews to find out why the Fragile Families Challenge yielded poor predictions of youth outcomes and exploring the use of computer vision on police camera footage.
Lai Wei
Lai Wei is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology, Princeton University. Before coming to Princeton, he attained a BA in sociology from Tsinghua University. Lai’s research interests include social mobility, public opinion, quantitative methodology, and China. One strand of his ongoing research tries to develop new indicators of social mobility and new methods for studying the impact of mobility that borrow insights from machine learning and causal inference. Another continuing line of research of his investigates the landscape, origin, and consequence of public opinion in China using survey, experimental, and social media data. Lai is broadly interested in how to use machine learning to help social science research.Rutgers
All Participants
Michael Kenwick
Michael Kenwick is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
Katie McCabe
Katie McCabe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
Katya Ognyanova
Katya Ognyanova is an Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.
Andrey Tomashevskiy
Andrey Tomashevskiy is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
Munmun De Choudhury
Munmun De Choudhury is Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech.
Christopher Fariss
Christopher Fariss is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan.
In Song Kim
In Song Kim is Associate Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Affiliate of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Daniel Nielson
Daniel Nielson is Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.
Hana Shepherd
Hana Shepherd is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University.
Vivek Singh
Vivek Singh is Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University.
Zhanna Terechshenko
Zhanna Terechshenko is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University.
Matthew Weber
Matthew Weber is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University.
Laura Bellows
Laura Bellows is a IES postdoctoral fellow in EdPolicyWorks at the University of Virginia; she graduated from Duke with a PhD in Public Policy from Duke University. I am a social policy scholar who studies the persistence of intergenerational inequality by race, ethnicity, and class. In my current research, I focus on describing how U.S. social policies stabilize, or destabilize, children’s lives.
Amy Benner
Amy Benner is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University and a research assistant at the Center for American Women and Politics. Her research interests include women’s political participation, barriers to representation, campaign finance, and political psychology. She primarily examines the fundraising process as a structural barrier for women candidates.
Cory Cascalheira
Cory J. Cascalheira is a doctoral student at New Mexico State University, the research project coordinator in the Minority Stress and Trauma Lab at Syracuse University, and the NICE Chair for Psi Chi. He applies computational social science to the study of minority stress and substance misuse among LGBTQIA+ populations.
Jeffrey Coltman-Cormier
Jeffrey is a PhD student in Political Science at Rutgers University and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow who earned his B.A. at Florida Atlantic University. The primary focus of his research agenda concerns the political attitudes and behavior of border residents regarding border security measures.
Haoshu Duan
Haoshu Duan is a doctoral student in sociology at University of Maryland and is also affiliated with Maryland Population Research Center (MPRC). Her research is primarily focused on patterns and health consequences of family caregiving over the life course; beyond this, she also experiments with Machine Learning technique and applies it into health research. She holds a B.A. from Zhejiang University, and a MPP from Michigan State University. She also interned at Insight Policy Research company and conducted program evaluations for WIC.
Mehri E. Baloochi
Mehri is pursuing a PhD in Organizational Behaviour at the University of Manitoba. She holds a Master’s degree in MBA from University of Tehran, and she has worked as an HR practitioner in several leading companies in Iran. Her research interests are focused on the new world of work, gig workers, resilience, and virtual identity. Her current research focuses on discrimination in online gig-work platforms.
Kelsey Edmond
Kelsey Edmond is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She employs mixed methods to study digital equity policymaking, coproduction theory, and initiatives that bridge the digital divide. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Organization and Community Leadership and a Master’s in Public Administration both from the University of Delaware, as well as a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Ilona Fridman
Ilona Fridman is a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University. Her research leverages data science to explore patient-reported outcomes in social media, inform future health communications, and prepare patients, physicians, and policymakers for decisions that lead to high-quality patient care.
Amy Funck
Amy is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Rutgers University studying the effects of emotions and socio-cognitive development on decision making. Current research includes a meta-analysis of emotions and information search, and experiments on personality and decision style, political knowledge and Gen Z, and prompting cognition in surveys.
Bijean Ghafouri
Bijean is a graduate student in political science at the University of Southern California. He holds a B.Sc in political science from the University of Montreal. His work lies at the intersection of political behavior, political communication, electoral campaigns and social media.
Stacey Greene
Stacey Greene is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University. She studies intergroup politics among and between racial/ethnic minorities in the United States.
V. Tibet Gur
Tibet Gur is a doctoral student at Rutgers Political Science department. He holds a BA and MA degree from International Relations department of Bilkent University, Turkey. His research interests include international political economy, energy regionalism, and maritime border conflict. His prior work has been published on Turkish Studies.
Jessica Hamilton
Jessica Hamilton is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University. Her research examines modifiable risk and protective factors for adolescent suicidal thoughts and behaviors, particularly focused on social media and sleep. Methodologically, she uses smartphone sensing and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine these factors in real time.
Brielle Harbin
Brielle Harbin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy. Her research examines how the American public forms opinions related to social problems in the United States (e.g. drug use and addiction and racial discrimination) as a result of their social identities, media representations, and personal experience with these issues. She investigates how these understandings emerge in the general public as well as how these same dynamics manifest and affect teaching and learning in the university classroom.
Xian Huang
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University. Before joining Rutgers, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at University of Pennsylvania. I received a PhD of Political Science from Columbia University. I just published a book, Social Protection under Authoritarianism: Health Politics and Policy in China.
Hyerim Jo
Hyerim Jo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany. Using quantitative research methods including text mining, her research focuses on the production and consumption of mediated messages in various contexts such as health, science, and environment, as well as their impacts on audiences.Stephanie Kang
Stephanie is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. She uses formal theory and quantitative data analysis to study defense cooperation between countries. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright Program, the Korea Foundation, and the Department of Education.
Isaac Kimmel
Isaac Kimmel is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Notre Dame who studies the shaping effect of cultural frames on identity formation and social change; his research often overlaps with the fields of political science, communications, philosophy, history, and theology. Isaac's dissertation uses data from US political candidates on Twitter to investigate how preexisting partisan values and loyalties formed the official response to the emerging and evolving COVID-19 pandemic. He is interested in topic modeling and other forms of automated text analysis, especially insofar as they can be integrated into a mixed-methods approach. Isaac holds an MA in sociology from Notre Dame and a BA in philosophy from the Catholic University of America.
India Lenear
India S. Lenear is currently a doctoral student at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. Her work broadly studies Women and politics, American politics, and American Political Theory. More specifically, she focuses on Black politics, identity politics, and Black feminism(s). Her research examines Black women’s political behavior, engagement, and participation through Black feminist theoretical lenses. She holds a BA in Political Science from North Carolina Central University.
YiJyun Lin
YiJyun Lin recently defended her doctoral dissertation entitled “Identifying Spatiotemporal Effects of Climate Variability on Civil Conflicts.” Her long-term research agenda concerns the use of machine learning and spatial methods to collect and analyze text and image data on the effects of climate change on local environmental degradation, resource scarcity, anti-immigration attitudes, and the emerging contentious politics.
Shuning Lu
Shuning Lu (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication, North Dakota State University. Her research interests revolve around news use, media effects, and political communication. Her recent projects explore social media news engagement, online incivility, and civic engagement with online experiments and large-scale surveys.
David Martin
David is a political science PhD student at Rutgers University where he studies American Politics, Comparative Politics, and Research Methodology. His interests are in political economy and American Political Development. His current project is on currency politics and the role of ideas in the New Deal.
Mario Mercado-Diaz
Mario Mercado Diaz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Sociology program at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His dissertation studies the effects Spanish Caribbean migrants have on the receiving communities of Houston, TX. More broadly, he is interested in land use and housing, aging and health equity, and migrant deportation.
Katlyn Milless
Katlyn is a PhD candidate in Basic and Applied Social Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research lives at the intersection of social justice and psychological theory. She investigates factors to upend group disparities in education and the workplace, as well as ways to promote intergroup safety more broadly.
Zhaomeng Niu
Zhaomeng Niu is a postdoctoral fellow in Behavioral Sciences at Rutgers Cancer Insititute of New Jersey. She received her PhD from Washington State University. Her research interests include social media interventions, human-computer interaction, and health communication.
Francisco Olivos
Francisco Olivos is a PhD candidate at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He will join the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He also obtained a master's degree in Sociology and Social Research from Utrecht University. His research interests are cultural sociology, education, stratification, and subjective well-being.
Salomey Osei
Salomey holds a Master of Philosophy in Applied Mathematics from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. She is the Research lead of unsupervised methods for Ghana NLP and a co organizer for the Women in Machine Learning and Data Science (WiMLDS) Accra chapter. She is also passionate about mentoring students, especially females in STEM and her long term goal is to share her knowledge with others by lecturing.
Emirhan Özkan
Emirhan Özkan is a doctoral student in political science at Rutgers University. His research interests lie in the intersection of international relations and comparative politics. Emirhan is particularly interested in the foreign policy, public opinion, foreign meddling with a methodological interest in experimental methods. His current research examines the public opinion towards foreign electoral interventions.
Nick Paulson
Nick Paulson is a doctoral student in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the role of postsecondary curriculum requirements like general education courses in long-term outcomes ranging from the labor market to democratic participation.
Annamaria Prati
Annamaria Prati is a doctoral student in the Political Science department at Washington University in St. Louis. Her current research seeks to develop quantitative methods for international relations research. She holds a B.A. from Stanford University, a M.A. from University of Chicago, and a M.A. from Columbia University.
Ian Reynolds
Ian Reynolds is a PhD student at American University School of International Service. His research focuses on how socio-historical processes generate the parameters for the adoption of artificial intelligence in US national security decision-making. He is also interested in exploring how interpretive and computational methodologies can be paired in social science research.
Alexandra Ruth
Ali Ruth is a PhD candidate in Health Policy & Bioethics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research interests include food insecurity, vaccine policy, and research ethics. Her dissertation research focuses on vaccine access and equity for older adults in the U.S. Previously, she worked as a Senior Research Assistant at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Elisabeth Silver
Elisabeth Silver is a doctoral student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Rice University. Her research merges computational and experimental methods to study workplace diversity and discrimination. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a research analyst at Columbia University Medical Center. Elisabeth holds a BS from the University of Michigan.
Eric Stokan
Eric Stokan is assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and a faculty affiliate with the Indiana University Metropolitan Governance and Management Transitions Lab (MGMT) as well as at the Center for Urban Studies at Wayne State University. His research focuses on explaining tradeoffs of local governments between economic development, sustainability, and social equity policies, as well as evaluating the programmatic effectiveness of these policies which is currently supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Michael Strawbridge
Michael is a PhD student in political science at Rutgers University who earned his B.A. from Beloit College. His primary field is American politics, with interests in Black political behavior and public opinion, political communication, and political psychology. Michael is interested in survey methodology, text analysis, and experiments.
Frances Wang
Frances Yaping Wang is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Singapore Management University. She received my Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. She studies public opinion on foreign policy issues in authoritarian states and state propaganda. Her research draws on archival work, survey experiments, and computerized content analysis.
Ryan Wang
Ryan Wang is a Ph. D. student majoring in Mass Communications and minoring in Social Data Analytics at Penn State. His broad research interests aim at investigating the development of ICTs and the backbone Internet infrastructure, and their interlocked impacts on political polarization and economic development within a spatial structure.
Pengfei Zhao
Pengfei Zhao is a first-year Ph.D. student in communication at Cornell University. Her research interest lies at the intersection of new communication technology, interpersonal communication, and well-being.
Burcu Kolcak
Burcu Kolcak is a doctoral student in the political science department at Rutgers University.
Katie Krumbholz
Katie Krumbholz is a doctoral student in the political science department at Rutgers University.
Gabriel Varela
Gabriel Varela is a doctoral student in the Sociology department at Duke University.
Luxuan Wang
Luxuan Wang is a doctoral student in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.Stellenbosch
All Participants
Richard Barnett
Richard is a lecturer in the Department of Information Science at Stellenbosch University. He is a co-founder of the Computational Social Science Group at SU and is the group's resident Computer Scientist. His current research focus is on deep learning on graphs.
Douglas Parry
Douglas is a lecturer in the Department of Information Science at Stellenbosch University. He is a co-founder of the Cognition and Technology Research group and his research concerns the interplay between digital technologies, human cognition, behaviour, performance, and affective well-being across a variety of life-situations.
Petrus Schoonwinkel
Petrus is a lecturer in the Department of Information Science at Stellenbosch University. He completed his masters in social network analysis, specialising in classification of social media accounts and is a member of the Computational Social Science Group. His research focuses on using machine learning and computational social science to identify automated agents on Twitter.
Ifedotun Aina
Ifedotun Aina is a doctoral student in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town. He is specializing in water resources management and public policies under drought. He is interested in learning new methodological skills that would be useful in understanding the optimal allocation of urban water resources and environmental sustainability. He is also interested in exploring computational methods that would aid in understanding the effects of piped water pricing on households’ choice of water source and the implications of transaction costs for groundwater policy regime implementation to mitigate water scarcity.
Saptarko Biswas
Saptarko Biswas is a Doctor of Law candidate at Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel, Germany, and has been awarded the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation doctoral scholarship. Previously, he completed his Master’s in European and International Law at Saarland University, Germany, with the DAAD scholarship.
Lee Blake
Lee Blake is a master's student in research psychology at Stellenbosch University. He has a background in advertising as a copywriter and strategist spanning ten years. His thesis focuses on an empirical investigation of the role that childhood contact norms and intergroup experiences play in determining acculturation strategies and psychosocial outcomes in educational settings characterised by diversity and social hierarchies.
Shaka Bob
PhD in Sociology Candidate
Konstantin Bogatyrev
Konstantin Bogatyrev is a PhD student in Public Policy at Bocconi University in Milan. He majored in economics at Lomonosov Moscow State University, followed by a master’s at Higher School of Economics in Moscow and Humboldt University, Berlin. In 2019, he started his PhD to pursue a research career.
Annie Burger
Annie Burger is a PhD candidate at the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University. The focus of her PhD study is the effective use of plain language. She has experience in information design and learning design.
Mennatullah Hendawy
An assistant lecturer at the Department of Urban Planning and Design in Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, and a Ph.D. Candidate at the Chair of Urban Design, TU Berlin who submitted her dissertation. She is a member of the urban AI network and the project is relevant to her Ph.D. thesis on the mediatization of planning and how different forms of media become a question of social and spatial justice. Mennatullah’s role in the project is social justice and urban communication expert and post-doctoral researcher with previous experience of teaching Cairo’s urban planners.
Eric Magale
Magale is PhD candidate in Development studies at the University of Pretoria under the Human Economy Programme. His research explores financial inclusion in Kenya through the lens of digital and co-operative lending models. He holds a Master’s degree in Development Finance from the GSB University of Cape Town and is a Chartered Accountant (ACCA).
Theo Maseloanyane
Theo is an Mphil Candidate in Public Policy and Administration at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on evaluating mobile e-government as a channel to broaden access to public services in the developing world. Recently, she worked on emerging technology policy (such as AI and IoT) as well as privacy legislation at Intel.
Katherine Steinke
I am a postgraduate student in History at Stellenbosch. I am doing my thesis on the history of aviation. In my free time, I enjoy running and art projects. I enjoy learning and being able to network.
Jeanré Süllwald
Jeanré Süllwald is a master's student at Stellenbosch University. She holds BCom and BCom Hons degrees in business management, specialising in marketing management. Her master's thesis examines the interplay between fanaticism and toxicity in online video gaming communities and the subsequent effect it has on customer acquisition and retention. While pursuing her degree, Jeanré also works at a tech startup in Stellenbosch. This, in conjunction with her research being in the digital realm, has sparked an interest in data science and data analytics.
Dechun Zhang
Dechun Zhang is a PhD candidate at Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands. He received his master degree from Erasmus Mundus program in Journalism Media and Globalization at Aarhus University and University of Amsterdam.Taipei, Taiwan (National Chengchi University)
All Participants
Feng-Yi Liu
Feng-Yi Liu received his BA and MA degree in Social Welfare at National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. He also completed a second MA at Columbia University in Mathematical Statistics. Now he is a Ph.D. candidate in the school of social work at Rutgers University, and a graduated statistician recognized by the American Statistics Association. His broad research interests include immigrant family and child development, American immigration policy, and American child care policy. His dissertation thesis focuses on how family instability and child welfare interventions might influence child development among low-income immigrant children.
Robin Lee
Robin Lee is a PhD student in Sociology at Princeton University. Robin studies digital communication, social networks, and social movements. He was previously a senior data analyst at the New York Times where he did experimental design research on format messaging and best practices for reproducible data analysis. He is the co-founder of Taiwanese Data Professionals.
Chung-pei Pien （卞中佩）
Chung-pei Pien (卞中佩) is an assistant professor at International College of Innovation, National Chengchi University and a research fellow of Risk Society and Policy Research Center, National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Texas A&M University in 2018. His research interests are political sociology, environmental sociology, sustainable development, social movement, big data analysis, and China study.
Christy Pu
Christy Pu is currently affiliated with the Institute of Public Health, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (國立陽明交通大學). She obtained a PhD degree in Public Health and a MSC degree in Economics. She is a health economist by training. Her research interests lie in national health accounts formulation and estimation, out-of-pocket medical spending, and patient behavior. She has been working with Taiwan’s National Health Insurance claims data as well as several other national datasets over the past ten years.
Cheng-Te Li (李政德)
Cheng-Te Li (李政德). is an Associate Professor at Institute of Data Science and Department of Statistics, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. degree (2013) from Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University. Before joining NCKU, he was an Assistant Research Fellow (2014-2016) at CITI, Academia Sinica. My research interests target at Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Data Mining, Social Networks and Social Media Analysis, Recommender Systems, and Natural Language Processing. Problems he aims to tackle are inspired by real-world applications with Massive Datasets. He currently leads the Networked Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (NetAI Lab) at NCKU.
Hsuan-Wei (Wayne) Lee
Hsuan-Wei (Wayne) Lee is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2016. His research, as well as a considerable portion of my collaborative work, addresses complex systems, computational sociology, dynamics on networks, and evolutionary games. Often using computer simulations and knowledge in graph theory, differential equations, combinatorics, stochastic processes, applied statistics, and machine learning techniques, he investigates all kinds of networks, especially social systems, their characteristics, formation, evolution, and often predictions of system behavior. He has publications in Physical Review E, Social Science Research, PloS ONE, Journal of Complex Systems, and Social Network.
Hsuan-lei Shao
Hsuan-Lei Shao(邵軒磊) is an Associate Professor at Dept. of East Asian Studies, National Taiwan Normal University. His Ph.D. degree (2009) is from National Chengchi University, in International Affairs and China Studies. His research interests are inter-displinary, which are Politics, Text Mining, Machine/Deep Learning and Social Media (FB) Analysis, Legal Analytics. More information: Lab. of Legal Analysis: https://reurl.cc/ZGjn93 ; His recent published work: https://reurl.cc/Gmmz43
Tzu-Ting Yang
Tzu-Ting Yang (楊子霆) is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Vancouver School f Economics, University of British Columbia in 2015. His research fields are public economics, labor economics, and health economics. His researches usually apply causal inference methods and large-scale dataset to answer important policy questions.
Gao-Xian Lin
Gao-Xian Lin is now pursuing a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. His research focuses on investigating the antecedents and the consequences of parental well-being. Recently, he is especially concerned with the association of parenting culture with parenting stress and parental burnout. Importantly to note, he is always fascinated by working on these research topics with various research methods. He received a Master of Science and a Bachelor of Science from National Taiwan University in Taiwan.
Po-Chien Lin
Po-Chien Lin is a master's student in Sociology at National Taiwan University. He focuses on empirical researches of sociology of education which based on various quantitative methods (e.g., causal inference, hierarchical linear modeling). Po-Chien is interested in a wide array of issues in educational studies such as tracking, higher education, early development of skills. He also tries to link studies in those fields to current policy controversies in Taiwan. He received his bachelor's degree of Political Science and Sociology from National Taiwan University, and was a visiting student at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Yu-Chen Dai
Yu-Chen Dai is a second-year master's student at Feng Chia University in the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science. After graduation, he plans to pursue the degree of Ph. D. His research interests analyze the malicious behaviors on social media, including information manipulation and disinformation. Currently, he focuses on using network structure and user behaviors to identify the sockpuppets in social media.
I-An Su
I-An (Amy) Su is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Developmental Psychology Ph.D. Program with her concentration in Law, Psychology, and Human Development in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University. She is also on the track of Ph.D. Minor in Statistics (Applied Statistics) and Graduate Minor in Cognitive Science. Her research interests include but are not limited to child witness, child testimony, forensic interviewing, and other topics in psychology and law. In addition to her research work at Cornell, she founded and is managing LegalChime Attorneys-at-Law. This Taiwan-based law firm focuses on consultancy services related to psychology-law issues.
Yu-Chuan Shen
Mike Yuchuan Shen is a Ph.D. candidate for Global Studies in Education and outreach coordinator at the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his MS in Global Affairs at New York University and his research interests focus on international relations and education. As a multicultural international affairs, education, and business professional, he also held an MBA degree and studied abroad at the University of Helsinki in Finland, which focused on developing intercultural competence. Before joining the University of Illinois, he previously served as an international adviser at the United Nations in New York and director of student and academic affairs at private and public schools in Tokyo and Taiwan.
Shun-Hsiang Yang
Shun-Hsiang Yang is a MA student of sociology in National ChengChi University. He has broad interests in demography and data visualization. He studies the internal migration in recent 20 years in Taiwan, and is devoted to clarifying how the migration flow influences the sub-regional population structure of Taiwan.
Hsien Hao Chen
Hsien Hao Chen is a graduate student in Computer Science at National Chengchi University. His research interests include Recommendation Systems, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing. He is currently working on topics about leveraging the semantic or multi-modal feature with conventional Collaborative Filtering to capture better the figure of each user/item in a recommendation system. One of his recent works tackles the main challenge in a conversational system, such as coreference, ellipsis, and word mismatch; the proposed machine learning method has won him second place in TREC CAsT 2020.
Chia-Jung (Galong) Lee
Galong Lee is a Sustainable Finance Data Project Manager at Risk Society & Policy Research Center, National Taiwan University. Her work is to build up a database of corporations in Taiwan in order to implement TCFD. She also works on assessment of climate-related physical risks and energy-related transitional risks of corporations.
Yu Chang Wu
Wu, Yu Chang is a MA student at National ChengChi University. His research interests mainly extend to corpus of online discourse, game theory, and educational inequality. He is now aiming the studies of the application of data processing and analysis on causal inference. From 2020, Yu Chang acted as Research Assistant at Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica. Before master, Yu Chang obtained Bachelor degree in English Literature and Linguistic with minor in Sociology from National ChengChi University.
Chia-Jung Tsai
Chia-Jung Tsai is a Ph.D. student in the Lab of Digital and Computational Demography at Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany. Her research interests are computational social science, sociology of migration, and causal inference. At this moment, her research investigates the rise and influence of anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe based on a combination of big data and survey data.
YuShan Chiang
YuShan will be pursuing a PHD degree in Special Education by Fall 2021 at Indiana University. She is interested in investigating the role of parent-child relation and parental involvement in children’s development. Before this, she completed a masters in developmental psychology at National Taiwan University.
Elu Tu
Elu Tu is Assistant Professor and Language Lab Director of the World Languages and Literatures Department at Southern Connecticut State University. She earned her Ph.D. degree in the Curriculum and Instruction Department—World Language Education program with a minor in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests are instructional technology, self-directed learning, and digital literacy. Her recent project was funded USD 10,000 to develop a best practice for authentic materials instruction in world language education. She asserts that language learning is a transdisciplinary practice to understand and connect to multi-cultures. Cultivating global citizens is her passion and determination to incorporate technology and language pedagogy. Her life goal is to found and run a successful foundation/NGO dedicated to promoting and advancing digital justice.
Yu-Hui Chang
Yu-Hui Chang is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota in the United States. Her research focuses on technology integration and professional development through the learning sciences lens. She is working on using qualitative content analysis to explore teachers’ beliefs and pedagogical approaches in the digital age. Her research interests also include CS in education, computational participation, knowledge building, and online collaboration.
Chiung-Ying Kuan
Kuan, Chiung-Ying is a doctoral student in Institute of Health and Management at National Taiwan University. Kuan is interested in applying Internet of Things and data analysis in healthcare/ public health field, such as telehealth, ehealth, mhealth, and so on.
PEI-JUNG 佩榮 YANG 楊
Pei-Jung (Annie) Yang is an Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Social Work at National Chengchi University Taiwan. Her research interests involve identifying factors in the developmental contexts and processes that foster resilience and positive development, with special attention to the historical and/or socio-economic structural inequalities experienced by children and youth in today’s society.
Chia-chen Yang
Chia-chen Yang is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at Oklahoma State University. Her research focuses on the psychosocial development of young people in the digital age. Specifically, she studies the use of communication technologies by adolescents and emerging adults, and the associations between the use of technology and young people's identity development, social relationships, and socioemotional well-being. Interdisciplinary in nature, Yang's research often integrates developmental science and communication literatures.
Kuan-Ju Huang
Kuan-Ju Huang is now working as a research assistant in the Department of Sociology at National Chengchi University. Huang received his M.S. in personality and social psychology from National Taiwan University, and his current research interests are in the intersection of emotion, decision-making, and culture.
Yu-Neng Chuang
Yu-Neng Chuang is a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Rice University. His research interests include recommender systems via modeling user behaviors with sparse textual data. He is also interested in applying graph analytics to several domains, e.g., social network analysis. Recently, he is working on the fairness issue on graph analytics and recommender systems for e-commerce services.
Jeffery Shih-Chieh Wang
Jeffery Shih-Chieh Wang is a PhD student in the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) Interdisciplinary Duo PhD Program in Informatics (Complex Networks and Systems Track) and Political Science (International Relations) at Indiana University Bloomington. He is interested in collective behavior, international politics, and international cooperation. Currently he uses social network analysis and inferential network models to study social mechanisms that drive states to cooperate in institutionalized environments (i.e., intergovernmental organizations). In the future, he hopes to apply more computational methods such as agent-based modeling and machine learning methods to further study collective behavior in institutionalized structures.
Kung-Chen (KC) Chen
I am Kung-Chen Chen (KC), a doctoral student in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. My research focuses on how politics shapes the landscape of global trade – especially in the realm of trade in services and the political dynamics of the WTO. I aim to bring in new insights to enrich our understanding of trade politics based on the protection-for-sale paradigm.
Yung Chun Chen
Multidisciplinary data analyst. Specialized in information operation studies. Currently applying for graduate school in quantitative research.
Yahui Chang
Yahui Chang is a PhD student in social psychology at University at Buffalo. She is broadly interested in peoples’ fundamental needs, such as need for affiliation and need for meaning. She investigates how social influence affects the way people process persuasive information, and how they further enhance their identity and well-being.
Fan Ju Yeh
Emily (Fan-Ju) Yeh is a research assistant in the Graduate Institute of Journalism, National Taiwan University. She is interested social media network and humanitarian data, focusing on freedom of speech, gender and LGBT issues. Emily received double Bachelor Degrees of International Relations and Economics from National Taiwan University, and will start pursuing the master degree of Computational Social Science in the University of Chicago.Tokyo
All Participants
Hirokazu Shirado
Hirokazu Shirado is Assistant Professor of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his doctorate in Sociology at Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His reseach interests include social networks and computational social science. He is particularly committed to the experimental study of cooperative behaviors as they manifest through interactions between people located within social networks.
Makiko Nakamuro
Makiko Nakamuro is Professor of Policy Management at Keio University. She is an economist who has focused on economics of education. Makiko graduated from Keio University, Faculty of Environmental Information (SFC) in 1998, and then completed Masters and Ph.D. programs at Columbia University in the city of New York (in 2005 and 2010, respectively). She used to work for the Bank of Japan and the World Bank where she was given considerable hand-on training on economic research. She also worked for Tohoku University as an Assistant Professor, particularly working on the project of international migration.
Theodore Charm
Theodore Charm is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government at UT Austin. His dissertation project focuses on how post-materialism, grievances, beliefs, and information facilitate protests in East Asia. Prior to graduate school, he received a MMath in Mathematics from Oxford University.
Kunihiro Miyazaki
Kunihiro Miyazaki is a PhD Candidate at the University of Tokyo. His focus centers on social media analysis using ML techniques. His current research topics include infodemic on COVID-19, fashion trend analysis, topic detection, and real-world prediction. He received his B.S and his M.S at the University of Tokyo.
Nino Migineishvili
Nino Migineishvili is a currently a Data Analyst with the California Policy Lab at UCLA, where she works on various projects around homelessness. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from UCLA. Before joining CPL, she worked as a research fellow at the National Institute of Health on mental illness and neuroimaging, investigating ways to use predictive modeling for early detection of cognitive impairment. Her interests lie at the intersection of computational methods, statistics and the social sciences. She hopes that with a rigorous, thoroughly thought-out and scientific approach to tackling social problems, her work can create a positive social impact.
Kyle Nolla
Kyle Nolla is a PhD student in Psychology from Northwestern University. Her dissertation focuses on skill learning and performance in women esports players. She will be joining Northwestern's Medical Social Sciences division as a postdoc in Fall 2021 to continue studying cognition and stress using computational social science methods.
Je Hoon Chae
Je Hoon Chae is a postmaster researcher in Communication at Yonsei University. His primary research interests are political communication, political polarization, public opinion, and applying computational methods to causal inference. He earned both M.S. and B.A. degree in Communication at Yonsei University.
Atsuhiko Uchida
Atsuhiko Uchida is a post-doctoral fellow at Education Unit for Studies on Connectivity of Hills, Humans, and Oceans in Kyoto University. His current research focuses on social capital within physical or virtual public space. He received his MAs in social psychology from Kyoto University and Education from University of York.
Yukako Inoue
Yukako Inoue is a postdoctoral fellow in social psychology. Her research focuses on altruistic cooperation in large groups, especially choosing cooperation partners based on reputation and judged trustworthiness. In recent years, she also conducts research on cooperative behavior toward future generations.
Jiayu Chen
Jiayu Chen is a doctoral student majoring in social psychology at Nagoya University. Her research interests lie primarily in human cooperation in dynamic networks. She has been studying the psychological process of increasing universal cooperation under socioeconomic disparities, using autonomous agents (bots) in online experiments.
Kongmeng Liew
Kongmeng Liew is currently an Assistant Professor at the Division of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, and recently completed his Ph.D. at Kyoto University. His research spans the intersection of music, culture, and computational methods, in examining how preferences for music are shaped by the cultural environment.
Yuki Mikiya
Yuki Mikiya is a Ph.D. student at Keio University. His research uses quantitative and archival researches to study political science, especially contemporary Chinese politics. His current research focuses on the ideologies and politics in China.
Yu Funakoshi
Yu Funakoshi is an assistant professor at the Department of Tokyo Metropolitan Health Policy Advisement, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU), Japan. His research interests are focused on social determinants of health and health communication. He obtained a Ph.D. from TMDU, MPH from Boston University, and MD from Gunma University.
Daisuke Nakama
Daisuke Nakama is a Chief Researcher at Recruit Management Solutions Co., Ltd., and is pursuing a PhD in social psychology at University of Tokyo. With 10+ years experiences in business practices in financial management, his current interests fall into the organizational management where academic knowledge and business practices are integrated.
Ramesh Krishnan
Ramesh is a 2nd year DBA student at Hitotsubashi University's graduate school of business administration. His interests are broadly in the Sociology of Emotions, and he takes a more than healthy interest in understanding the antecedents and consequents of Shame in organizations. He is currently working towards a dissertation in this area. He has a prior MBA and Masters in Advertising degrees, and he has worked as a marketing manager for Fortune 500 companies in India.
Keita Suzuki
Keita Suzuki is a PhD Student in University of Tokyo, department of social psychology. His current research focuses on people's lay belief in malleability of human nature. He will be joining Complex Human Data Hub in University of Melbourne as a guest researcher to study how maintenance of stereotype through social transmission is affected by those beliefs.
Atsushi Ueshima
Atsushi Ueshima is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Social Psychology at The University of Tokyo. Starting April 2021, he will be working as a postdoctoral fellow at Tohoku University. His research interests lie in the field of human group decision making. He has experience using natural language processing for conversation data analysis.Zürich
All Participants
Elliott Ash
Elliott Ash is Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich Department of Social Sciences, where he chairs the Law, Economics, and Data Science Group. Professor Ash's research undertakes empirical analysis of law and political economy, with methods drawn from applied microeconometrics, natural language processing, and machine learning. Professor Ash was previously Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Warwick, and before that a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. He received a PhD in economics and JD from Columbia University, a BA in economics, government, and philosophy from University of Texas at Austin, and an LLM in international criminal law from University of Amsterdam.Malka Guillot
Malka Guillot is a postdoctoral associate in the Law, Economics, and Data Science Group in the Lab of Law & Economics at ETH Zurich. Malka teaches introduction to machine learning applied to policy questions at ETH. She has a background in public economics, where she investigates income inequality and taxation. She is interested in application of machine learning and natural language processing in public economics. In 2018, she received her Ph.D. in economics at the Paris School of Economics (France).Philine Widmer
Philine Widmer is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of St.Gallen. She works on topics in media economics and development economics. She is enthusiastic about bringing machine learning and natural language processing to politico-economic questions. She has been a teaching assistant for various subjects (including introductory data science, political economics, and microeconomics).2020
All Participants
Nicolò Cavalli
Nicolò is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford and a Postdoctoral researcher at Bocconi’s Ifamid group, working on intergroup relations and computational approaches to the study of identities and life course transitions. He holds a BA in Politics from the University of Bologna and an MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi. He was a participant to SICSS-2018 at Duke University and a co-organiser to SICSS-Oxford in 2019.
Taylor Brown
Based in New York, Taylor Brown is a doctoral candidate in the Duke Sociology department, with association at the Duke Network Analysis Center. She has broad interests in computational methods and social media studies. Her dissertation explores gender inequality in creative professions. Taylor holds an MA in sociology from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MSc in evidence-based social intervention from the University of Oxford. Prior to beginning her PhD, Taylor fulfilled an appointment at the National Science Foundation in the division of Social and Economic Sciences. SICSS TA 2017 & 2018, co-organizer to SICSS-Oxford 2019 & SICSS-NYU 2020.Arnstein Aassve
Professor of Demography at Bocconi UniversityFrancesco Billari
Professor of Demography and Dean of the Faculty at Bocconi UniversityPaul Matthew Loveless
Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of BolognaMarco Albertini
Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna
Adriana Manna
Adriana is a Research Assistant at Dondena Research Centre and a Teaching Assistant of two MSc courses at Bocconi University - Simulation and Modelling and Social Media Marketing. She is a passionate researcher. Leveraging Network Science, Mathematical Modelling and Simulation techniques she aims to investigate the mechanisms governing the evolution of socio-demographic processes. She holds a MSc in Economic and Social Sciences and a BSc in Economics from Bocconi University.
Milena Tsvetkova
Milena Tsvetkova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University in 2015. Prior to joining LSE, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Milena’s research interests lie in the fields of computational and experimental social science. In her research, she uses large-scale web-based social interaction experiments, network analysis of online data, and agent-based modeling to investigate fundamental social phenomena such as cooperation, social contagion, segregation, and inequality.
Jorge Cimentada
Jorge Cimentada has a PhD in Sociology from Pompeu Fabra University and is currently a Research Scientist at the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. His research is mainly focused on the study of educational inequality, inequality in spatial mobility and computational social science. He has worked on data science projects both in the private sector and in academic research and is interested in merging cutting edge machine learning techniques with classical social statistics. You can contact him through twitter at @cimentadaj.All Participants
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is an associate professor of social demography and professorial fellow of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She completed her DPhil in Sociology jointly affiliated with the University of Oxford and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Her research spans a number of substantive areas in demography and sociology, including gender, mortality and health, marriage and family, and ethnicity and migration. Her work has sought to adopt computational innovations both in terms of modelling approaches such as agent-based models and digital trace data from web and social media platforms to study social and demographic processes.
Charles Rahal
Charles is a social science methodologist and applied social data scientist with a background in high-dimensional econometrics, having completed his PhD in 2016. He is particularly interested in unique data origination processes, be they unstructured or otherwise, and is an advocate for open source and reproducible academic research. He presently teaches 'Python for Sociologists' and 'Replication', both in Michaelmas term, although he has also recently given workshops and guest lectures on the themes of 'An Introduction to Machine Learning' and 'An Introduction to the Command Line'.
Chris Barrie
Christopher Barrie is a political sociologist of protest and conflict, specializing in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). He currently holds the position of Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He is particularly interested in combining qualitative field-based methods with computational techniques.
Tobias Rüttenauer
Tobias Rüttenauer is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on environmental inequality, selective migration trajectories, and spatial demography. Furthermore, he is interested in quantitative spatial methods, longitudinal regression models, and the use of geographical information systems to connect different sources of administrative data.To be announced.
To be announced.
To be announced.
All Participants
Elizaveta Sivak
Elizaveta Sivak is a director of the Center for Modern Childhood Research at Higher School of Economics. She uses qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods to study childhood and parenting. Her main research interests are concerned with modern parenting cultures, children’s behavior and social networks, factors influencing children’s psychological well-being, and how we can study behavior, attitudes and psychological well-being using digital traces. She is also interested in gender and educational inequality, and sociology of science.
Sofia Dokuka
Sofia Dokuka is Research Fellow in the Computational social science lab at Higher School of Economics. Her research interests include social networks, agent-based models and computational social science. Her academic work focuses on social networks in online environment and education, individual well-being and people analytics. In her recent research Sofia is investigating the interaction between sleep patterns and academic performance based on survey data and digital traces.
Ivan Smirnov
Ivan Smirnov is Head of the Computational Social Science Lab and Leading Research Fellow at Higher School of Economics. He employs data science to better understand human behavior and complex social phenomena. His main research focus is on inequality and well-being in the digital age.
Lev Manovich
Dr. Lev Manovich is one the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide, and a pioneer in application of data science for analysis of contemporary culture. Manovich is the author and editor of 13 books including AI Aesthetics, Theories of Software Culture, Instagram and Contemporary Image, Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media which was described as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He was included in the list of '25 People Shaping the Future of Design' in 2013 and the list of '50 Most Interesting People Building the Future' in 2014. Manovich is a Presidential Professor in PhD Program in Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab that pioneered analysis of visual culture using computational methods. The lab created projects for Museum of Modern Art (NYC), New York Public Library, Google and other clients.
Marc Santolini
Marc Santolini is a long-term research fellow and team leader at CRI research (Paris) and a visiting researcher at the Barabasi Lab (Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, Boston). He is also the co-founder of Just One Giant Lab, a nonprofit initiative aimed at developing decentralized open science challenges using smart digital tools. Trained as a theoretical physicist at ENS Paris and Princeton University, he developed a strong interest in the universal organisational properties observed in real-world networks in various domains, leading him to work as a postdoc at the Barabasi Lab in Northeastern Univeristy and Harvard Medical School. He now leads a team at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris to unravel how communities innovate, learn and solve complex problems using network approaches on large empirical datasets, with the end goal to develop tools fostering collective intelligence for social impact.
Anastasia Karpova
Anastasia is currently pursuing her bachelor degree in economics from Higher school of economics (HSE). She was a teaching assistant for many statistical and data science courses at HSE. She is interested in computational methods in macroeconomics, marketing and social sciences.
Alex Knorre
Alex Knorre is a Ph.D. student in Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also an affiliated researcher for the Institute for the Rule of Law at the European University at Saint Petersburg. Alex is interested in illegal online drug markets, gun violence, and Russian criminal justice, and extensively uses R for his research.All Participants
Joshua Becker
Joshua Becker is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Kellogg School of Management and a researcher in residence at the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems. Joshua will be starting on faculty somewhere awesome in Fall 2020, TBA. They use agent-based models and online laboratory methods to study collective intelligence and group decision-making. Joshua's current reserach focuses on how social influence in networks can improve or undermine factual belief accuracy.
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is a Law and Sciences Fellow in sociology and the Pritzker School of Law at Northwestern University. She is also a member of Luis Amaral’s Complex Systems Lab in the McCormick School of Engineering. Kat’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study school gun violence, felony murder, Title IX policy, and racial disparity in arrest. Her work has been published in outlets like Nature Human Behavior, Law and Policy, and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society. Kat is also pleased to be an a research affiliate of the Duke University Center for Firearms Law in 2020.
Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. His research interests span public opinion, causal inference, climate change, and immigration. His current work explores how demographic changes affect political attitudes and policy opinion using experimental and computational methods. In 2021, Andrew will start at George Washington as Assistant Professor within the Department of Political Science. Andrew holds a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from Marquette University.Remote Live Stream
Matt Salganik, Chris Bail, Dan Ariely, Zeynep Tufeckci, Elizabeth Bruch
Sheena Erete
Sheena is an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. Sheena co-directs the Technology for Social Good | Research and Design Lab with Dr. Denise Nacu.
James Evans
James Evans is a Professor at the University of Chicago and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Professor Evans is the Director of the Knowledge Lab and the founder and director of the Computational Social Science program at the University of Chicago.
Rochelle Terman
Rochelle Terman is the Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where she will begin as Assistant Professor in Fall 2020. She studies international norms, gender, and advocacy, with a focus on the Muslim world.
Henry Dambanemuya
Henry Dambanemuya is a Ph.D. student in Technology and Social Behavior, a joint program in computer science and communications at Northwestern University. His doctoral research, supervised by Ágnes Horvát, advances complex network analysis and machine learning methods to better understand the structure and dynamics of social processes and has been published in Mary Ann Liebert’s Big Data journal as well as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) proceedings.All Participants
Karsten Donnay
Karsten Donnay is Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science in the Department of Politics and Public Administration of the University of Konstanz. He is the designated lecturer for the SEDS data science master degree and a member of the Konstanz Center for Data and Methods. His current research examines political behavior on digital media and how this affects societal decision-making using tools from the field of computational social science. He also works on a range of methodological questions related to digital trace data and the use of novel highly-resolved spatiotemporal data in the social sciences.
Carsten Schwemmer
Carsten Schwemmer is senior research associate at University of Princeton, Center for Information Technology Policy. His work focuses on the application of computational methods for social science research. He is particularly interested in the study of ethnic minorities, social media communication, natural language and image processing as well as software development. He co-organized a partner site for the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science in Bamberg and taught courses on methods of political sociology and computational social science at University of Bamberg, University of Konstanz and Humboldt University of Berlin.
Peter Selb
Peter Selb is professor of survey research at the University of Konstanz, Germany, where he directs the interdisciplinary Master's program in Social and Economic Data Science (SEDS). Prior to this position, he was coordinator of the Swiss National Election Study at the University of Zurich and assistant professor of research methodology in Konstanz. His research covers topics in political behavior and public opinion. He regularly teaches classes in survey methodology, causal inference, and statistical modeling.
Susumu Shikano
Susumu Shikano is Professor of Political Methodology at University of Konstanz. He is doing research on spatial models of politics and diverse topics in political behavior. Before coming to Konstanz, he was professor ad interim at the University of Potsdam (2008) and assistant professor at the University of Mannheim (2001-2008). He received a Dr. phil (2001) and venia legendi (2007) for political science from the University of Mannheim. Since 2012 he has been the instructor of the courses ‘Bayesian statistics’ at the ECPR Summer/Winter School in Methods and Techniques. In 2020, he will teach ‘maximum likelihood estimation’ at the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis.
Annelies Blom
Annelies G. Blom is Full Research Professor for Data Science at the School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, Germany. She is Head of the German Internet Panel (GIP) at the Collaborative Research Center 884 'Political Economy of Reforms' and project leader of several methodological research projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Previously, Prof. Blom was an Assistant Professor at the University of Mannheim, set up her own consulting business (Survex - Survey Methods Consulting), was the Head of Unit Survey Methods at the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), a doctoral researcher at the European Social Survey (ESS), and a researcher at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), London. She studied in degree programs at University College Utrecht (B.A.), the Conservatory Utrecht, the University of Oxford (M.Phil.), the University of Essex (Ph.D.), and the University of Leuven. Her research concentrates on survey data collection processes, associated errors, and error correction, as well as various applications of artificial intelligence to the collection of social scientific data, such as voice data collection, data fusion, and predictive analytics for attrition processes.
Andreas Jungherr
Andreas Jungherr is a Juniorprofessor (Assistant Professor) for Social Science Data Collection and Analysis at the University of Konstanz. He studies the impact of digital media on politics and society. He has worked on the uses of digital media and technology by publics, political actors, and organizations in international comparison. He also addresses challenges for scientific research in reaction to digital change in order to realize opportunities emerging from new data sources and analytical approaches. In this, he has focused on harnessing the potential of digital methods and computational social science while addressing methodological challenges in its integration into the social sciences. Depending on the object under study, he also uses traditional quantitative and qualitative empirical approaches. Currently, he is lead investigator of 'Communicative Power in Hybrid Media Systems', a project financed by the Volkswagen Stiftung (2017-2020). The interdisciplinary project, featuring computer and information scientists, focuses on the interconnection between political coverage in legacy, online media, and political talk on online platforms in Germany, UK, USA, and South Korea.
Philipp Kling
Philipp Kling is a PhD Student of Computational Social Science in the Graduate School of Decision Sciences of the University of Konstanz. He received both his BA (Major in Sociology, Minor in Statistics) and his MSc (Social and Economic Data Analysis) from the University of Konstanz. In his dissertation, he analyzes social media users' consumption awareness. In particular, he focuses on the accuracy of Twitter users' statements about their online activity and the political heterogeneity of their Twitter network. Further, he analyzes the normative perceptions of biased news diets by utilizing online surveys and experiments in addition to analyses of social media data.
Julian Schuessler
Julian Schuessler is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Decision Sciences at the University of Konstanz, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Data and Methods. He researches public opinion on European integration as well as methods for causal inference. He is co-recipient of the 2019 Causality in Statistics Education Award of the American Statistical Association.
Nils Weidmann
Nils Weidmann is a Professor of Political Science and head of the 'Communication, Networks and Contention' Research Group. Previously, he held research fellowships at the Centre for the Study of Civil War, Peace Research Institute Oslo (2011-12), the Jackson Institute, Yale University (2010-11), and the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University (2009-10). He received a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Freiburg (Germany) in 2003, a M.A. in Comparative and International Studies from ETH Zurich (Switzerland) in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from ETH Zurich in 2009.
Rahkakavee Baskaran
Rahkakavee Baskaran is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. She is particularly interested in comparative politics, as well as empirical and statistical analysis, especially with regard to electoral research. In the past Rahkakavee gained considerable teaching experience in statistic and methods working as a tutor for these subjects.
Philipp Bosch
Philipp Bosch is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Social and Economic Data Science at the University Konstanz. Previously he finished his Bachelor in Politics and Administration at the University Konstanz. Philipp is particularly interested in research concerning political behavior and public opinion with a focus on the formation of radical attitudes. In the past he gained teaching experience in undergrad courses for statistics and empirical research methods.Jana Schwarz
Jana is currently studying an MA in Politics and Public Administration with a specialization in International Administration and Conflict Management at the University of Konstanz. During her bachelor’s degree she developed a growing interest in international relations and global governance issues and wrote her thesis on the impact of immigration on right-wing populist voting behavior and if migration does explain the rise of the AfD in Germany. Apart from that she has gained working experience as a student teacher in statistics and management aswell as vice president of the student’s union.
Franziska Weeber
Franziska is currently pursuing her MSc in Social and Economic Data Science at the University of Konstanz. She is interested in the application of computational methods for data retrieval and exploratory analysis as well as the impact of digital technology on social inequality and culture. She has experience in working as a teaching assistant for statistics, quantitative methods and applied data analysis. Moreover, she participated at SICSS 2019 in Bamberg.All Participants
Matti Nelimarkka
Matti Nelimarkka works at the Centre for Social Data Science, University of Helsinki. He teaches computational and digital methods for social scientists and supports uptake of these methods in Helsinki. His own research focuses in the intersections of political science and data science as well as political science and human-computer interaction. His current work social data science pratices and politics in human-computer interaction.All Participants
Carly Knight
Carly Knight is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology department at NYU. She recieved her PhD from Harvard University. Her work applies quantitative and computational methods to questions of historical and cultural change. Her primary research interest concerns the evolution of attitudes towards the market and the development of organizational market actors. She is also broadly interested in political sociology, law and regulation, markets and moral classification, and computational analysis. In the Fall, she will begin as an Assistant Professor at New York University.
Taylor Brown
Though based in NYC, Taylor Brown is a doctoral candidate in the Duke Sociology department, with association at the Duke Network Analysis Center. She has broad interests in computational methods and social media studies. Her dissertation explores gender inequality in creative professions. Taylor holds an MA in sociology from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MSc in evidence-based social intervention from the University of Oxford. Prior to beginning her PhD, Taylor fulfilled an appointment at the National Science Foundation in the division of Social and Economic Sciences.
Di Zhou
Di Zhou is a doctoral student in the Sociology department at NYU. She is interested in political sociology and computational methods. She holds an MA in Social Sciences from UChicago. Her master thesis explored the formation of the pro-Trump discourse in a Chinese online forum during the 2016 general election using computational text analysis combined with in-depth interviews.
Tara Hoey
Tara Hoey is NYU's Department Manager and is the Financial Administer for SICSS-NYU.Bennett Hillenbrand
Bennett Hillenbrand is Tooling and Data Product Manager for the Election Research Commission Project at Facebook, based in Washington DC.Suresh Naidu
Suresh Naidu is Professor in Economics and International and Public Affairs at SIPA, Columbia University. He teaches economics, political economy and development. Previously, he served as a Harvard Academy Junior Scholar at Harvard University, and as an instructor in economics and political economy at the University of California, Berkeley.Arthur Spirling
Arthur Spirling is Professor of Politics and Data Science at New York University. He is the Deputy Director and the Director of Graduate Studies (MSDS) at the Center for Data Science, and Chair of the Executive Committee of the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment.
Chris Wiggins
Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times. At Columbia he is a founding member of the executive committee of the Data Science Institute, and of the Department of Systems Biology, and is affiliated faculty in Statistics. He is a co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY, a nonprofit which since 2010 has organized once a semester student hackathons and the hackNY Fellows Program.All Participants
Yan Leng
Yan Leng is a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab. She will join the McCombs School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2020. She holds master degrees in Computer Science and Transportation Engineering, both from MIT. Yan is a network scientist working on social science problems. Her research lies in the intersection of machine learning, network theory, and causal inference. She uses large-scale behavioral data to understand collective human behavior over social networks and builds computational techniques for solving societal and organizational issues.
Jar-Der Luo
Luo Jar-Der is a professor of Sociology Dept., Tsinghua University in Beijing, director of Tsinghua Social Network Research Center. He earned his Ph.D degree in Sociology Dept. of State U. of New York at Stony Brook. He researches numerous topics in social network studies, including social capital, trust, social network in big data, self-organization process and Chinese indigenous management researches, such as guanxi, guanxi circle, and favor exchanges.
Margaret Ng
Margaret Ng is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her current research is on (1) technology use discontinuance, (2) technology and information diffusion, and (3) social media in news contexts. Methodologically, she takes a hybrid approach that combines big data, machine learning, as well as survey, and experimental research on media platforms. She received her Ph.D. in Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Ng was an advanced analytics intern at Pew Research Center’s Data Labs and worked as a news artist at National Geographic Magazine, The Seattle Times and a data reporter for The Center for Public Integrity.
Jie Tang
Jie Tang a Full Professor and the Associate Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University. He obtained my Ph.D. in DCST of Tsinghua University in 2006. His research interests include artificial intelligence, data mining, social networks , machine learning and knowledge graph, with an emphasis on designing new algorithms for mining social and knowledge networks. Dr. Tang has published more than 200 journal/conference papers and hold 20 patents. He served as PC Co-Chair of CIKM’16, WSDM’15, Associate General Chair of KDD’18, and Acting Editor-in-Chief of ACM TKDD, Editors of IEEE TKDE, IEEE TBD, and ACM TIST. He is leading the project AMiner.org for academic social network analysis and mining, which has attracted more than 10 million independent IP accesses from 220 countries/regions in the world. He was honored with the UK Royal Society-Newton Advanced Fellowship Award, CCF Young Scientist Award, NSFC for Distinguished Young Scholar, and KDD’18 Service Award.
Yuan Yuan
Yuan Yuan is a PhD Candidate in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He researches social and economic networks by applying cutting-edge computational methods, including machine learning, causal inference, and experimental design, to large-scale network data. He is especially interested in how social ties are formed and stabilized, and how social ties mediate social contagion, social exchange, prosocial behavior, and information diffusion. Yuan’s thesis advisor is Prof. Sandy Pentland. Yuan considers himself as a computational social scientist who cares a lot about research methodology.
Sandro Lera
Sandro is assistant professor at the Shenzhen based ETH Zurich-SUSTech Institute of Risk Analysis, Prediction and Management (Risks-X). He received his PhD from the Singapore ETH-Centre for Future Resilient Systems and worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (IDSS). He holds a BSc and MSc in Physics from ETH Zurich. He studies the effects of feedback mechanisms in socio-economic systems with tools from statistical physics. Beyond his academic interests, he has also been collaborating with various industry partners, where he has translated these concepts into trading strategies and tools for risk-monitoring.All Participants
Naniette H. Coleman
Naniette H. Coleman is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of California Berkeley and a UC-National Lab In-Residence Graduate Fellow at Los Alamos National Lab. Since 2016 Naniette has directed the AAC&U award winning Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy at Berkeley. Naniette is an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Center for Long-term Cybersecurity, and the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at Berkeley as well as the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. Naniette’s research sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically Naniette’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as work for two international organizations, and two universities.Coming soon...
Coming soon...
Coming soon...
All Participants
Mathieu Ferry
Mathieu Ferry is a PhD Candidate at the Observatoire Sociologique du Changement (Sciences Po) and affiliated to CREST. Since the fall of 2017, he has been working on the social stratification of food practices in India, using both quantitative and qualitative data sources.
Maël Ginsburger
Maël Ginsburger is a PhD Candidate at the Observatoire Sociologique du Changement (Sciences Po) and affiliated to CREST. Since 2018, he has been studying the evolution and the social structure of French households' environmental practices since the 1980’s, relying on both quantitative and qualitative data.
Julien Migozzi
Julien Migozzi is a PhD Candidate in economic and urban geography, and a Lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He uses qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse the digitalization and financialization of housing markets, focusing on South Africa and mixing digital with administrative data.
Etienne Ollion
Étienne Ollion is a CNRS research fellow and an Associate Professor in Sociology at l’École Polytechnique. His research focuses on politics, and he integrates digital data to more classic data sources and methods.
Jean-Philippe Cointet
Jean-Philippe Cointet is a Researcher at Sciences Po Médialab where he works on the development of innovative computational sociology methods. He participated in various quali-quantitative research projects including social media analysis (Facebook, public comments), science dynamics (oncology collective thoughts (CIHR project), synthetic biology emergence), political processes (political discourses, climate change negotiations). He also designs the CorText platform.
Salomé Do
Salomé Do is a PhD Candidate at LATTICE (Ecole Normale Supérieure) and Médialab (Sciences Po). She works on natural language processing and its applications to social sciences. She graduated from ENSAE, specializing in machine and deep learning.
Guillaume Hollard
Guillaume Hollard is an Associate Professor at Ecole Polytechnique. His work focuses on public and individual decision making.
Thomas Louail
Thomas Louail is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of UMR Géographie-cités based in Paris. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and worked at the Institut de Physique Théorique [CEA] & at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC) in Palma. His research focuses on analysing large-scale individual data to measure, model and develop - hopefully - a better understanding of social dynamics.
Ivaylo Petev
Ivaylo Petev is a CNRS Research Fellow and a Professor of Sociology at ENSAE.
Paula Tubaro
Paola Tubaro is an associate research professor at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Her work focuses on facilitating inter-disciplinary dialogue to leverage today's growing capacity to collect and analyze data at both small and large scale and to model complex systems, to reveal yet-unknown patterns of individual and group behaviors. She teaches teach the sociology of social networks at ENS-EHESS, and social and economic network science at ENSAE.
Sander Wagner
Sander Wagner is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratoire de Sociologie Quantitative (LSQ) at CREST-ENSAE.More to be added soon ...
All Participants
Tithi Chattopadhyay
Tithi Chattopadhyay is the associate director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. Her interests include analyzing and developing information and communication technology (ICT) regulatory frameworks, non-governmental forms of coordination and socio-economic impacts of digital technologies. She was the first director of the State of Wisconsin’s Broadband Office, where she led large-scale data collection projects and strategic planning initiatives. She has a Ph.D. in information technology policy from Michigan State University and master degrees in economics and mathematics.
Alex Engler
Alex Engler is a Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He studies the implications of artificial intelligence and emerging data technologies on society and governance. Most recently faculty at the University of Chicago, Alex teaches classes on large-scale data science and visualization to public policy students. He ran UChicago’s MS in Computational Analysis and Public Policy and designed the MS in Data Science and Public Policy at Georgetown University. He was formerly a data scientist and principal investigator at the Urban Institute, where he helped found the Center for Technology and Data Science. Alex is also an alumnus of Sunlight Foundation’s Labs and the Congressional Research Service.
Carsten Schwemmer
Carsten Schwemmer is senior research associate at University of Princeton, Center for Information Technology Policy. His work focuses on the application of computational methods for social science research. He is particularly interested in the study of ethnic minorities, social media communication, natural language and image processing as well as software development. He co-organized a partner site for the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science in Bamberg and taught courses on methods of political sociology and computational social science at University of Bamberg, University of Konstanz and Humboldt University of Berlin.
Simone Zhang
Simone Zhang is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Princeton. Her research examines the consequences of technological shifts that alter how public and private organizations make decisions that govern access to opportunity. Prior to Princeton, Simone worked at the Urban Institute, where she studied housing and education policy, and the World Bank, where she contributed to an evaluation of the World Bank's investments in higher education.(Coming soon)
(Coming soon)
All Participants
Hirokazu Shirado
Hirokazu Shirado is Assistant Professor of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his doctorate in Sociology at Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His reseach interests include social networks and computational social science. He is particularly committed to the experimental study of cooperative behaviors as they manifest through interactions between people located within social networks.
Makiko Nakamuro
Makiko Nakamuro is Professor of Policy Management at Keio University. She is an economist who has focused on economics of education. Makiko graduated from Keio University, Faculty of Environmental Information (SFC) in 1998, and then completed Masters and Ph.D. programs at Columbia University in the city of New York (in 2005 and 2010, respectively). She used to work for the Bank of Japan and the World Bank where she was given considerable hand-on training on economic research. She also worked for Tohoku University as an Assistant Professor, particularly working on the project of international migration.
Kosuke Imai
Kosuke Imai is Professor in the Department of Government and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. He is also an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Before moving to Harvard in 2018, Imai taught at Princeton University for 15 years where he was the founding director of the Program in Statistics and Machine Learning. Imai specializes in the development of statistical and machine learning methods and their applications to social science research, including causal inference, survey research, and various computational social science problems. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and 20 open-source statistical software packages. Imai is the author of an introductory statistics textbook for social scientists, Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2017).
Kazutoshi Sasahara
Kazutoshi Sasahara is Senior Lecturer in Department of Complex Systems Science, Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University. He received his Ph.D. in Multidisciplinary Sciences from The University of Tokyo in 2005. His research interests are in computational social science and complexity science. In particular, he studies the information ecosystem (e.g., echo chamber and fake news), language, morality, and culture in the digital era.
Naoki Egami
Naoki Egami is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, starting in Fall 2020. He is finishing his Ph.D in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and a pre-doctoral fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University. He is broadly interested in political methodology and comparative political behavior. His research has focused on spatial and network causal inference and the development of machine learning methods for the social sciences. His work has appeared in Journal of the American Statistical Association. He obtained a B.A. in Liberal Arts from the University of Tokyo in 2015, and also studied at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as a visiting student in 2013.
Hirotake Ito
Hirotake Ito is a Researcher of Policy Management and a Ph.D. student at Keio University. He completed a master's course in economics at Hitotsubashi University. He has experience working for an asset management company and a data analysis company.All Participants
Friedolin Merhout
Friedolin Merhout is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and an affiliate of the Centre for Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen. He uses computational and experimental methods to examine intergroup relations such as between immigrants and natives, political partisans, or religious groups. His research leverages digital trace, text, survey, and administrative data to generate novel insights about established social scientific puzzles.
Anne Helby Petersen
Anne Helby Petersen is a Ph.D. student at the Section of Biostatistics at the University of Copenhagen. Her Ph.D. project aims to develop new statistical methods for integrating data driven machine learning methods with dynamic life course analysis. She is the primary developer of two R-packages on CRAN, dataMaid and PCADSC.
Hjalmar Bang Carlsen
Hjalmar Bang Carlsen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen. He works at the intersection of social data science, political sociology and pragmatism. He is currently working on two main projects focusing on 1) activists patterns of engagement, and 2) methodological issues within quantitative and qualitative text analysis, and especially their combination.
Samin Aref
Samin Aref is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) working on a wide range of computational social science topics. His background is in Network Science and Operations Research and he has an Erdős number of 3.
Claus Thorn Ekstrøm
Claus Thorn Ekstrøm is a professor in the Section of Biostatistics at the University of Copenhagen. His primary research interests are within the fields of bioinformatics, statistical genetics, and genetic epidemiology. In particular, his research has been centered on methods for linkage analysis of quantitative traits, linkage analysis and heterogeneity, analysis of genomewide association studies, environmentability, genetic marker error detection, and statistical models for genetic analysis of quantitative and qualitative traits measured on complex human families. His bioinformatics-related research involves functional data analysis, analysis of microarray experiments, image analysis of microarray scans, and integrated analysis of gene expression and metabolic profile data.![Image of Andrew Gelman [remote]](/assets/images/agelman.jpg)
Andrew Gelman [remote]
Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40. His books include Bayesian Data Analysis (with John Carlin, Hal Stern, David Dunson, Aki Vehtari, and Don Rubin), Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks (with Deb Nolan), Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models (with Jennifer Hill), Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (with David Park, Boris Shor, and Jeronimo Cortina), and A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences (co-edited with Jeronimo Cortina).
Sune Lehmann Jørgensen
Sune Lehmann Jørgensen is a Professor at DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark. He began his career as a physicist, but his interests have shifted towards complex networks and massive datasets, working in the intersection between physics, sociology, and computer science. In the past, he's worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University and the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeasthern University; before that, he was at Laszlo Barabási’s Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University and the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He's a graduate of the Niels Bohr Institute (B.Sc, Physics 2001, M.Sc, Physics, 2003) and the Technical University of Denmark (Ph.D., Complex Networks, 2007).
David Dreyer Lassen
David Dreyer Lassen is professor of Economics at the University of Copenhagen. He is the founding director of the Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) and co-deputy director of the Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI), established in 2017 through a grant from the Danish National Research Foundation. He is also the Chair of the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF), and was a member of the 2017-8 Committee for Better University Education (Udvalget for bedre universitetsuddannelser). He has received a Sapere Aude Research Leader grant (2011-5), an ERC Starting Grant (2013-7), and a 2016 Elite Researcher Award from the Danish Ministry of Education and Research.
Laust Hvas Mortensen
Laust Hvas Mortensen heads the Data Science Lab at Statistics Denmark and is professor of Epidemiology at the University of Copenhagen. He conducts research in social and perinatal epidemiology broadly defined.
Naja Hulvej Rod
Naja Hulvej Rod is professor in the Department of Public Health and head of the Section of Epidemiology at the University of Copenhagen. Her primary research interests are centered around complexity and lifecourse approaches to understand long-term health consequences of stress, impaired sleep and social adversities. She also has a keen interest in epidemiological methododology including causal inference approaches.
Merlin Schaeffer
Merlin Schaeffer is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. He works on immigration, in particular on social and ethnic stratification as well as on the political sociology of immigration. In addition to this substantive focus, he has expertise in the field of quantitative empirical social science research and methods.
Jonas Toubøl
Jonas Toubøl is a postdoc in the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. He conducts research in the areas of political sociology, social movements, labor market segmentation and unionzation as well as survey methodology. In particular Refugee Solidarity Movements and activist recruitment.
Kun Zhang
Kun Zhang is an assistant professor in the CMU philosophy department and an affiliate faculty member in the machine learning department. His research interests lie in machine learning and artificial intelligence, especially in causal discovery and causality-based learning. He develops methods for automated causal discovery from various kinds of data, investigates learning problems including transfer learning and deep learning from a causal view, and studies philosophical foundations of causation and machine learning. On the application side, he is interested in neuroscience, computational finance, and climate analysis.
Asger Andersen
Asger Andersen is a PhD student at the Centre for Social Data Science. His research interests include social network dynamics and machine learning methods for causal inference. He holds a master’s degree in Statistics from UCPH.
Jolien Cremers
Jolien Cremers is a Postdoc at the Department of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen. She is an applied statistician bridging the gap between mathematical statistics and applied researchers by bringing new methods to their (potential) users. Her current research interest lies in modeling life trajectories from registry data using various methods for longitudinal and event-history data.Bay Area
All Participants
Sharad Goel
Sharad Goel is an assistant professor at Stanford in the Department of Management Science & Engineering, in the School of Engineering. He also has courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Sociology, and the Law School. His primary area of research is computational social science, an emerging discipline at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and the social sciences. Sharad is particularly interested in applying modern computational and statistical techniques to understand and improve public policy. Sharad is the founder and executive director of the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, a team of researchers, data scientists, and journalists that addresses policy problems through technical innovation.
David Harding
David Harding (Ph.D. Harvard, 2005) is a Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director, Social Science D-Lab at at University of California, Berkeley. David J. Harding has taught quantitative methods for over ten years at both the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley. In his own research, he has used various methods for causal inference, including propensity score matching, sensitivity analysis, inverse probability of treatment weighting, panel data models, regression with residuals, field experiments, and natural experiments. His recent work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and Nature Human Behaviour, among other journals.
Susan Athey
Susan Athey is the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University and her PhD from Stanford, and she holds an honorary doctorate from Duke University. She previously taught at the economics departments at MIT, Stanford and Harvard. Her current research focuses on the economics of digitization, marketplace design, and the intersection of econometrics and machine learning. She has worked on several application areas, including timber auctions, internet search, online advertising, the news media, and the application of digital technology to social impact applications. As one of the first “tech economists,” she served as consulting chief economist for Microsoft Corporation for six years, and now serves on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo, and Ripple, as well as non-profit Innovations for Poverty Action. She also serves as a long-term advisor to the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, helping architect and implement their auction-based pricing system. She is the founding director of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford GSB, and associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Dennis Feehan
Dennis Feehan is a demographer and quantitative social scientist. His research interests lie at the intersection of networks, demography, and quantitative methodology. He's an Assistant Professor of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. In the summer of 2015, he finished his Ph.D. at Princeton’s Office of Population Research, and he spent the fall of 2015 as a Research Scientist at Facebook.
Aniket Kesari
Aniket Kesari is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley's D-Lab. He completed his PhD at Berkeley Law, where he specialized in Law & Economics, and he is also a JD candidate at Yale University. During graduate school, he was a Google Policy Fellow at Engine, a Data Science for Social Good Fellow at the University of Chicago, an a Technology Policy Intern at GitHub. His primary research interests lie in law & technology, data science and public policy. His current research agenda focuses on using data science to answer questions in privacy and cybercrime law.
Eli Ben-Michael
Eli Ben-Michael is a PhD candidate in statistics at U.C. Berkeley. Previously, he studied at Columbia University where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and statistics. Drawing from computational statistics, optimization, and machine learning, he works on developing methods for causal inference and applying them to problems in the social sciences.
Johannes C. Eichstaedt
Johannes C. Eichstaedt is a computational social scientist. He is jointly appointed as the Ram and Vijay Shriram HAI Faculty Fellow, and an Assistant Professor (Research) in the Psychology Department. Johannes obtained his Ph.D. in Psychology and has been a Senior Research Associate at the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2011 he co-founded and led the World Well-Being Project, bringing together computer scientists and psychologists, which has since attracted $3.9m in funding. Before joining the social sciences, Johannes did research in particle physics with an M.S. from the University of Chicago. In 2014, he was elected an Emerging Leader in Science & Society by the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS). In his non-academic time he practices Tai Chi and goes on long-distance hikes.
Johan Ugander
Ugander's research develops algorithmic and statistical frameworks for analyzing social networks, social systems, and other large-scale data-rich contexts. He is particularly interested in the challenges of causal inference and experimentation in these complex domains. His work commonly falls at the intersections of graph theory, statistics, optimization, and algorithm design.
Luke Terra
Luke directs the Community Engaged Learning and Research (CELR) division at the Haas Center for Public Service. The CELR team supports faculty and students in connecting teaching and research to broader public concerns through service-learning courses, community-engaged internships, and community-based research. Luke received his doctorate in history of education and international comparative education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on teaching and learning in secondary history and civics classrooms. Luke’s dissertation explored the development of a common history curriculum in Northern Ireland, and the challenges of teaching history in a post-conflict context. Prior to his doctoral work, Luke managed international partnerships for the Center for Civic Education, supporting civic educators in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Malawi, India and Indonesia. He previously served as assistant director of the Center for Service and Learning at Colorado College, where he worked with student service organizations, community organizations, and faculty interested in community engagement.
Rob Reich
Rob Reich is Professor of Political Science, director of the Center for Ethics in Society, co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and associate director of the Institute for Human-Centered AI. He is the author of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. His teaching and writing these days focuses on ethics, policy, and technology.
Sameer B. Srivastava
Sameer B. Srivastava is the Harold Furst Chair in Management Philosophy and Values at Berkeley Haas. He is also affiliated with UC Berkeley Sociology. His research unpacks the complex interrelationships among the culture of social groups, the cognition of individuals within these groups, and the connections that people forge within and across groups. Much of his work is set in organizational contexts, where he uses computational methods to examine how culture, cognition, and networks independently and jointly relate to career outcomes. His work has been published in scholarly journals such as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, and Organization Science. It has been covered in media outlets, including The New York Times, The Economist, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Forbes. He teaches a popular MBA elective course, Power and Politics in Organizations, and co-directs the Berkeley-Stanford Computational Culture Lab.
Sharad Goel
Sharad Goel is an assistant professor at Stanford in the Department of Management Science & Engineering, in the School of Engineering. He also has courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Sociology, and the Law School. His primary area of research is computational social science, an emerging discipline at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and the social sciences. Sharad is particularly interested in applying modern computational and statistical techniques to understand and improve public policy. Sharad is the founder and executive director of the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, a team of researchers, data scientists, and journalists that addresses policy problems through technical innovation.
Jae Yeon Kim
Jae Yeon Kim is a PhD candidate in Political Science, a D-Lab data science fellow, and a data science education program fellow at UC Berkeley. He uses data science to advance social science research on diversity inclusion. His award-winning dissertation applies computational, statistical, and qualitative methods to understand what unites racial minority groups in the United States. His most recent research investigates intersectional bias in hate speech and abusive language datasets.
Jaren Haber
Jaren Haber is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research applies computational methods to study how organizational contexts shape the impacts of structural inequalities. Jaren has studied whether charter school identities reinforce stratification by race and class, and at SICSS 2019 he joined Nick and Jae (fellow BAY-SICSS organizers) to conduct experiments evidencing how school websites' racial cues influence perceptions of school quality. He also studies text analysis workflows for social science. Jaren is currently on the job market and appreciates referrals.
Nick Camp
Nick Camp is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, where he received his PhD in social psychology in 2018. His research examines racial disparities in the everyday encounters between police officers and citizens, drawing on a range of methods, from computational studies of officer body-worn camera footage, experiments in community and lab settings, to analyses of traffic stop data. Starting Summer 2020, Nick will be an assistant professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan.
AJ Alvero
AJ is a PhD candidate in Education at Stanford University. His research lies at the intersection of the sociology of education, sociolinguistics, and data science. His ongoing dissertation work examines a large corpus of college admissions essays written by Latinx identifying students to understand the relationships between an applicant's context and the content of their essay. Outside of research, AJ has experience with activism and advocacy in his hometown of Salinas, CA. Prior to starting the PhD program, AJ was a high school English teacher in Miami, FL.
Emily Grabowski
Emily Grabowski is a PhD student in linguistics at UC Berkeley. Her research combines computational and experimental approaches to investigate the relationship between speech perception and production. She also explores applications of machine learning to speech, including the use of supervised and unsupervised methods to discover structure and applications in speech.
Mahnaz Roshanaei
Mahnaz is a Postdoc research fellow at Stanford University. She is a computer scientist with data science skills who is interested to collaborate across disciplines and develop and apply statistical and machine learning methods on social science issues. Her current research focuses on applying computational methods to understand behavioral, network and smartphone data to explore how the individuals’ characteristics and behavior shape their position in, or effect on, social networks. Mahnaz is broadly interested in Machine learning and Causal inference to reason better with behavioral and network data to solve societal problems.
Saqib Mumtaz
Saqib is a PhD student at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He completed a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology and a master's degree in Public Policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy. He previously worked on technology policy issues in the Indian context. His research interests include entrepreneurship, technology and innovation policy, and social networks.
Tyler McDaniel
Tyler is a PhD student studying sociology at Stanford University. His current research focuses on school policies and individuals’ daily experiences with segregation. Using survey data, he compares racial and socioeconomic segregation experienced - in locations such as friends’ homes, places of worship, and shopping centers - by students who make different school choices. Broadly, he is interested in spatial inequalities, meritocracy, and predictive algorithms.
Abbie Nelson
Abbie Nelson is a Phd student in social work at Michigan State University. She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over ten years of experience. Her clinical focus has been trauma, sexual abuse, and domestic violence. Her research interests include developing holistic, culturally competent interventions for domestic violence survivors as well as the structural role of patriarchy and domestic violence. She also studies the connection between mental health and nutrition and is an active yoga instructor and triathlete. She is eager to learn more about how to bring computational social science to the discipline of social work.
Allison Jiang
Allison Jiang is a PhD student in Economics at University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in Behavioral Economics with applications in real world settings. Her current research focuses helping individuals alleviate obesity and digital addiction.
Brian Kim
Brian Heseung Kim is a Ph.D. student in quantitative Education Policy at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on supporting students of diverse backgrounds through major decision-making junctures in higher education like the college application process and the post-graduation job application process. He hopes to leverage natural language processing methods to tap into the wealth of text and audio data generated every day in education, as well as predictive analytics to improve the responsiveness and personalization of student support systems.
Brooke Staveland
Brooke Staveland is a Ph.D. student in Neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley. She currently uses electrocorticography to study the neurobiology of anxiety, but in the past has used statistical and machine learning methods to look for meaningful treatment groups across a wide range of mental health diagnoses. Most broadly, Brooke hopes to apply computational methods in order to improve mental health treatment and maintenance.
Carlos Denner
Carlos Denner is a visiting professor at UC Berkeley Engineering's Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET), an associate professor at the University of Brasilia, and a senior researcher at the Université de Montréal (St-Justine Hospital). He has done research on open source software for the last 15 years to understand the dynamics of collaboration using various statistical models and tools. Nowadays, Carlos works in research capable of incorporating elements of image and text processing, as well as live geo-tagged big data to deliver decision support systems for educational and clinical purposes that prime for their design.
Cheng Ren
Cheng Ren a Ph.D. student in Social Welfare, with Designated Emphasis in Computational and Data Science and Engineering Program, and is also a data consultant for the D-Lab at UC Berkeley. He applies data science tools to improve the welfare system. His research interests are community engagement and assessment, nonprofit development, migrant well-being, community database, and computational social welfare. He is also a big fan of geographic information systems.
Chirag Modi
Chirag Modi is a graduating Physics PhD student at UC Berkeley. His primary research is focused on computational cosmology and developing statistical methods for scientific analysis using machine learning. He is equally interested in expanding his work and contributing to social topics, particularly public policy, social equity and climate change. He is currently working on developing causal inference techniques to evaluate the impact of policy interventions.
Claire Daviss
Claire Daviss is a PhD student in sociology at Stanford University. Her research interests include gender inequality, work and employment, and quantitative methods. Her current research focuses on long-term trends in employers' preferences for workers of different genders, drawing on longitudinal data from a large online labor marketplace. She's excited to learn more about how computational methods can be utilized for academic and community-engaged research.
Diana Reddy
Diana Reddy is an attorney and a Doctoral Student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on work law; law and political economy; law and social movements; and social stratification and inequality, with a particular emphasis on the identity politics of class. Diana graduated Order of the Coif from New York University School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar. She has an MA in Sociology and a BA in Cultural and Social Anthropology, magna cum laude, from Stanford University. Before her return to academia, Diana practiced labor law. Diana served as in-house counsel for the California Teachers Association, a labor union representing over 325,000 educators in the state of California.
Ernesto Gutiérrez Topete
Ernesto Gutiérrez Topete is a PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics at UC Berkeley. His research is focused on Spanish-English bilingualism, code-switching, and Spanish in the US. His work falls within the subdisciplines of sociophonetics and psycholinguistics. Through a variationist approach, the research he conducts is primarily experimental and quantitative.
Isaac Dalke
Isaac is a graduate student in the sociology department at UC-Berkeley. His current work pairs traditional interpretive techniques and computational text analysis to investigate decision-making practices around who to release from prison in California. More broadly, he is interested in expertise and the art of governing, with an eye to the consequences of state bureaucratic practices for those whose lives hinge on them.
Jeff Sheng
Jeff Sheng is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and MS Graduate ('20) in Computer Science at Stanford University. His dissertation project examines the influence of technology on social movements, particularly the way the Internet and social computing have affected activism for LGBT rights over the past two decades. He also recently completed a research internship with the social media company Twitch on a collaborative paper examining the ways weak ties become strong ties on that platform. At a broader level, his research uses both qualitative, quantitative, and CSS methodologies to better understand how social media technologies shape culture, networks, and political change.
Krista Schnell
Krista Schnell is a PhD student in sociology at University of California, Berkeley. Her areas of interest include inequality, gender, and sport. Her master’s research was on how and why women transition into technical careers later in life through coding bootcamps--and she strongly believes there should be greater diversity in tech! She is currently looking forward to her dissertation.
Landon Schnabel
Landon Schnabel is a postdoctoral fellow in the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford and the incoming Rosenthal Assistant Professor of Sociology at Cornell. He studies inequality and why it persists. Current projects consider factors like religion, philanthropy, and seemingly positive stereotypes that ostensibly compensate for inequality—by providing social, psychological, and/or material benefits to subordinated groups—but can paradoxically end up legitimating and reinforcing it.
Meredith Meacham
Meredith Meacham is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco. She is an epidemiologist and social scientist with a current focus on digital media as a tool for expanding access to healthcare and examining contemporary health behaviors, especially substance use and mental health. She is currently working on projects examining engagement with and trust in peer-generated online health information and novel knowledge production systems related to cannabis legalization.
Nabamallika Dehingia
Nabamallika Dehingia is a PhD student in Global Health at UC San Diego. Her current research focusses on using machine learning models for understanding women’s health in low resource settings. She is interested in using text data from social media platforms to measure public opinion on gender.
Purnima Padmanabhan
Purnima Padmanabhan is a PhD student in Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her current work investigates how perception and valuation of effort and reward affect the engagement and efficacy of physical rehabilitation in neurological disorders. Broadly, she is interested in emotional and social decision making, and how we can translate our knowledge in neural correlates of reward sensitivities to bring about long-lasting improvement in social and cognitive behavior. She is particularly interested in developing a large-scale data-driven approach to devise positive behavior change strategies in persons facing neuropsychiatric challenges.
Sherry Jiang
Sherry Jiang is a Ph.D student in psychology at University of California, San Diego. Her research areas focus on the intersection of emotion, morality, and decision-making combining experimental methods and computational methods (e.g., data mining and machine learning). She is especially interested in examining how people use social and affective information to inform decision-making, as well as how to decode emotions from big social media data.
Terresa Eun
Terresa Eun is a PhD student in sociology at Stanford University. Her current research explores the rise in pain in the United States. More broadly, she is interested in the intersection of health and inequality, and she looks forward to applying computational social science tools to understand such topics as the intergenerational transfer of wealth through health (and vice versa) and the relationship between health, status, and organizations.
Vanessa Böhm
Vanessa Böhm is a postdoc at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her current research is centered around developing machine learning and statistical methods that specifically meet the needs of scientific applications. While she is a cosmologist by training, she is interested in expanding her work to more useful causes. Topics that she is excited about include promoting social equity and creating equal opportunities, sustainability and transforming transportation systems.
Code for America
Code for America helps government work for those who need it most. Our current projects include making safety net program applications quick and easy, connecting people who need help with getting their tax refunds to Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) volunteers, and automating the clearance of criminal records so that people have greater access to jobs and housing. Our goal for the Summer Institute is to contrast the post-COVID influx of GetCalFresh (food stamp) applications with earlier applications. In what ways are new applicants and their circumstances distinctive from those in the past? What new challenges may today’s applicants be facing that ought to be receiving greater attention from policymakers or the media? Specifically, we would like to 1) identify these compositional changes and surface new challenges individuals may be facing, 2) highlight these through interactive visualizations and other content for a major revision to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) stories microsite, and 3) explore research collaborations academic participants may want to pursue with us.
DonorsChoose
DonorsChoose makes it easy for anyone to help a classroom in need, moving us closer to a nation where students in every community have the tools and experiences they need for a great education. Our project focuses on understanding the impact of school closure policies on the ability of teachers to get crucial materials to their students. We want to map trends in our daily aggregate state-level project posting data against the beginning of state school closure policies, and against state-level COVID-19 case numbers. We'd love to analyze what happened in each state when DonorsChoose implemented initiatives to allow teachers to ship materials to a location other than their school. We're hoping to get a broad understanding of which states' teachers were hit hardest by the pandemic on their ability to get materials through us, and which states' teachers are benefitting the most from our distance learning initiatives.
Hopelab
Hopelab is a social innovation lab that creates behavior-change tech (apps, chatbots, digital games, etc) to help adolescents and young adults live happier, healthier lives. Our project seeks to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on young people’s health and wellbeing. COVID-19 has disrupted nearly every aspect of our lives, and that’s profoundly true for adolescents and young adults (AYAs) too. There’s a lot we still don’t know, but we do know that challenges already facing AYAs in the U.S. are likely to get worse. For example: dramatic increases in social isolation and associated mental health problems in what was already the loneliest generation ever; unprecedented disruption of higher education and its value proposition, likely exacerbating financial and educational disparities; widening access barriers to maternal/child health for low income young women; increased wellbeing and safety risk for LGBTQ+ youth who may be sheltering in place in unsupportive/unsafe homes; consequences of the explosion of teen vaping, to name a few. For our project, we’d love to tap into this group’s creativity and data science toolkit to explore new ways to use high quality, publicly available datasets (e.g., teen stress and mental health surveys, federal student loan data, sexual and gender minority health data) to generate new insights into drivers of AYA vulnerability and resilience during COVID, to identify needs and digital intervention targets, and/or to create novel digital measures of impact and change over time.
UCSF NLP Community and PanaceaLab
The Natural Language Processing (NLP@UCSF) team is part of an ongoing initiative to develop a UCSF-based community of practice focused on natural language processing (NLP) and its applications to health disparities, clinical & biomedical research and healthcare. Our mission is to connect practitioners, enable collaborations, learning, and knowledge sharing, and to provide a support network for diverse teams. To facilitate multidisciplinary research aimed at reducing health disparities in COVID-19, promoting inclusion in COVID-19 discourse, and informing public health policy, NLP@UCSF is partnering with the Panacea Lab at Georgia State University (GSU) and BAY-SICSS to analyze the Covid-19 Twitter chatter dataset. This data consists of over 361 million COVID-19 related tweets collected from January 27th to today. The COVID-19 Twitter chatter data captures all languages, but the higher prevalence languages are: English, Spanish, and French. Potential projects include: 1) identifying misinformation spread (retweets are available for this); 2) characterizing social discourse of policies, such as shelter-in-place, use of masks, among others, and 3) COVID-19 health disparities (e.g. disproportionate impact on African American, LatinX, and Asian communities, essential workers, prison populations, and people experiencing homelessness), and 4) potential human rights issues with contact tracing, law enforcement, public health, and privacy. This data include daily tallies of the most common COVID19 bigrams and trigrams. For example, a potential project could aim to analyze this data over time to examine discourse on public health interventions (i.e. social distancing and masks) using NLP techniques (e.g. LDA topic modeling, Word2Vec) over time. We encourage and are open to all approaches (e.g. machine learning and statistics) and to project ideas.
UCSF Library
Opening the Data of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic is a project of the UCSF Archives and Special Collections to prepare digitized archival materials on HIV/AIDS as textual data for use in computational research in the health sciences and humanities. UCSF Archives' mission is to identify, collect, organize, interpret, and maintain rare and unique material to support research and teaching of the health sciences and medical humanities and to preserve institutional memory. The No More Silence project aims to facilitate new research and discovery that bridges gaps between patient care, the lived-experiences of people with AIDS, and the historical and cultural components of the epidemic by allowing for analysis of large sets of textual data from this historical moment using one dataset. What can we discover when we are able to ask questions of a large corpus of records at once, tracing things such as the adoption of diverse terminology around gender across time and institutions, and the sentiments around different treatments and therapies as they entered the arena of possibility for the first time? This dataset allows researchers to begin asking such questions across multiple archival collections at different institutions and using hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. This project is open to collaborations with other teams. The UCSF@NLP team has collaborated with the No More Silence Initiative to examine discourse in the AIDS epidemic. Potential projects could focus on comparative research on discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic and AIDS epidemic.Duke University
All Participants
Chris Bail
Chris Bail is 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 the Duke Population Research Institute. His research examines political polarization, culture and social psychology using tools from the field of computational social science. He is the author of Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream.
Matthew Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he is affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers: the Office of Population Research, the Center for Information Technology Policy, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.
Dan Ariely
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. His studies decision-making and behavioral economics with applications to financial decisions, health and many other issues.
Elizabeth Bruch
Elizabeth Bruch is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, and an External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute. She leads the Computational Social Science Initiative at the University of Michigan, and her research focuses on the quantitative study of human behavior, with applications to online dating and residential preferences.
Deena Abul-Fottouh
Deena Abul-Fottouh is an Assistant Professor in the Human Centered Data Science Concentration at the Faculty of Information at University of Toronto. Deena earned her PhD from McMaster University. She specializes in computational sociology, data science, and digital media analytics. Her research interests include big data analytics, digital activism, and political sociology. Her expertise is in social network analysis and digital methods. While at McMaster she was the recipient of the prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, a scholarship given to world-class doctoral students who have demonstrated leadership skills and a high standard of scholarly achievement. While at MAC, she was also a fellow of the Sherman Center for Digital Scholarship. Upon her graduation, Deena was awarded the 2017 Outstanding Graduating Student Award from the Canadian Sociological Association for her research that examined Twitter networks of activists during the 2011 Egyptian revolution and how the movement turned from solidarity to schism. After completing her PhD, Deena got certified in data analytics, big data, and predictive analytics from Ryerson University. She has worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on various digital media projects at the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University. Deena has also worked as a Senior Research Specialist with the United Nations Development Programme.
Abeer Aldayel
Abeer is a Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh, School of informatics. Abeer's area of research is Computational Social Science, where she studies stance detection and how the stance is being modeled in Social Media, with a focus on online social behavior.
Alejandro Beltran
Alejandro Beltran is a PhD candidate at the School of Government and Public Policy at UArizona. His dissertation identifies the institutional and political determinants of corruption investigations performed by subnational audit agencies in Mexico. A separate research agenda explores the diversification of drug trafficking organizations into fentanyl and its effect on violence. As a computational social scientist, he uses machine learning and NLP to generate quantitative measures of these phenomena from text in Spanish. Alejandro completed his undergraduate studies in Public Policy at the Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa.
Nick Buttrick
Nick Buttrick is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. I received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Virginia in 2020. My research focuses on the intersection of the real world and the psychological theories we use to describe it, using a socioecological approach to understand contemporary society. I examine how structural, demographic, geographic, cultural, and historical factors create individual psychology in real-world contexts, trying to understand peculiarly American beliefs, such as the protective utility of firearms, the blame that comes from thinking that hard work alone is all that is needed for success, and the effects of slowing American residential mobility.
Anna Evtushenko
Anna Evtushenko is a second-year PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University. She is broadly interested in Computational Social Science—data analysis, simulation and theory—and is currently working on extending the notion of homophily in networks. She got her Bachelor's degree in Mathematical, Computational, and Statistical Sciences at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, graduating as part of the first class. She is originally from Russia.
Carlos Fernández-Loría
Carlos is a PhD candidate in Information Systems at NYU Stern School of Business. His dissertation examines the circumstances in which good intervention decisions can be made using machine learning models, even if the models are problematic for causal-effect estimation. This has important implications because acquiring data to estimate causal effects accurately is often complicated and expensive, and results are often better when modeling intervention decisions rather than causal effects. He has also conducted work studying referrals in the ride-sharing industry; the interpretability of data-driven decions made by AI systems; and the combination of observational and experimental data to improve the intervention decisions made by machine learning models.
Kelsey Gonzalez
Kelsey E. Gonzalez is a PhD Candidate in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on computational methods, traditional statistical methods, and social network analysis in connection to thematic interests in the social determinants of physical and mental health and illness, racial and panethnic identities, and discrimination. A few of her current projects include (1) developing a method to visualize multinomial logistic regression coefficients using agglomerative hierarchal clustering and heatmaps, (2) a study of meso-level behavioral contagion and geographic social interconnectedness, (3) A computationally driven analysis of the online cultural logics of bodily transformation, and (4) investigating the moderating role of social network composition on the social support & health relationship. Outside of her research, she is a UArizona Data Science Ambassador, a Carpentries instructor and lesson maintainer, and an avid R user.
Qiwei Han
Qiwei Han is currently an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Business Analytics at Nova School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE), Portugal. He is an affiliated faculty with the Data Science Knowledge Center of Nova SBE. He received Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy and M.S. in Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon University. His research is at the intersection of econometrics and machine learning, using complex data-driven approaches on a variety of projects with societal impacts. He served as the Technical Mentor for Data Science for Social Good Europe program jointly offered by Nova SBE and the University of Chicago in 2017 and 2018.
Cole J. Harvey
Cole J. Harvey is a 2019-2020 research fellow in the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 2019. His work has been published in Electoral Studies, Democratization, Europe-Asia Studies, and Government and Opposition. Prior to his graduate study, he was a Herbert Scoville Fellow and policy researcher in Washington DC, with a focus on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation issues. Beginning in fall 2020, he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Oklahoma State University.
James Houghton
James Houghton is a PhD student in the Sloan School of Management at MIT. His research combines agent-based and compartmental modeling with online networked experiments to explore social contagion, polarization, and collective sensemaking. His recent work explores the effect of interaction between diffusants on macro-scale patterns of diffusion.
Michelle Irving
Michelle Irving is a PhD student in the Political Science program at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on gender and politics, political behavior and political communication broadly. Her work draws on a range of methods including surveys, experiments and text analysis to understand how political candidates’ self-presentation and personal experience shape the way they engage with politics and voters. Prior to coming to Rutgers, Michelle completed her M.A. in Political Science at Memorial University in Newfoundland and worked in communications for the Calgary (Canada) municipal government.
Jonne Kamphorst
Jonne Kamphorst is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the European University Institute. He earned an MPhil in Comparative Politics from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics. Jonne's main research interests are voting behavior, political parties, polarization, and elections. His PhD project focuses on cleavages in previously homogeneous groups of voters and examines how such new divisions impact voter decision-making, parties, and party systems. His work draws on a combination of quantitative methods, specifically text-as-data, causal inference, and experiments.
Yujin Kim
Yujin Kim is a doctoral student in communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin and a research associate at the Center for Media Engagement. Her research focuses on political polarization and computational analysis of language in political discourse. Yujin's dissertation examines how polarization can be understood as resulting from the interplay between toxic political language and individuals’ partisan identity.
Zeynep Melis Kirgil
Zeynep Melis Kirgil is a PhD Student in Sociology at Stockholm University. Her area of research is the sociology of social norms. She uses mixed methods to link computational text analysis with survey data in order to investigate the effect of discursive constructions of solidarity in local newspapers on solidarity norms. Other research interests include social inequality, networks and behavior in small groups. She completed her undergraduate studies in Sociology at Leipzig University and obtained a Master’s degree in Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Groningen.
Sarah Ariel Lamer
Sarah Ariel Lamer is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She earned her Ph.D. in Social, Affective, and Cognitive Psychology from the University of Denver. Her primary research interest is in examining the ways that social inequity develops and is maintained in sociocultural environments. Specifically, she studies patterns present in the subtle features of frequently-encountered environments.
Diego F. Leal
Diego is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina. He applies systems science methods, particularly network analysis and agent-based models, to the study of international migration and network-based inequalities. In particular, he focuses on the relational determinants of health and ethnoracial disparities. He also studies Latin American societies in several of his papers.
Nicolas Legewie
Nicolas Legewie is a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the Sociology Department, University of Pennsylvania. His substantive research focuses on the role of social environments, such as personal and neighborhood networks, on educational and occupational attainment, and on upward mobility. In his methodological work, he has worked on digital social research, especially on video data analysis, redesigning digital survey tools, and smartphone-based Experience Sampling to study personal network dynamics. In one if his current paper projects, Nicolas uses quantitative text analysis of large-scale geo-coded Twitter data, in combination with county-level census data, to study the impact of heterogeneity in cultural models of education and occupation in counties on individuals’ college enrollment and completion.
Rūta Liepiņa
Rūta Liepiņa is an Assistant Professor in Digital Legal Studies at the Maastricht University and an active member of the Law & Tech Lab. Her current research lies in the intersection of legal reasoning, argumentation, and decision-support systems. She is a PhD Candidate in Law at the European University Institute and her thesis focused on modelling and assessing causal arguments in torts decisions. She is also interested in consumer empowerment through AI and data science applications.
James Martherus
I am a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at Vanderbilt University. My general interests are partisanship, political polarization, and political psychology. My dissertation project examines social group norms in the partisan context. Specifically, I answer the questions - do Republicans and Democrats adhere to different social norms? Have these partisan norms changed over time? How do partisan social norms affect political attitudes and behaviors? My other major project examines partisan dehumanization - an extreme form of affective polarization associated with political violence. In general, I use surveys, experiments, and various text analytic methods to study these topics.
Demetrius Murphy
Demetrius Murphy is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. He earned his B.A. in Management Consulting and Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame and his M.A. in Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. His research interests lie in the areas of race and ethnicity, economic sociology, and urban sociology, focusing in particular on the black middle class, entrepreneurship, and migration in the United States and Brazil. His current project examines boundaries, mobility, and travel among the Black middle class.
Rida Qadri
in Urban Information Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My interests lie in empirically exploring how digitization unfolds in non-western urban spaces, asking what changes, where and for whom? In my research I play with a variety of methods, merging spatial analytics, computational social science, field-based interviews and embedded observations. For my dissertation project I study the transformation of urban mobility markets in Jakarta and Bangkok through the entry of digital platforms like GoJek and Grab. Combining the granularity of big data and the contextualizing powers of qualitative research, I examine how digital workers can create collective structures of solidarity, resist the governance regime of the platform and even transform the functioning of the platform. As my work shows though these outcomes are not determined or random, but instead arise out of complex interactions between possibilities created by technology, worker agency and social norms.
Matthew P. Robertson
Matthew P. Robertson is a PhD student in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. His doctoral research uses computational methods and process tracing to study China's organ transplantation industry. His work seeks to answer empirical questions, while also using the case to explore the political logic of state control over citizen bodies in the PRC.
Samantha Robertson
Sam is a PhD student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley working at the intersection of human-computer interaction and machine learning. Her research interests include computational social choice, participatory design (especially applied to AI/ML), social computing and data ethics. She is interested in how these topics can inform the design of algorithmic systems that support, rather than replace, individual and collective human decision-making. In current projects she has been applying this perspective to studies of machine translation systems and mechanism design for public school assignment.
Amber Spry
Dr. Amber Spry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and the Department of African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. Amber's research examines the relationship between identity and political attitudes and behavior. She uses innovative survey design methods to demonstrate how inferences about group political attitudes may differ depending on how individuals are asked to self-identify. In 2015-2016 Amber was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. Amber earned her Ph.D. in Political Science at Columbia University.
Dror Walter
Dr. Walter’s research is centered on the intersection between classic media effects theories, and novel computational social science methods. His research addresses the ways computational methods such as network analysis, unsupervised machine learning, and supervised machine learning can aid in the identification and measurement of frames in online political communication. He applies these methods and theories to the study of misinformation campaigns (in health and politics), international communication, political extremism, and election campaigns.
Mark Whiting
Mark Whiting builds systems to study and scaffold improved collaboration. He is a postdoc under Duncan J. Watts in both Computer & Information Science in Engineering and Applied Science and Operations, Information and Decisions at Wharton at U Penn. He was previously a postdoc under Michael S. Bernstein in the HCI group in Computer Science at Stanford. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Industrial Design from RMIT and KAIST respectively, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from CMU.
Lindsay Young
Lindsay (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her works sits at the intersection of public health, social networks, and communication studies and focuses on the social network and communication mechanisms of health disparities and health care engagement in underserved, resource-restricted populations. Her current research, supported by a NIH Career Development Award, explores the social and communicative contexts of young sexual and racial minorities that impact their HIV prevention and risk engagement, with an emphasis on leveraging online social networking data to these ends. She aims to apply insights from this research to develop culturally appropriate network-based health prevention interventions that leverage peer influence and support processes. Lindsay was a postdoctoral scholar with the Chicago Center for HIV Elimination at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University in 2014.
Shuo Zhang
Shuo Zhang is a PhD student in Economics at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her main research interest is the empirics of job search and matching in online labor markets, including workers' job search behaviors, employers' recruitment decisions, and the role of internet job platforms in online job matching, with a focus on gender differentials. She draws on machine learning techniques, field experiment, text analysis, causal inference methods to build and analyze her research questions.
Aidan Combs
Aidan is a PhD student in sociology at Duke University. She uses computational methods to study gender, discourse, and social influence. Her current work uses data from a messaging app to investigate processes of identity discernment and influence in anonymous conversation about politics.
Emily Maloney
Emily Maloney is a PhD candidate in sociology at Duke University. Emily uses computational, relational, and experimental methods to investigate questions concerning identity and emotion processes. Her current work focuses on the role that humor plays in the acquisition of extreme identities and beliefs.
Graham Tierney
Graham Tierney is a Ph.D. student in Statistical Science at Duke University. His research interests include applications of statistics to questions in social science, particularly those involving politics. He currently works on causal inference for text data, particularly in the context of social media. He previously worked as an analyst at Cornerstone Research, helping to prepare expert testimony on civil litigation regarding financial regulation, anti-trust issues, and labor market discrimination. Then, he worked for Professor Steven Levitt as a Research Professional at the University of Chicago, assisting with research projects about early childhood education, campaign spending, and the psychology of perseverance.
Robin Lee
Robin Lee is a first-year PhD student in sociology at Princeton University. Robin studies digital communication, social networks, and social movements. He was previously a senior data analyst at the New York Times where he did experimental design research on format messaging and best practices for reproducible data analysis.
Ian Lundberg
Ian Lundberg is a PhD candidate in sociology and social policy at Princeton University. Ian studies stratification and inequality. His desire to produce conceptually precise substantive claims that rest on credible assumptions often lead him toward computational and machine learning methods and the development of new approaches.Istanbul
All Participants
Akın Ünver
Akin Ünver is an associate professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University, specialising in conflict research, computational methods and digital crisis communication. He is the Resident Fellow of Cyber Research Program at the Centre for Economic and Foreign Policy Research (EDAM), a Research Associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs, Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow at GUARD (Global Urban Analytics for Resilient Defence) at the Alan Turing Institute.
Matti Nelimarkka
Matti Nelimarkka serves as computational social scientists at the Faculty of Social Science, University of Helsinki. His research focuses on social computing, such as: digital democracy and politics of technology, practices of computational methods for social sciences, and hybrid media systems. He is also a visiting researcher at Aalto University, Department of Computer Science and Futurice.
Yunus Emre Tapan
Emre is currently doing his Ph.D. in International Relations at Kadir Has University. His research interests are at the intersection between data science and social sciences. He is employing social network analysis and computational text analysis methods to study online communities with a particular focus on radicalization and extremism. He gained his Bachelor's degree in Economics from Bogazici University and his Master's degree in Middle East Studies from Middle Eastern Technical University. He was a participant of SICSS-Helsinki in 2018 and a teaching assistant of SICSS-Istanbul in 2019.
Ahmet Kurnaz
Ahmet is a PhD candidate at Çanakkale 18 Mart University’s Department of Political Science. Ahmet comes from a computer science background and has advanced knowledge of R. He works on polarisation and political communication online and specialises in text mining and analysis. He was a visiting researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute in 2017 and 2018, and the University of Maryland, College Park in 2015. He was a teaching assistant of SICSS-Istanbul in 2019.
Merih Angın
Merih Angın is an Assistant Professor at the International Relations Department of Koç University. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government of the University of Oxford, and a visiting scholar at the Mortara Center for International Studies of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Dr. Angın holds a PhD degree in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), an M.Sc. degree in International Relations from METU, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Bilkent University. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy, international organizations, international development, international financial institutions, investment arbitration, political economy of privatization, migration, quantitative methods, agent-based modelling, machine learning, artificial intelligence and computational social sciences. Her research on IMF lending has recently been awarded the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship, as well as the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey’s International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers for 3 years.
Albert Ali Salah
Albert Ali Salah received his PhD degree at Boğaziçi University in Turkey. Having worked as a researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), University of Amsterdam, Boğaziçi University and Nagoya University, he is currently a professor and chair of the Social and Affective Computing group at Utrecht University, Dept. of Information and Computing Sciences. His research focuses on the development of computational systems that can interpret and model social and affective signals, and thus exhibit and understand human behaviour. He was the scientific coordinator of the Data for Refugees (D4R) Challenge, a mobile data challenge to improve the living conditions of Syrian refugees in Turkey. He has co-authored over 200 publications on multimodal interfaces, pattern recognition, computer vision, and computer analysis of human behavior. Albert has received the inaugural EBF European Biometrics Research Award (2006), BUVAK Award of Research Excellence (2014), and the BAGEP Award of the Science Academy (2016). He serves as an associate editor of several journals, including IEEE Trans. Affective Computing, JAISE, Int. Journal on Human-Computer Studies, and IEEE Trans. Cognitive and Developmental Systems. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, and a member of ACM.
Onur Varol
Dr. Onur Varol is an Assistant Professor at the Sabanci University Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences and Principal Investigator at the VIRAL Lab. His research focuses on developing techniques to analyze online behaviors to improve individual well-being and address societal problems using online data. Prior to joining Sabanci University, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University at the Center for Complex Network Research. He completed his PhD in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA). His thesis focuses on the analysis of manipulation and threats on social media and he was awarded the 2018 University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award. He has developed a system called Botometer to detect social bots on Twitter and his team ranked top 3 worldwide at the 2015 DARPA Bot Detection Challenge. Efforts on studying social bots yield publications on prestigious venues such as International Conference of Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Nature Communications, World Wide Web (WWW) conference, and Communications of the ACM.
Pinar Dag
Pınar Dağ is a lecturer at New Media Department of Kadir Has University. Since 2017, she has been teaching at Galatasaray University Faculty of Communication as a visiting lecturer. Pınar Dağ took her bachelor's degree in economics and her master's degree in journalism at the London School of Journalism. She was elected a member of the 2019 Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media by The Poynter Institute. She is one of the founding members of the Open Data and Data Journalism Association established in 2016. Her research interests are Data Literacy, Data Journalism, Open Data, Data Visualization, Big Data, Data Management, Data Analysis.
Sadettin Demirel
Sadettin is a Ph.D. candidate at Istanbul University's Journalism Department. He took his bachelor's degree in Public Relations at Kadir Has University. He also holds two master's degrees: one is in Investigative Journalism from Göteborg University, another is in New Media Department from Kadir Has University. Sadettin has a scholarly interest in computational & data journalism, data visualization. In his MA dissertation, he studied the challenges facing the integration of data journalism (visualization) in Turkish news media. He is an intermediate level R user and eager to use R and computational methods in his doctoral research. Additionally, he co-founded the İstanbul-based Data Literacy Association (VOYD) in 2018 to promote data literacy and support data journalism and open data activities in Turkey. Occasionally he is writing on R programming, data journalism, and visualization for News Lab Turkey, Journo, and Veri Bülteni.
Martin Llada
Martin Llada is an economist who is doing a PhD in Economics at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. In addition, he is doing a master's degree in Data Science at the same University. He is interested in macroeconomic topics and the way available information is used for the formation of opinions related to these topics, which have an effect on people's behaviors and the dynamics of economy. His research agenda is focused on understanding the complex phenomenon of the process of agents’ opinion formation through the exploitation of several sources of data (newspapers, social networks, publications by private and public institutions, and objective indicators), and on evaluating whether the indices based on these sources of data can explain or predict the evolution of objective economic indicators.
Ezgi Siir Kibris
Ezgi Siir Kibris is a Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester, Department of Political Science. She has MA degrees in Political Science and European Studies, and BA in Economics from Sabanci University. Her research revolves around judicial politics, international courts, corruption, and democratic backsliding. She is interested in quantitative methods specifically causal inference, machine learning, and natural language processing.
Leo Bauer
Leo is a second-year MA student in the International Studies / Peace and Conflict Research program at Goethe University Frankfurt. He just completed an internship with the Max Planck Research Group How ‘Terrorists’ Learn in Halle, Germany, conducting an empirical study on the impact of terrorism research on subnational security policymaking in Germany. His research interests revolve around civil war and armed non-state actors, with a particular focus on rebel governance, diplomacy and warfighting. To further understand armed non-state actor behavior, he is eager to creatively employ computational methods. Outside of class, he participates in the civil society initiative Frankfurter Demokratiekonvent (Frankfurt Democracy Convention), which once a year hosts a municipal direct democracy forum with randomly selected citizens to work on more direct forms of political participation. Leo holds a BA in American Studies from Leipzig University and has studied and worked abroad in the US and Turkey.
Efe Baslar
Efe is an industrial engineer whose interests mainly lie at the conjunction of social sciences, mathematics and statistics. This usually results in investigating questions relating to behavioural decision-making. Specifically, he would like to learn about how agents perceive and response to threat and how can automated agents that make decisions in our stead be taught (or if they should) to incorporate behavioural nuances, in a market setting. He got his BSc and MSc degrees from Istanbul Technical University. While he is currently a research assistant at the same institute, he will continue his studies as a PhD student at Berlin School of Economics, if there is still a recognizable world come October.
Cansu Basak
Cansu Basak is a Ph.D. student at the Ankara University, Department of Economics. She holds an MA degree in Development Economics from Marmara University and a BA in Physics Engineering from Istanbul Techical University. She seeks to apply analytical and machine learning techniques to various macro-economic indicators, and aims at utilizing these tools for analyzing socio-economic relations from a critical point of view in her academic work.
Kyle Beattie
Kyle Beattie is a professor and researcher of Political Science and English as a Second Language. He obtained his BA in Political Science from Humboldt State University and his MA in Teaching: TESOL from the University of Southern California. Here is a list of his recent research. Currently, he is a PhD student at the University of Alberta in the Department of Political Science specializing in International Relations and Comparative Politics. His doctoral dissertation focuses on the field of corruption studies. Whereas most of the discipline of corruption studies has largely focused on developing world corruption, he is interested in the types of corruption that emanate from the developed world. These forms of corruption, which are often much more sophisticated, include illegal wars, economic sanctions, fiat currency manipulation, the UN veto vote, and others. He is also an amateur self-taught programmer and avid language learner. He speaks and researches in English, Spanish, and Arabic. Here is a link to his personal website to find out more.
Enes Abanoz
Enes Abanoz is an assistant professor in School for Communication at Ondokuz Mayıs University, Turkey where he has been faculty member since 2018. He has been worked as an assistant professor at Woosong University, South Korea in the 2018-2019 academic year. Enes Abanoz completed his Ph.D. at the Marmara University and his undergraduate studies at Istanbul Commerce University. During his Ph.D. education, he had been as a visiting researcher in Digital Media, Networks & Political Communication (DiMeNet) at University of Pennsylvania and Social Media & Political Participation (SMaPP) at New York University. His research interests lie in the area of Graph Theory, Computational Communication and Social Media, ranging from theory to implementations.
Bilal Salaymeh
Bilal Salaymeh is a Ph.D. student in the International Relations and Political Science program at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies IHEID in Genève. He holds a BA and MS in International Relations. His research interests revolve around: the relations between authoritarian political regimes’ nature and possibilities of transition/change; post-conflict state/peacebuilding, SSR and CVE; and armed non-state actors, with a solid background in politics of the Middle East and experience in policy-oriented research. Bilal is interested in the emerging computational social science approaches and their potential to advance political research.
Feride Saliha Taşpınar
Saliha Taşpınar is a masters student in Political Science department at Sabancı University. She holds a double major BA degree in Political Science and International Relations and History from Boğaziçi University. Her field of interest is political methodology with a focus on quantitative and formal political analysis.
Ibtissam Makdoun
Ibtissam Makdoun is currently doing a Ph.D. in National School of Computer Science and Systems Analysis Rabat. Her research is about improving the education system using data science. She is using Social Network Analysis and Machine learning and Data mining techniques to study study the mismatch between the education system and the job market. She has a Bachelor Degree From Multidisciplinary faculty in Errachidia in Networking and Telecommunication and her a Master Degree at National School of Applied Science in Kenitra Morocco, she majored in Security of Information systems.
Ozan Ahmet Cetin
Ozan Ahmet Cetin is a PhD student at American University’s School of International Service. His research interests include international cybersecurity cooperation, technology, and alliance politics. His current work focuses on varying state responses to emerging technologies with national security implications. He holds a BA in Political Science from Bogazici University and an MA in International Relations from King's College London’s War Studies Department. Before returning to the university, he worked in the telecommunications sector and in media research.
Tekin Baykız
Tekin Baykız is a research assistant in the Department of International Relations at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Turkey. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in the same department. He holds B.A. degrees in Computer Engineering and Computer Teaching from Ankara University and Gazi University respectively. Baykız also received a M.S. degree from Information Systems Program at METU. He worked as a researcher in the project titled “EU-GLOBAL: Transatlantic Perspectives in a Changing Global Context: Multilateralism through Regionalism”, which was financed under the European Union Seventh Framework Program. His research interests include Islamic Groups and Foreign Policy, Westernism and anti-Americanism in Turkish political thought.
Imane Khaouja
Imane Khaouja is a Ph.D. student at Université Internationale de Rabat. Her thesis focuses on improving education and employability in Morocco using data science. She uses text analysis to identify required hard skills and soft kills in job postings to grasp job market needs. The analysis draws the big picture of the job market needs in Morocco which will help future job seeker and graduates to find a job.
Betül Özturan
Betül Özturan is MA student of Political Science at the University of Konstanz. She is the research assistant to the Development Research Group there. She obtained her Bachelor degree from Boğaziçi University in Political Science and International Relations and her minor degree in Economics (2018). Her research interests are civil wars and terrorism. Her current research is on UN Peacekeeping mission's economic impact. She is currently learning social network analysis and text analysis methods to apply on her research of foreign combatants in civil wars.
Burak Özturan
Burak is a second-year master student at the University of Konstanz in Social and Economic Data Science. He received his Economics B.A with an honors degree from Bogazici University. He stands on the ideal intersection point of social science, mathematics, and computer science for computational social science research. Currently, He is analyzing Turkish social media polarization through quantitative text analysis approaches. His research interests are political polarization, behavioral economics, collective action, and conflict studies.
Osman Zeki Gökçe
Osman Zeki Gökçe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at İstanbul Medipol University. He earned both M.A. (2012) and Ph.D. (2018) degrees in Political Science from Sabancı University. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics from Koç University. During the spring semester of 2017, he pursued his pre-doctoral research at Harvard University as a Visiting Fellow. His research interests lie in the intersection of quantitative political methodology and international relations focusing specifically on factors affecting the likelihood of interstate relations. His current research focuses on the role of energy dependence in shaping states’ foreign policy preferences and actions. As one of the important outputs of this research agenda, he compiled Global Energy Interdependence Dataset, presented in monadic and dyadic formats for the years between 1978 and 2014. He has also published interdisciplinary joint articles on social network and media analyses and their applications on subjects related to domestic and foreign policies of Turkey.Maastricht
All Participants
Monika Leszczyńska
Monika Leszczyńska is Assistant Professor of Empirical Legal Research at the Maastricht University Faculty of Law, Netherlands. She received her PhD in law from University of Bonn (Germany). In her research, she uses laboratory and online experiments as well as content analysis to deliver evidence-based insights to legal decision-makers on the impact of law on human behavior. Among others, she has researched how gender quotas influence group cooperation. She also studies how individuals make decisions in the online environment, i.e., how zero-price offers affect people’s decisions about their contractual rights and privacy. This research project has been funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship.
Catalina Goanta
Catalina is Assistant Professor in Private Law at Maastricht University and co-manager of the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab. Her current research addresses decentralization and Internet governance, with projects such as the regulation of social media influencers, where she looks at monetization and content moderation on social media. During February 2018 - February 2019, Catalina was a Niels Stensen fellow and visited the University of St. Gallen (The Institute of Work and Employment) and Harvard University (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society). Catalina is also a non-residential fellow of the Stanford Transatlantic Technology Law Forum, and was a visiting researcher at the Stanford Law School during September 2017.
Amalia Alvarez-Benjumea
Amalia Alvarez-Benjumea is a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn (Germany), where she works as part of the Max Planck Research Group “Mechanisms for normative change”. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Cologne, Germany, in 2019. In her current research, she addresses the effect of social norms on the expression of prejudice, particularly online hate speech. She has studied the causal effect of specific interventions, such as censoring hate content, in online hate. She has also studied the impact of terrorist attacks on xenophobic speech in online discussions. She uses different methodological approaches with a focus on experimental methods, particularly online experiments.
Argyri Panezi
Argyri is Assistant Professor of Law and Technology at IE Law School and research fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford PACS. Her research interests include access to knowledge, digitization, and AI. She is examining digital civil society interactions with libraries and other cultural heritage institutions, as well as electronic access to public institutions (mostly courts) and the relevant legal frameworks incentivizing distributed methods for building a content infrastructure accessible online. Her current work focuses on access to court material. She explores legal and ethical issues around e-justice and legal innovation more generally. She is also exploring regulatory challenges for FOSS that form part of critical digital infrastructure. Argyri has previously written on digitization, on copyright issues related to digital libraries, and on the European legal framework applicable to cultural heritage institutions. Argyri holds a Ph.D. from the European University Institute, and studied at the University of Athens and at Harvard Law School.
Constanta Rosca
Constanta Rosca is a PhD researcher in Digital Legal Studies at the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab (Maastricht University). Constanta Rosca holds a LL.B. in European Law (cum laude, 2017) and a LL.M. in European Law (cum laude, 2018) from Maastricht University. During her studies at Maastricht University, Constanta participated in the research excellence programme MaRBLE, lead the team in charge of the Ambassador Lectures project and was a teaching fellow for Introduction to International and European Law, International and European Law, SMEI (States, Markets and European Integration) and Comparative Contract Law. Constanta is also the co-coordinator of the Python Club. The Python Club is an initiative to support the development of programming and data analysis skills amongst researchers at the Faculty of Law.
Frank Fagan
Frank Fagan is an Associate Professor of Law at EDHEC Business School and a member of the Legal EDHEC research center. He teaches and writes about contracts, corporations, torts, attorney ethics, and the First Amendment. Work in progress includes empirical analysis of the complete corpus of U.S. contractual good faith case law and theoretical analysis of the strengths and limitations of algorithms in law.
Gijs van Dijck
Gijs van Dijck is an empirical legal scholar who specializes in tort law, insolvency law, and contract law. He uses empirical legal research methods and data sciences methods, network analysis in particular, to analyze legal issues. Research topics include the role of non-monetary relief in tort law, apologies and law, the effects tort law has on behavior, class actions, funding mechanisms in bankruptcies, and legal analytics ('big data'). He has taught courses on tort law, contract law, property law, legal methodology, and empirical legal research. Van Dijck has published in top journals including the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. He has been a speaker at various conferences, including ones at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Duke and Cornell. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2011. He is Professor of Private Law, Director of M-EPLI, researcher at the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab, and Principal Investigator at BISS Institute, Smart Services Campus.
Gunes Acar
Gunes is a FWO postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven's COSIC research group. His research interests involve web tracking measurement, anonymous communications, and IoT privacy and security. Gunes obtained his PhD at KU Leuven in 2017, and was a postdoctoral researcher between 2017 and 2019 at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.
Johan Bollen
Johan Bollen is a professor of informatics at Indiana University . He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2005-2009, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University from 2002 to 2005. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2001. He has published more than 75 articles on computational social science, social complexity, health, well-being, machine learning, and informetrics. His research has been funded by the NSF, DARPA, IARPA, EDA, NASA, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Johan lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife and daughter. In his free time he enjoys P90x and DJing in the local Bloomington clubs as DJ Angst (with his colleague E-trash aka Luis Rocha).
Philipp Chapkovski
Philipp is a postdoctoral fellow at HSE-Moscow, International lab for the behavioral and experimental economics. His main research topics are collective sanctions, social conformity and methodological issues with running experiments online using crowdsourcing platforms (Amazon mTurk, Prolific and Yandex.Toloka). Philip received his PhD in Sociology from the European University Institute, Florence, and was a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Zurich.
Agnieszka Karlińska
Agnieszka Karlińska is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Sociology and at the Institute of Polish Literature at the University of Warsaw. She holds BA's in sociology and cultural studies, MA in sociology and MA in Polish philology. Her main research areas are sociology of law, medical sociology, sociology of literature, text analysis, and NLP. In her dissertation in sociology, she reconstructs discursive strategies adopted by forensic psychiatrists in response to the challenges and contradictions related to their role in the legal system. Using computational methods, she compares forensic psychiatric opinions with strictly medical and legal texts. In her dissertation in literary history, she employs quantitative text analysis to study stylistic and narrative shifts of the nineteenth-century crime fiction. Currently, she works on a project which aims to analyse social shaping of emotions through social media communication in the situation of the COVID-19 crisis.
Alessandro Ferrara
Alessandro is a PhD student in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. He earned an MSc in Economics and Social sciences from Bocconi University and has worked in the Education directorate of the OECD for two years. His main research interests are in social stratification, non-cognitive skills and migration. His dissertation focuses on the causes and consequences of migrant optimism in educational transitions. His work draws on a combination of quantitative methods, including network analysis and causal inference.
Alexandru Sotropa
Alexandru Sotropa is an external PhD candidate within University of Maastricht, Faculty of Law. Also, he is a practicing lawyer in Bucharest. His academic interests and professional background concern interdisciplinary issues regarding competition law, consumer protection and privacy with a focus on digital area. He aims at developing computational research skills in order to improve the academic work. Alex is also interested in policy developments and has been involved in providing feedback on legislative measures.
Amit Zac
Amit Zac is a Ph.D. (DPhil) candidate at the University of Oxford, Centre for Competition Law and Policy. Before starting the doctorate, he received a law bachelor’s degree (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and LL.M. in Law and Economics (Erasmus University Rotterdam). He also worked as a public attorney in the Israeli Competition Authority and the Supreme Court. He is passionate about empirical legal studies and integrating law research within the wider social sciences. His research interests include economic inequality, competition law and policy and constitution law. His current research project focuses on the causal effect of competition law on economic inequality which is part of a two-year Leverhulme research project. In this project he uses different methodological approaches with a focus on panel data and syntactic control methods.
Anna Lewczuk
Anna is a PhD student in economics at University of Warsaw. Her research interests are focused around law & economics, constitutional economy and political economy. She completed master degrees in both law and quantitative methods in economics. Anna’s dissertation concerns the economic analysis of human rights in post-socialist states, particularly their economic effects, impact on subjective well-being of citizens, determinants and the interrelationship between standards of rights protection and economic development. Methodologically, she uses mainly spatial modelling and simultaneous equations models.
Anna Sekuła
Anna is a PhD student in Comparative Analysis of Institutions, Economics and Law at the University of Turin and Collegio Carlo Alberto, Italy. In her work she focuses on transnational regulation of business activity. She examines diverse state-level legal responses to the problem of abuses of human and environmental rights in global supply chains. More broadly, she is also interested in methodology and philosophy of law and economics and the interdisciplinary redefinition of its conceptual framework.
Bilgecag Aydogdu
Bilgecag Aydogdu is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, in Information and Computing Sciences Faculty. Before starting his Ph.D., he studied political science, economics, development studies and data science in Paris and in Istanbul. His PhD thesis focuses on gaining insights on migration patterns to Europe through the usage of mobile phone data. He is interested in making social impact and evidence-based policy making, which leverages on private data sources. He is excited to take part in growing network of computational social scientists!
Elena Sidorova
Elena Sidorova is a Junior Researcher of the Institute for Industrial and Market Studies at the Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow, Russia. She is a Ph.D. student at the HSE and her sphere of academic interest focuses on Empirical Legal Research. She uses econometric analysis as well as machine learning methods to deliver evidence-based insights to the way of decision-making by judges and parties in commercial legal processes.
Evangelia Nissioti
Evangelia Nissioti is a Ph.D. candidate at the Erasmus Mundus Doctorate Program on Law and Economics. She has attended research semesters in Universita di Bologna and Erasmus University of Rotterdam while her home university is the University of Hamburg. She has a legal background with a bachelor in law from the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and is an admitted lawyer to the Athens Bar Association. Her research interests revolve around the economic analysis of dispute resolution systems and more specifically, her PhD project deals with the question of whether mediation can generate more efficient outcomes than litigation and negotiation. She holds a Joint Degree Master LL.M/M.A. on Law and Economics from the EMLE Program and is trained in empirical analysis and the conduct of experiments.
Haroun Rahimi
Haroun Rahimi has obtained his Ph.D. in Law from the University of Washington. Rahimi is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Afghanistan. Rahimi's research focuses on economic laws, institutional development, and institutional reform in the context of less developed countries. Rahimi's dissertation, titled Formalizing Informal Credit and Trade Institutions: How to Create Effective Economic Institutions in Afghanistan and Beyond has been awarded the 2018 Outstanding Dissertation Award by the University of Washington School of Law. Rahimi's research has appeared in reputable local and international journals. Rahimi has also collaborated as an independent consultant with several research firms and policy think tanks conducting research and delivering seminars on institutional development and good governance in the Afghan context. Currently, Rahimi is working on the legal history of Afghanistan and the ways that legal transplantation is legitimized in Muslim countries.
Kirils Makarovs
Kirils Makarovs is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex. His research lies in the field of public understanding of science, risk perception, and conspiratorial mentality. He is also broadly interested in survey data analysis, experimental methodology, and computational approaches to studying public opinion, beliefs, and attitudes.
Jakub Drápal
Jakub concludes his Ph.D. studies at Charles University in Prague. Alongside he works at the Czech Academy of Sciences (PI) and as an assistant to a constitutional judge. He focuses on sentencing in post-communist countries using quantitative methodologies. He has studied at the University of Cambridge and spend several months as a visiting researcher at the University of Leiden and Max Planck Institute in Freiburg.
Maria José Schmidt-Kessen
Maria José Schmidt-Kessen is Assistant Professor in EU Commercial Law at Copenhagen Business School. She holds a PhD (2018) from the European University Institute in Florence in competition and intellectual property law. Her current research interests lie in the area of online platform regulation, data governance, smart contracts and the use of algorithms in trade, online gambling regulation, and legal design. Most of her work is theoretical and legal-doctrinal, but she is on a quest to better understand and apply quantitative methods in her legal research.
Matthias Krönke
Matthias is a PhD student in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research focuses primarily on political parties and judicial politics in Africa. Matthias’ dissertation examines how political parties shape citizens’ satisfaction with basic service delivery on the continent. A second stream of research assesses judicial power in Africa and how it affects citizens’ perception of the courts on the one hand, and the quality of elections on the other.
Omar Vasquez Duque
Omar Vasquez Duque is a J.S.D. candidate at Stanford Law School. His research focuses on the application of behavioral insights to competition policy and economic regulation, and empirical analysis of law and its policy implications.
Rok Hrzic
Rok Hrzic is a physician by training and holds MSc degrees in Epidemiology and in Governance and Leadership in European Public Health from Maastricht University. He has experience with novel data sources and analysis methods in public health, in particular utilizing hospital information systems and insurance claims datasets in the area of rare diseases, and indicators of population health and health system performance. He is an affiliated doctoral student with the International Max Planck Research School on Population, Health and Data Science, pursuing a thesis on determinants of mortality convergence in the European Union.
Rossana Ducato
Rossana Ducato is lecturer in European IT Law by Design at UCLouvain. On the 1st of July she will join the School of Law of the University of Aberdeen as a lecturer in IT Law & Regulation. Rossana has a Ph.D. in European and Comparative Legal Studies from the University of Trento. Her research interests include privacy and data protection, intellectual property, empirical legal studies, and legal design.
Valentina Golunova
Valentina Golunova is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of fundamental rights and digital innovations. In the course of her PhD project, Valentina examines recent transformations of the EU intermediary liability framework in light of the need to afford effective protection of freedom of expression. She seeks to employ computational methods to study the impact of algorithmic content moderation on online content diversity. Furthermore, her goal is to test technical feasibility of safeguards that can be implemented to ensure free expression on the Internet.
Yulia Orlova
Yulia is a postdoctoral researcher and a lecturer at Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow, where she received PhD in economy in 2017. Her main research interests include regulation in network industries, especially in power sector, and antitrust cases. Yulia’s current project investigates influence of renewable energy policy in Russia on investment decisions and competition between investors. Yulia received her M.A. in Economic Geography from Moscow State University in 2006.
Bogdan Covrig
Bogdan Covrig is a Research Assistant at the Maastricht Law&Tech Lab (Maastricht University). He is currently following a computer science bachelor degree (Saxion University), which contributes to the interdisciplinary research conducted at the Lab. He is passionate about building infrastructures that support the development of digital legal frameworks. His research interests include human computer interaction (HCI) from the perspective of user behavior and consumer protection. In particular, his current projects focus on social media consumer profiling and influencing, as well as the impact of recommender systems on the commercial activities of influencers/content creators.
Thales Bertaglia
Thales is a PhD Candidate at Maastricht University, working jointly with Studio Europa and the Institute of Data Science. His current research focuses on characterizing the opinion of youth on European issues using Artificial Intelligence techniques for social media analysis. He is passionate about Computational Linguistics and Machine Learning. Thales received his Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Computational Mathematics from the University of São Paulo.Montreal
All Participants
Vissého Adjiwanou
Vissého Adjiwanou is a professor of Demography and quantitative and computational methods in the department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He is affiliate with the Centre on Population Dynamics (McGill University), and the department of Demography (Université de Montréal). Previously, he has served as Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He received a M.A in Statistics from the National School of Statistics and Applied Economics (ENSEA-Cote d’Ivoire), a M.A in Economics of Development at the Centre for Studies and Research on International Development (CERDI- France) and a Ph.D in Demography from the Université de Montréal (Canada). His research focusses in population issues in sub-Saharan Africa and in Canada, including fertility, family dynamics, gender inequality, reproductive health, and migration. Vissého is the organizer of the first two Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at the University of Cape Town (South Africa).
Julie Hussin
Dr. Hussin is an early career Principal Investigator at the Montreal Heart Institute since January 2017 and Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine at Université de Montréal. She is an active member of the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO) funded by Canada First Excellence Funds. She has extensive expertise in computational biology, statistics, molecular evolution and human genetics. In particular, she is an expert in population genetics and has worked on natural selection and population demography in the founding population of Quebec, deepening our understanding of the French-Canadians’ genetic make-up. Her bioinformatics team have significant experience in handling and integrating large datasets and in developing computational tools, including Bayesian methods and machine learning approaches in genomics.
William L. Hamilton
William L. Hamilton is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, a member of the Mila AI Institute of Quebec, and a Canada CIFAR Chair in AI. His research focuses on graph representation learning, as well as applications in computational social science and biology. William's doctoral thesis -Representation Learning Methods for Computational Social Science- received the 2018 Arthur L. Samuel Thesis Award for the best thesis in the Computer Science department at Stanford University. He also received the 2017 Cozzarelli Best Paper Award from PNAS for his work studying police-community interactions using machine learning. His work has been featured on the BBC, Wired, and in the New York Times.
Stephane Helleringer
Stephane Helleringer is a demographer with interests in a) the development of new methods to measure mortality rates in countries with limited data, and b) the impact of epidemics on population health and mortality. Over the past 15 years, he has worked extensively in several African and south Asian countries. He has launched the Likoma Network Study, a cohort that generates detailed maps of the sexual networks through which HIV spreads in a small island community of East Africa. He is currently the principal investigator of a multi-country study on adolescent and adult mortality in Malawi, Uganda, Guinea-Bissau and Bangladesh, funded by the NIH. He recently initiated a panel study of behaviors and mortality during the COVID19 pandemic in Malawi.
Taiwo Amoo
Taiwo Amoo is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at University of Lagos. His research interests include development and application of machine learning techniques to mine machine generated data and also leverages spatio-temporal models for solving social problems. He underwent his research internship at MainOne where he was involved in several data mining related tasks on system logs. Recently, he was selected as a winner of the MTN Academic Research Design and Innovation Challenge. He is currently the founder of LogTech which leverages machine learning to anticipate failures in intermediary devices in the network using logs and trouble tickets.
Boureima Adamou
Boureima Adamou is a PhD candidate on food security and livelihoods in University Abdou Moumouni of Niamey (Niger). His research interest is about food security determinants analysis and local livelihoods and sustainable coping strategies in the Sahel region. His focus is on combating food insecurity with a resilient community model based on a better understanding of food systems dynamic; sustainable adaptations mechanisms and livelihoods. He holds a master’s degree in statistics from National School of Statistics and Applied Economics (ENSEA, Senegal) and a master’s degree in Society innovations and Development from International Institute of Water and Environmental Engineering of Burkina Faso. He worked as program officer for World Food Program (Niger Country Office) in resilience and capacity development unit. He is co-founder of a private statistics and computer sciences school (ESSI) in Niamey.
Giorgio Barnabò
Giorgio Barnabò graduated in Applied Statistics and is now a Ph.D. candidate in Data Science at the Department of Cumputer Engineering, Sapienza University, Rome - Italy. His research focuses on Algorithmic Fairness, and Affirmative Action policies. Recently, he started applying advanced NLP techniques (i.e. Bert like language models) to online contents in order to study how narratives are created and spread in the online world.
Fatim Diabagaté
Fatim Diabagaté is a PhD candidate in economics at Université de Montréal. She holds a Master's in Statistics and Economics. Her research focuses on labour mobility, immigration and housing. More specifically, her current orientation addresses information issues about workers actual skills, how immigration affects public debt and the impact of parents' homeownership on kids' long-term outcomes. She is interested in deepening her skills in computational science for ongoing projects on gender wage gap using machine learning algorithms.
Chaimae Drioui
Drioui Chaimae is a PhD candidate at National Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics (INSEA), Morocco. She is a state engineer in statistics and demography, graduated from INSEA. She is also a member of the GES_3D laboratory (Gender, economics, statistics, demography and sustainable development). Her PhD study is interested in the analysis of fertility and reproductive health with a gender perspective.
Shruti Kulkami
Shruti Kulkarni is a data science professional interested to collaborate across disciplines and develop and apply statistical and machine learning methods on social science and sustainability issues. She has widely used causal modeling and forecasting techniques before and interested to learn more about causal graph models, social network analysis to reason better with environmental-social-governance (ESG) issues. Shruti has finished her M,tech, and Ph.D. from the Department of Management Studies, IISc, Bangalore and she is currently working as deputy manager-data science & analytics with Philips. She is an early career researcher with research interests broadly focusing on advanced computational solutions for sustainability, climate change, and beyond.
Matthew Martin
Matthew Martin is a PhD Candidate in the Cognitive Informatics program at L'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM, Canada). He is also an analyst at The Decision Lab, a non-profit think-tank that uses behavioural science to improve decision-making. His research interest is in finding or creating the best tools for aiding decision-making and subjecting them to rigorous empirical analysis. He holds a Master's degree in psychology and a Bachelor's degree in cognitive science.
Georges Alain Tchango Ngalé
Georges Alain Tchango Ngalé is a PhD candidate in demography at the Université de Montréal. He participates in research activities as part of Trajectories of Immigrant Participation in Quebec Society (TrajIPaQ) project in the Department of Demography. His thesis project focuses on the relationship between the health of immigrants and their participation/integration into Quebec society, using a mixed methodological approach. More generally, his heuristic fields of interest focus on population health and gender-based violence, trying to follow as much as possible a cross perspective between life course and intersectionality. He has participated in several international conferences and is the author/co-author of a scientific article and book.
David Pelletier
David Pelletier is a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University’s Sociology Department and is also affiliated with INRS and Université de Montréal. Trained in demography, he uses surveys and administrative data to study family dynamics and inequality in the Canadian context, but also in the United States and Europe.
Julian Posada
Julian Posada is a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Information and a Junior Fellow of Massey College. His research focuses on the personal networks of workers of digital labour platforms that produce, label, and verify data for artificial intelligence systems. It combines theories and methods from the sociology of work and social networks, and the political economy of platforms. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he worked as a research assistant for the Laboratory for Computer Science (LRI) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He holds a master's degree in sociology form the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and a bachelor's degree in the humanities from Sorbonne University.
Xavier St-Denis
Xavier St-Denis is an economic sociologist currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. He completed his graduate work at McGill University and spent two years conducting research in the Income Statistics Division at Statistics Canada, where he developed an expertise in the use of administrative and integrated datasets to explore new questions of high policy relevance. His research focuses on labour markets, stratification, careers, organizations, and comparative political economy using quantitative methods. In his most recent work, he explores the drivers of trends in job stability in Canada, the UK and Germany, and the consequences of job hopping on hiring outcomes in different US occupations. In addition, his postdoctoral research builds on work he conducted in parallel to his PhD on the drivers of intergenerational income transmission in Canada. He is currently dedicating some of his time to research on labour market inequality in the context of COVID-19.
Oluwaseyi Dolapo Somefun
Oluwaseyi Dolapo Somefun holds a Ph.D. in Demography and Population Studies. Her doctoral thesis applied a mixed method approach and engaged diverse young adults across different regions in Nigeria. Her central aim explored how young people overcome risks in the face of adversity and focused on issues like resilience and vulnerability. She plays an ongoing active role in several interdisciplinary research projects. The majority of these have been published in high ranking international and national accredited journals. Her scholarly interests range widely from adolescent sexual and reproductive health, social networks and mixed research methodology. She is strongly interested in improving health behaviors of adolescents through health communication and policy dissemination.
Yang Teoh
Yang Teoh is a PhD student at the Department of Psychology, University of Toronto. He is interested in the interpersonal emotional processes that guide and sustain prosocial behaviour. HIs research mainly focuses on the design and application of computational algorithms that capture and explain psychological processes as they unfold during social interactions.
Anagha Uppal
Anagha Uppal has been involved in the Computational Social Science movement since 2015 when she declared it her undergraduate self-designed major. Now a MA/PhD student in Geography (geographic information science), she is developing as an early career researcher answering environmental and humanistic social science questions from a spatial data science lens. She also has experience with large and small nonprofits, including with the American Red Cross, and hopes to spend her career in effective altruism nonprofit spaces.
Robert Vidigal
Robert Vidigal is a Ph.D Candidate at the Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, NY. His research focuses on Comparative Political Behavior, Political Communication, Political Psychology, Public Opinion, and Network Analysis. He is interested in how political communication influences voters behavior and political attitudes. Especially, citizens’ ability and motivations to learn and process new information.
Baturay Yurtbay
I studied Political Science and International Relations at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey, and took a double major in Sociology at the same university. During my education, I also attended various universities such as The Hague University of Applied Sciences as an Erasmus student, Beijing Language and Culture, and University of Oslo for Comparative Social Science Summer School. I hold a Master at the Department of War Studies at King's College London. During my MA, I worked about peace processes in Turkey by evaluating the socio-political steps in this process by attempting to understand governmental responses and the reactions of terrorist actions. I have been research assistant in the Department of Sociology at Yeditepe University since 2016 where I do my doctoral study. I also studied in the department of Politics and International Relations as recognised student at University of Oxford between 2019-2020 for my doctoral studies. My main research areas are political sociology, terrorism studies, sociology of war and social movements. My doctoral research focuses on exploring the institutional responses and counter-terrorism strategies developed by Turkey and the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, 2003 Istanbul and 2005 London terrorist attacks. I plan to defend my thesis in September 2020.
Nima Zahedinameghi
Nima Zahedinameghi earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Laval University. He comes to data science from a social science background where he has received both quantitative and theoretical training in the field. His current research agenda revolves around the combined application of social and complex systems theory and formal methods such as agent-based modeling and computational techniques. Methodologically, he is interested in using artificial intelligence for the study of human behavior in large-scale social systems. Nima also has a keen interest in data science as an overarching discipline for conducting interdisciplinary research in different aspects of society, politics, and economics. His current research includes a work-in-progress that provides ontological compatibility between sociology and other computational fields such as information science, and data science.
Firmin Zinvi
Firmin Zinvi is PhD candidate in demography at University of Montreal. He holds a master’s degree in demography at the Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques in Cameroon and a bachelor’s degree in statistics at École nationale supérieure de statistique et d’économie appliquées in Ivory Coast. His research focuses on fertility, female employment, reproductive health and demographic dividend in Sub-Saharan Africa. He is also interested on quantitative methods such as longitudinal analysis, structural equation models, spatial analysis and most recently bayesian analysis.Dan Xu
Dan Xu is a doctoral student in Information at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on misinformation propagation in homogeneous and heterogeneous social networks. He is particularly interested in how misinformation shapes people's political attitudes and behaviors, and hence contributes to political polarization and ideological segregation.
Robert Djogbenou
Robert Djogbenou is a PhD candidate in the department of Demography at Université de Montréal. His research interests include reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa and family dynamics, integration of immigrants, migration in Canada. In the realm of computational methods, he is particularly interested in machine learning techniques and the use of social media data.Rutgers
All Participants
Katherine McCabe
Katie is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. Her research interests include public opinion, social identity, and political psychology.
Hana Shepherd
Hana is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on social networks, social norms, and group cultures.
Kira Sanbonmatsu
Kira is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and Senior Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics. Her research interests include gender, race/ethnicity, parties, public opinion, and state politics.
Thomas Davidson
Thomas Davidson is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Cornell University. In fall 2020 he will be an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. He studies political discussions, hate speech, and other topics using digital trace data.
Daniel Hopkins
Daniel Hopkins is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Michael Kenwick
Michael Kenwick is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.
Yanna Krupnikov
Yanna Krupnikov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Stony Brook University.
Arvind Narayanan
Arvind Narayanan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton.
Katherine Ognyanova
Katherine Ognyanova is an Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.
Adam Thal
Adam Thal is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University.
Simone Zhang
Simone Zhang is a PhD student in Sociology at Princeton University interested in social stratification, organizations, and how social policy is implemented on the ground.
Zainab Alam
Zainab Alam is a PhD candidate in political science at Rutgers University, focusing on women and politics and comparative politics. Her current research is on digitally-enabled political participation in the context of South Asia.
Analia Albuja
Analia is an incoming postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at Duke University. She completed her PhD at Rutgers University, where her work examined the discrimination experiences of people who hold multiple identities (e.g., biracial, bicultural identities), and how people who hold multiple (or otherwise stigmatized) identities are perceived by others. She will be extending this research to child populations in her postdoc position.
Chelsea Allen
Chelsea Allen is a doctoral student at Columbia University's School of Social Work. She currently works with Dr. Courtney Cogburn examining the role of racism and race-related stress in the production of health inequities. Additionally, this work studies the effect of immersive virtual reality experiences on psychological processes, such as empathy/social perspective taking, racial bias and decision making. Previous to attending Columbia, she practiced as a clinical therapist working with children and families. Chelsea's scholarship is interested in historical trauma and its specific application to African American communities. Her current research involves developing a conceptual model that reframes this theory through a multi-disciplinary lens that integrates various theories that are related, but not intentionally grounded, in a historical trauma framework.
Meril Antony
Meril Antony is a doctoral student in the School of Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers University-Newark. Her idea of conducting research is to be at the nexus of civil society and academia that allows for an understanding of strengthening partnerships to enhance social impact. Her current research interests include understanding the effects of social class inequality and race on parental perception regarding school engagement, and how schools as institutions can have a positive social impact. Her dissertation intends to utilize social network analysis to identify co-production behavior between parents and schools. Meril has a Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree from Rutgers University and a Bachelor’s in Economics degree from Delhi University, India.
Carolyn Barnett
Carolyn Barnett is a PhD candidate in politics at Princeton. She is interested in combining experimental, computational, and qualitative methods to study how policy change affects social norms and behavior related to gender equality and political participation, with a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Previously, Carolyn was a research fellow with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. She holds an MSc in Middle East politics and an MA in Islamic studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and a BSFS from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
Ihsan Beezer
Ihsan Beezer is a PhD student in Organization Management at Rutgers Business School. He is also affiliated with Rutgers Business School’s Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CUEED). His research focuses on urban and minority entrepreneurship. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park and M.S. in Management from the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ashley Bieniek-Tobasco
Ashley Bieniek-Tobasco is a Research Assistant Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health in the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. Her research focuses on the theory, practice and evaluation of climate change and risk communication. In particular, she is interested in the interaction between narrative transportation, efficacy beliefs, emotion, and political affiliation in responses to climate change communication. She is also interested in characterizing the public health impacts of exposure to COVID-19 misinformation. Prior to joining UIC, she worked in climate science policy at the US Global Change Research Program. Ashley received her DrPH from George Washington University and is a two-time alumna of the University of Michigan.
Changyong Choi
Changyong Choi is a postdoctoral fellow with the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being (ICFW) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research interests include adverse childhood experiences, psychosocial well-being of children and youths, health disparity in life course, and early childhood intervention. He is working on several projects with the ICFW including the FACT study and the Family Connect. His major research aims with the ICFW are to understand how adversities in childhood are embodied in multidimensional health outcomes and to identify what risk and protective factors influence on resilience among disadvantaged children. Prior to postdoctoral fellowship, Changyong earned his PhD degree in social welfare from Seoul National University in South Korea.
Amanda Cox
Amanda Barrett Cox is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College. Her research examines how organizations transform and reproduce social inequality. Her specific areas of interest include power, economic elites and philanthropy, education and social mobility, social networks, and emotions. She holds a PhD in sociology and education from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Sociology of Education from Stanford University, an MSEd in Education, Culture, and Society from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Classical Civilizations from Wellesley College. Before pursuing her PhD, she worked as a community organizer and a high-school Latin teacher.
Aysenur Deger Yanik
Aysenur is pursuing a PhD in Political Science at Maxwell School in Syracuse University. She studies comparative political behavior, political psychology, and women & gender. Currently, she researches social media use’s effect on political attitudes. She seeks to integrate social media and digital trace data to her studies.
Beidi Dong
Beidi Dong is an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University. He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida and completed post-doctoral training in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on identifying risk and protective factors of community violence (especially gun violence) in the United States, and developing and implementing evidence-based prevention, response, and recovery strategies that mitigate the negative impacts of violence on the affected individuals and communities. His research also addresses inequalities in access to health care, social services, and other resources that are critical to post-trauma resilience.
Kasey Eickmeyer
Kasey Eickmeyer is a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University. Her work lies at the intersection of family demography and social work, with a focus on the economic circumstances of US families. She is particularly interested in applying computational social science techniques to the collection of state-level data on predatory lending practices and appending this data to surveys of the underbanked and unbanked citizens of the US. Prior to her postdoctoral position, Kasey earned her PhD in demography from Bowling Green State University and was a senior research assistant at the Center for Family & Demographic Research.
Michael FitzGerald
Michael FitzGerald is a PhD student in political science at Rutgers University. His research brings feminist theory to bear on methodological and substantive questions related to gender, democratization, and representation from a comparative perspective. His current project draws on post-structural feminism to develop a gendered methodology of concept formation and applies this framework to the project of formulating a concept of democracy that has greater empirical validity and normative purchase. This concept is dynamically articulated through computational social science approaches including network and text analysis.
Chen-Shuo Hong
Chen-Shuo Hong is currently pursuing a PhD in sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests center on the processes that create inequality. He draws on machine learning, network analysis, and statistics to pursue his questions. Specifically, he seeks to develop computational tools that help researchers and practitioners address social and economic inequality. Outside academia, he has two-year industrial experience of applying big data at Deloitte Consulting in Taiwan.
Chien-shih Huang
Chien-shih Huang is a PhD Candidate at Florida State University. His work lies in the interaction of urban politics and network governance in environmental policy using network and experimental methods. His dissertation focuses on how executive turnover introduce changes in interlocal service delivery and policy adoption in sustainability. He holds an MA and BA in public administration from National Taiwan University.
Kiku Huckle
Kiku Huckle is an assistant professor of Political Science at Pace University in New York City, specializing in the fields of Race and Ethnic Politics, Latino Politics, and Religion and Politics. Her research addresses how culture, values, and identity intersect and ultimately affect political beliefs and patterns of engagement, with an emphasis on race, racial resentment, and religious affiliation.
Yujin (Julia) Jung
Yujin Julia Jung is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Missouri. Her work mainly examines the nexus of international relations and domestic politics, focusing on comparative political behavior. Julia is particularly interested in democracy, foreign policy, and gender studies with a strong methodological interest in machine learning and text analysis. Prior to beginning the PhD program, Julia was a researcher at the Institute of Euro-African Studies and a research fellow at Nuclear Nonproliferation Education and Research Center both based in the Republic of Korea.
Burcu Kolcak
Burcu is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University. She is broadly interested in comparative politics and political methodology. Her research interests include democratization, subnational politics, decentralization, causal inference, spatial analysis, and data visualization. Her recent research project focuses on the effects of decentralization on democratic backsliding.
Sergei Kostiev
Sergei Kostiaev is a student of interest groups and lobbying. His interests also include: American politics, Russian politics, U.S.-Russia relations, U.S. health care policy. He has been supported by various granting bodies – Fulbright program, Legislative fellows program, Russian Humanities Foundation, Russian Basic Science Foundation, etc. He has published in such journals as Journal of Public Affairs, Arab Studies Quarterly, World Economy and International Relations, USA-Canada: Economics, Politics, Culture, etc.
Katie Krumbholz
Katie will be starting her second year as a PhD student at Rutgers in political science. Her major subfield is American politics, and minor subfields are public law and methods. Prior to attending Rutgers, Katie received her MA in Political Science from Iowa State University with a focus on public policy. Her research interests are centered around criminal justice policy and the political behavior they inspire. Particularly, she is interested in the participation of the formerly incarcerated and their friends, families, and community members, which has fueled the social movement that has developed around criminal justice reform.
Manika Lamba
Manika Lamba is a PhD candidate at the Department of Library and Information Science, University of Delhi, India. She completed her MPhil and Master’s degrees in Library and Information Science. She also did a MSc in Plant Biotechnology and BSc(H) in Biochemistry. She has research articles, book chapters, and conference papers at both the national and international levels. She was featured in Information Professionals Share their Top Tips for 2019 blog by Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). She received the best paper award for her work presented at the ICDL2019 conference in New Delhi. Currently, she is writing a book on “Text Mining: An Uncharted Territory for Librarians” soon to be published in Springer Nature. She is an active reviewer for many international journals including IEEE Access, Journal of Medical Internet Research, and Journal of International Medical Research, among others. Her current research interests include digital humanities, information visualization, data analytics, data mining, and scholarly communication.
Kueichun Liu
KueiChun Liu is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. She received her MA in Communication and Information Studies from Rutgers University. Her research interests aim at political and health communication. Currently, she is looking at the online discourse related to COVID-19 in Taiwan.
Daniele Loprieno
Daniele Loprieno is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the formation and impact of social equity policies in recreational cannabis regulatory frameworks. She received her BA in Sociology from Penn State University and her MA in Sociology from California State University, Northridge.
Yi-Ta Lu
Yi-Ta Lu is a PhD candidate in Political Science and a graduate affiliate of the Center for Behavioral Political Economy at Stony Brook University. His research interests include behavioral political economy and computational modeling. Substantive topics include social dilemmas, coalition lobbying, electoral competition, and political polarization. His dissertation concerns the collective action problems in interest group coalitions and how the strength of policy opponents affects their cooperative behavior. The study aims to provide insight into climate negotiation, interest group politics, and human cooperation in general.
Hanjin Mao
Hanjin Mao is a PhD student in Public Administration at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research interests include nonprofit management, nonprofit finance, philanthropy, and volunteerism. Her dissertation project focuses on the financial returns of information technology adoption in nonprofit organizations. She holds a Master of Public Administration from Rutgers University-Newark, and a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from Hohai University in China.
Cristina Monzer
Cristina Monzer is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include political communication, cultural resonance, European international migration and framing processes in public communication. Methodologically, she is interested in comparative approaches, computational social science, and in advancing automated textual analysis methods that reconcile the pattern identification capabilities of computational techniques with the contextual sensitivity of qualitative methodologies. She holds a Research Master’s degree in Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam, and a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Ludwig Maximilians University Munich.
Pooneh Mousavi
Pooneh Mousavi is currently pursuing a PhD in computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas. She has an MSc in Computer Science. Before joining the PhD Program, She has been working as a Full Stack Developer and Technical lead for three years. Her work lies at the intersection of Networks, Dynamics, and Data Sciences; in particular, using natural language processing and computational approaches to discover a pattern in society and learn how people collaborate and communicate to solve social challenges.
Ali Parviz
Ali Parviz is a graduate research assistant pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science at NJIT. His research interests lie at the intersection of Network Science, Machine Learning, and Theoretical Computer Science with applications in Computational Social Science. He is currently involved in research projects concerning the modeling, analysis, and control of complex networked systems with applications in online social networking, web search, product recommendations, and mobile networks. Most recently, he has been investigating using nonlinear graph diffusions as an alternative way to design algorithms for community detection in large networks. Identifying important communities in a complex network is a highly relevant problem that has applications in many disciplines, such as computer science, physics, neuroscience, social science, biology, and many others.
Krushna Ranaware
Krushna is a PhD candidate in the Social Science program at Syracuse University. Her research focusses on applications of mixed research methods and feminist theories to agricultural policy; her current project examines women’s work in agriculture in the context of public policy shifts in western India. Previously, she assisted with studies on social security programs, agriculture, and nutrition at IGIDR, Mumbai and completed an integrated masters in Economics and Development Studies From IIT-Madras.
Christopher Saint Jean
Christopher Saint Jean is a Political Science doctoral student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His research interests include the political participation of African Americans, as well as discriminatory policy and legislation created in the United States. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and is a Ronald E. McNair and Ron Moelis Social Innovation scholar.
Jayme Schlesinger
Jayme Schlesinger is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Rutgers University. Her dissertation studies the effectiveness of terrorism by highlighting the role of public responses to terrorist events in determining the outcomes for terrorist campaigns. Her research interests more broadly include studying terrorist decision-making and the mobilizing capabilities of terrorist organizations. She applies qualitative and mixed-quantitative approaches to her work with a particular interest in using survey experiments.
Wensong Shen
Wensong Shen is an incoming assistant professor of sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He earned his PhD degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2020. His research focuses on education and health, and especially the interaction between education and health in the context of social stratification and inequality. Broadly speaking, he utilizes quantitative methods to explore how individuals and families with different social backgrounds experience the complex process of social stratification, and how such experiences shape their life opportunities and consequences such as education and health.
Inyoung Shin
Inyoung Shin is an assistant faculty associate in the department of communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She earned her PhD from the Department of Communication at Rutgers University in 2019. Her research examines the relationship between new/social media, social networks, community, organization, and democratic engagement. In this broad domain, she is particularly interested in the pervasive nature of new/social media, which exposes individuals to a substantial amount of information about social ties. Focusing on the process through which people develop awareness of thoughts, opinions, and life experiences of social ties, her research addresses social and psychological implications of new technology.
Gabriel Varela
Gabriel Varela is a PhD student in the Sociology department at Duke University. His current research focuses on repeated exposure to media information and the development of cultural frameworks. He draws on a variety of computational methods to approach socio-cultural systems, namely natural language processing and networks. Broadly, he is interested in investigating the intersection of medicine, culture and cognition.
Justin Vinton
Justin is a doctoral student at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. His primary research areas are in labor and employment relations and organizational structure, with a focus on labor management-management partnership, collaborative work arrangements, high performance work systems, and the changing role of middle management. He also approaches his research with a policy lens as his current projects take place in public education and healthcare settings. As a proponent of mixed methods research, he utilizes both quantitative and qualitative analyses, including qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Before his doctoral study, he worked at the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers, studying the implementation of workforce development programs in community colleges across the US. Justin is also the recipient of the Baden-Württemberg Scholarship to study at the University of Konstanz’s Department of Politics and Public Administration.
Luxuan Wang
Luxuan Wang is a PhD student in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Before coming to Rutgers, she received an MA in humanities and social thought at New York University. Broadly interested in the social construction of algorithmic power and the consequences of online news consumption, she conducts research examining platform-user relations, and how passive news consumption behaviors associate with misperception.
Maria Wilson
Maria is a PhD student at Rutgers University in Political Science, with a focus on gender and politics. Her work uses both qualitative and quantitative analysis to examine the relationship between campaign finance law and women's political participation in state legislatures. She received her undergraduate degree in Political Science from the University of New Mexico.
Laura Wolton
Laura Wolton is a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs. She received a graduate certificate in Science and Technology Policy and MS in Astrophysical, Planetary, and Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder after receiving a BS in Marine Science from Texas A&M at Galveston. Her research interests include public science agencies, citizen and bureaucratic dissent, campaign narratives, and media coverage of technological disasters. Her dissertation uses semi-automated methods to investigate policy narrative elements, including the social construction of characters, issue frames, and blame.
Jing Yang
Jing Yang is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science at Rutgers University. Her research primarily focuses on judicial politics in authoritarian regimes. She is particularly interested in applying computational methods to the study of Chinese judicial decisions to examine the patterns of judicial behaviors and the diversity of local courts-politics relationships. Jing holds an MA in Political Science from Duke University. Before coming to Duke, she received her Bachelor of Laws and Master of Laws from China.
Kathleen Rogers
Kathleen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University. Her research integrates work on symbolic representation from the field of women and politics with scholarship on emotions and social identities from political psychology.Stellenbosch
All Participants
Aldu Cornelissen
Dr Aldu Cornelissen is a data scientist at Kantar. He is a specialist in Social Network Analysis and is a co-founder of the Computational Social Science Group at Stellenbosch University.
Douglas Parry
Dr Parry is a lecturer in the Department of Information Science at Stellenbosch University. He is a co-founder of the Cognition and Technology Research group and his research concerns the interplay between digital technologies, human cognition, behaviour, performance, and affective well-being across a variety of life-situations.
Richard Barnett
Richard is a lecturer in the Department of Information Science at Stellenbosch University. He is a co-founder of the Computational Social Science Group at SU and is the group's resident Computer Scientist. His current research focus is on deep learning on graphs.
Kyle Finlay
Kyle runs an international data science team for a large market research firm. His team focuses on R&D, including in areas such as networks and NLP. In his spare time, he maintains a blog that applies a computational social science lens to understanding South African politics on social media.
Schalk Visagie
Schalk Visagie is a data scientist with the Kantar Group's Global Innovations Team based in Cape Town, South Africa, where he works on natural language processing. He completed his graduate studies at Stellenbosch University where his research primarily focused on minimum wage legislation and its relation to subjective well-being in South African labour markets. He is currently studying Mathematics at the LSE.
Eric Nyambiriga Araka
Eric N. Araka is currently a doctoral student pursuing PhD in Computer Science at the Computing & Information Technology Department, Kenyatta University, Kenya. He holds Master of degree in Distributed Computing Technology from University of Nairobi, Kenya and Bachelor of Science Computer Science (First Class Honors) from Kenyatta University. He currently lectures at the School of Computing & Information Technologies at the Technical University of Kenya, Kenya. His research interest areas include Educational Data Mining, Learning Analytics, Big Data, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence in Educational Systems and Technology Enhanced Learning. Currently, his research focus is exploring how Educational data mining techniques can be used to improve the measurement and promotion of self-regulated learning in online learning environments.
God'sGift Uzor
God'sGift is a post graduate researcher in the school of Computational and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand. My research looks to evaluate facial expressions applicable to e-therapy using deep neural networks. I am exploring data analysis for evaluating consumers' purchase behaviour.
Guidance Mthwazi
Guidance is undertaking a Doctoral Degree in Information Systems (PhD IS) with the Department of Information Systems at the Faculty of Commerce, University of Cape Town (UCT). His broader interest is Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy formulation for improved ICT enabled Development (ICT4D) and ICT governance in southern Africa. He however, address in his inquiry, the phenomenon of electronic-governance and its roles on citizen engagement and ICT policy formulation in order to foster human developmental goals. He holds a Master of Commerce Degree in Information Systems and a Bachelor of Business Administration Degree in Computer and Management Information Systems. He is an upcoming Academic with more than a decade of experience on Computers and Management Information Systems.
Hermine Kruger
Hermine is a MA candidate in Psychology at Stellenbosch University. She holds Honours degrees in BSc (Physiology) and BA (Psychology) from Stellenbosch University. Her research interests include caregiver involvement in children’s mental health and mental health services as well as chronic illness. She is currently involved in a project aimed at developing a universal life skills programme to support the mental health of adolescents in South Africa and will shortly engage in an international collaboration to assess the effect of COVID-19 on the mental health of children. She is interested in learning new methodological skills to apply to psychological research.
Isabel Basson
Isabel Basson is a postdoctoral fellow at the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (SciSTIP) hosted by the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University. Previously she worked on the South African National Survey of Research and Experimental Development (R&D Survey) conducted by the Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (CeSTII) at the Human Science Research Council (HSRC). Her main research interests involve bibliometrics, scientometrics, citation analysis and open access publishing.
Joseph Omidosu
Joseph is a Ph.D. Candidate with the Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town. He has a passion for technology, cybersecurity, and social impact. His research focuses on cybersecurity policies, and how computational methods can be adopted to enhance the effectiveness of cybersecurity policies. Outside research, he has a dynamic career background having worked in Telecommunication and the Government sector. He currently works for UCT Information Communication Technology Services, as a Systems Analyst, and has been involved with the implementation of the University’s Electronic Research Administration Systems, and also an associate member of the Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA).
Lucas Hertzog
Lucas is a sociologist interested in the relationship between work and digital technologies. He is a Research Coordinator at the Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescent Hub, a partnership between international organisations, governments, and universities in Africa and Europe, funded by the UK Research and Innovations Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). Lucas is responsible for a work package of seven studies across South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. His work focuses on secondary quantitative data analyses of existing or recently collected datasets, from studies that test impacts across multiple shared Sustainable Development Goals outcomes for adolescents. Lucas holds a PhD in Sociology from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2019), a MSc in Sociology (2015), and BA in Social Sciences (2012) from the same university. Previously, he has worked as Lecturer in Social Sciences at the Federal University of Fronteira Sul, and as a Researcher at the Brazilian Ministry of Justice.
Malebo Sephodi
Malebo Sephodi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Information Systems at the University of Cape Town. She is a writing fellow for the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Johannesburg. Her current research project investigates the relationship between technology and society. She is also interested in education technology and interrogates the digital divide within the South African education sector. Malebo’s other scholarly interests include African Feminist theory, critical theory, human development policy, and global politics.
Meli M Ncube
Meli M Ncube is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He completed his MA in Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in 2015. His research examined dialogues, turn-taking, and conversations – all features of deliberations – on Zimbabwean Twitter, ‘Zwitter’. He current PhD study is in Media Studies where the research focus is on social media – Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp Groups – and the influence it has on the democratization processes in Africa.
Nobungcwele Mbem
Nobungcwele is a PhD candidate in History at Stellenbosch University. She forms part of the Biography of an Uncharted People programme which conducts research related to the digital humanities and the data revolution in South African history. Her own research looks at migration in early twentieth century South Africa. She makes use of household surveys, marriage records as well as other archival material to weave together the stories and microhistories of people migrating from Eastern Cape to Cape Town. Before joining the Biography of an Uncharted People, she was a student at the University of Pretoria where she obtained her MSocSci in History and her research focused on railway histories and modernity.
Oladele Samuel
Oladele is currently a Postgraduate student and a research fellow at the Department of Demography and Social Statistics, Federal University Oye Ekiti, Nigeria. His research interest includes Mathematical Demography, Family Planning, Mortality and Medical Demography. He has a very solid background in statistical modelling, data analysis and computer modelling of population dynamics. He has trained over 600 persons on how to choose appropriate statistical techniques and demonstrated several modules on statistical tools like SPSS, Stata, R and more. His versatility in the use of these statistical tools have won him recommendations to teach data analysis at different academic platforms, teaching both undergraduates and postgraduate students at different Universities in Nigeria.
Sibusiso Nkomo
Sibusiso Nkomo is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cape Town (UCT). His research focuses on the role of historical newspapers in debate and discussion in the public sphere. His dissertation will focus on the Sotho-language Leselinyana la Lesotho newspaper published by the Morija Printing Press from 1863 until late into the 20th century, playing a prominent role in the orthography, literacy, history and politics of Lesotho. He is interested in textual analysis utilised in computational social science, especially on digitised newspapers and other archival material.
Sofiya Voytiv
Sofiya Voytiv is employed by Sociology Department at Stockholm University, Sweden. She uses mixed methods - social network analysis and ethnography to understand if armed conflict in the “homeland” can contribute to politicisation of social network of diasporic organisations and individuals. She aims to incorporate text networks analysis into her further research.
Tapfuma Pashapa
Tapfuma Pashapa is a Ph.D. student at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He holds a MPhil. degree in Demography from UCT and a degree in Mathematics from Midlands State University. His research interests are in Information Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) and the demography of developing countries. He is a member of the iCOMMS research group at UCT.
Uviwe Binase
Uviwe is a PhD candidate at the Univesity of the Western Cape (UWC) under the Statistics and Population Studies Department. Her current research seeks to understand The Economics of Tobacco Control in South Africa. She enrolled in this seminar as she has an interest in advancing her data analytics skills.Tucson
All Participants
Thomas Davidson
Thomas Davidson is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Cornell University. In fall 2020 he will be an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. He studies political discussions, hate speech, and other topics using digital trace data. His research involves a number of different computational methods including machine learning, natural language processing, and social network analysis.
Yotam Shmargad
Yotam Shmargad is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government & Public Policy at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on understanding how social media platforms shape political life in the United States. He uses a mix of statistical and computational methods, including social network analysis, online data collection, virtual experimentation, sentiment analysis, and machine learning.
Annie Boustead
Annie Boustead researches legal and policy issues related to electronic surveillance, privacy, policing, and drug policy. She is particularly interested in empirically studying law enforcement surveillance, and evaluating the impact of policies regulating this surveillance. She has a Ph.D. from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, where her dissertation focused on the interplay between commercial data collection and law enforcement surveillance, and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law.
Laura Brandimarte
Laura Brandimarte, Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems. She joined the Eller College of Management in 2015 after two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also earned her PhD in public policy and management (2012). Her areas of research include privacy, security, the psychology of self-disclosure and the social dynamics of privacy decision making and information sharing.
Ronald Breiger
Ronald Breiger, Regents Professor and Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, holds affiliations with the School of Government & Public Policy, the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Applied Mathematics, and the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Statistics & Data Science. His work is on social networks, adversarial networks, stratification, mathematical models, theory, and measurement issues in cultural and institutional analysis. He is the 2020 recipient of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award of the American Sociological Association Section on Methodology, recognizing a scholar who has made a career of outstanding contributions to methodology in sociology.
Frank Gonzalez
Frank is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy (SGPP) at the University of Arizona. His research strengths lay primarily in political psychology, experimental design and quantitative methods. His current research involves using work from political psychology, social neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology to understand attitudes toward race, class, inequality and hierarchy.
Robert Henderson
My research is in formal semantics with a special focus on the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, languages on which I have done many years of fieldwork. I am particularly excited about using tools from the natural language processing world to speed the annotation, documentation, and description of endangered languages.
Samara Klar
Samara Klar is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona School of Government & Public Policy. Dr. Klar studies why voters support policies and candidates, especially given the influence of their personal and social identities, their social networks, and their information environments. Her award-winning book, Independent Politics: How American Disdain Leads to Political Inaction (Cambridge University Press 2016), explains why so many Americans identify as politically independent and what the consequences are for American democracy.
Javier Osorio
Javier Osorio is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. His research focused on understanding the micro-foundations and dynamics of political and criminal violence in Latin America. To address this research agenda, he uses natural language processing, quasi-experimental and experimental techniques, geographic information systems, and big data analytics.
Fernando Sanchez
Fernando Sanchez is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. A quantitative researcher with academic experience in both STEM and the social sciences, his research has evolved in the context of spatial statistics and geocomputation to identify interactions between landscape dynamics, regional development, and the human dimensions of the environment.
Abe Barranca
Abe Barranca is a graduate student in Government at The University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation examines the effects of neighborhood organizational power and housing tenure divisions on local housing policy outputs. More broadly, he is interested in inequality, public policy, agent-based modeling, and influence networks in governance and policy-making.
Ae sil Woo
Ae sil Woo is an Assistant Professor at Gettysburg College. She studies how dictators manage the trade-off between reducing opposition threat and minimizing policy loss. Specifically, she explores leaders' strategic rule manipulations to decouple the opposition's electoral success from policy influence while increasing the inclusiveness of a legislative process. Her work, which has been published in the Journal of Politics and the Annals of Comparative Democratization, contributes to our understanding of why dictators create heterogeneous legislative institutions and how those institutions affect a variety of political outcomes including opposition dissent and elite coups.
Alejandro Martin del Campo
Alejandro Martin del Campo is a Professor at Tecnologico de Monterrey at Education and Humanities School. After a long career at broadcast television he finished his PhD and teaches political & social communication at the intersection of emerging technologies. His current research agenda uses computational social science on digital media and democracy.
Ashok Kumar Kaliyamurthy
Ashok is a doctoral student at the Eller College of Management focusing on the socio-cultural aspects of consumption. His research interest is in how algorithms are consumed and how that in turn mediates consumption. Ashok is working on a minor in sociology to supplement his training in consumer culture theory (CCT) at the marketing department. Prior to doctoral research Ashok has over 15 years of corporate experience starting as a software engineer and then moving to management roles in sales and marketing. He has an MBA from Cornell University and an undergraduate degree in engineering from Bangalore University.
Aytalina Kulichkina
Aytalina Kulichkina is a PhD student in Communication and a research associate at the Computational Communication Science Lab at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research interests lie primarily in the area of computational communication science methods with a focus on agent-based modeling and network analysis.
Azade Esther Kakavand
Azade Kakavand is a PhD Candidate in the field of Computational Communication Science at the University of Vienna. For her dissertation, she researches right-wing extremism on social media using network analysis and automated content analysis. She completed the Erasmus Mundus Master’s program in Journalism, Media and Globalization at Aarhus University and the University of Amsterdam.
Chen Chen
Chen Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona. Her research primarily focuses on the application of corpus linguistic approach and computational techniques to better understand second language acquisition and sociolinguistic phenomenon. She is currently working on examining the use of pragmatic markers in peer talks in the study abroad context, as well as building a longitudinal Chinese learner corpus.
Chendi Wang
Chendi Wang is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the European University Institute. His broad research interests include comparative politics, political behaviour, political economy, and methodology. He examines both enduring topics, such as economic voting, social movement and public opinion, as well as new topics surfacing as a result of recent crises, e.g. the COVID-19 pandemic and the migrant crisis in Europe. His research incorporates a variety of methods, including quantitative analysis, survey experiment and formal modelling, to bring a well-rounded approach to the study of important questions. He is also interested in political methodology, trying to develop new quantitative techniques and improve current ones. He specialises in time series analysis and causal inference with observational data. At the same time, he has been actively working on Bayesian statistics and machine learning techniques.
Chengzhi Yin
Chengzhi Yin is a PhD candidate in Political Science Department in the Morrissey School of Arts and Sciences, Boston College. He majors in International Relations and minors in Comparative Politics. His research interests include Alliance Politics, Coercive Diplomacy, Chinese Foreign Policy, and East Asian Security.
Christina Gahn
Christina Gahn is a pre-doctoral research fellow at the chair of comparative politics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Also, she is a PhD student at the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences. Before, she studied political science and worked at the University of Vienna. Christina was a research assistant for the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) and teaching assistant for comparative politics and quantitative methods. Christina's research interests include political parties and party competition, electoral campaigns and political communication with a focus on quantitative methods. Her dissertation project is about targeting issue messages in electoral campaigns in Europe.
Dana Guy
Dana Guy is a PhD student at the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe) at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on social media and narratives during intractable conflicts. She holds B.A. degree in Political Science and Journalism from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and M.A. from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tel Aviv University.
EmiLee Smart
EmiLee Smart is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Kentucky. Her research uses computational social science to investigate language patterns to determine and evaluate authorship of United States Supreme Court Opinions and Special Orders.
Fan Yang
Fan Yang is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at University at Albany, SUNY. Her research interests include the psychology of communication technology, strategic communication, and advanced research methods. I am interested in examining the effects of new media on decision-making, with a special focus on information processing and attitude change. My second research area focuses on the strategic use of social media in health/science communication as well as advertising/public relations using advanced research methods, including meta-analysis, social network analysis, as well as big data analytics.
Firman M Firmansyah
Firman M Firmansyah is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University, where he is also pursuing Advanced Graduate Certificate in Data and Computational Science. He holds an M.Sc. in learning technology from the University of Bristol, England and Sarjana (B.A.) in psychology from Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. His research interests lie at the intersection of information technology and human behavior. In his dissertation, he examines why diverse people hardly get along causing polarization. He introduces outreachability, the ability to reach out outgroup members in social identity space, and reveals how its variance always favors homophily over heterophily through computer simulation.
Francisca Castro
Francisca Castro is a Research Fellow in the Chair of International Politics at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is currently enrolled as a PhD Student in the Berlin School of Social Sciences (BGSS). She has a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology, and a M.A. in Sociology from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Gerard Chung
I am from Singapore. I am a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work. My dissertation will focus on risk factors of maltreatment rereports. My research interests include parenting, engaging fathers in services, child protection services, risk assessment and prediction modeling.
Gustavo Schneider
Gustavo is a doctoral candidate at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on two topics: 1) how different aspects of numerical judgment can influence decision making and 2) political contributions. Gustavo examines how consumers make inferences about numerical quantities, and how these inferences impact subsequent decisions. In addition, he investigates factors that influence small donor contributions to political campaigns. Using experiments and secondary data, his research unveils factors that influence consumers’ decisions to donate money or purchase campaign merchandise. Gustavo has published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, and presented his research at ACR, SCP, and SJDM conferences.
Helen Kras
Helen Kras is a PhD Candidate in political science at the University of Kentucky. Her field of study is comparative politics with a regional focus on Latin America. Her dissertation focuses on the effect of laws and policies addressing violence against women on citizens’ political attitudes and news media reporting in Brazil. To explore these topics, she relies on a mixed-method approach combining experimental and non-experimental designs. The quantitative component of her dissertation includes time series, multilevel modeling, and computer text analysis. The qualitative portion of her dissertation comprises of findings from the extensive fieldwork that she conducted in Brazil and El Salvador.
Jack Simons
Jack Simons, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Mercy College in New York. His counseling lab is dedicated to scholarship on student and educator experiences, academic and career development, and health and wellness. He specializes in school counseling and LGBTQ topics and is an expert in counseling youth and emerging adults. His research on sexual and gender minority (SGM) topics aims to improve academic success and wellness among SGM people and other underrepresented minority groups. Dr. Simons’ research agenda is presently focused on: (1) stress, identity, and coping among transgender and gender non-binary individuals; (2) identity development and motivation among minority females in STEM; and (3) cultural competence among school counselors and other helping professionals.
Jacob Turner
Jacob Turner is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests focus on the politics of democratization in Latin America, particularly the impact of competitive electoral politics and state building in the context of weakly institutionalized democratic regimes. His dissertation centers on “iron fist” politics, especially how strong anti-crime campaign discourse affects voter perceptions and support for democratic norms. A doctoral research associate at the Violence and Transitional Justice Lab at Notre Dame, Jacob is committed to producing research that advances our understanding of political and criminal violence and that engages with human rights practitioners in Latin America.
Jane Cronin
Jane Cronin is a PhD candidate at American University in Washington DC. She is completing her dissertation on emotional expression in digital activism using computational approaches, and is particularly interested in text and network analysis.
Kenneth D. Aiello
Ken applies computational historical analysis and epistemology to question what scientific knowledge is, how we can analyze changes in knowledge, and how to measure similarities and differences between the knowledge claims of individual agents and groups. His work builds on how to assess contested knowledge claims and measures the evolution of knowledge across complex systems and multiple dimensions of scale. This approach also engages in dynamic new debates about global and local structures of knowledge shaped by technological innovation within microbiology related to public policy, shrinking resources given to biomedical ideas as opposed to “translation”, and the ethics of scientific discovery. Using interdisciplinary methods for understanding historical content and context-rich narratives contributes to novel discoveries in scientific domains and major transitions in science. These results provide insight into the evolution of knowledge and how innovation emerges.
Krystal Maughan
Krystal Maughan is a current PhD student at the University of Vermont. Her primary area of research involves Provable Fairness, Differential Privacy, and Machine Learning. She is particularly interested in thinking about participatory methods of data collection and in making mechanisms that socially benefit and ethically support people.
Kun Yan
Kun Yan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of Arizona. She studies media messages and health topics in computer-mediated contexts. She is particularly interested in understanding users' expressions and social support exchanges in online communities.
Laura W. Dozal
PhD student at the University of Arizona's School of Information. Her recent work has focused on analyzing sentiment from text and image content, as well as categorizing content through NLP deep learning. Her research specifically views topics of gender equality movements in Latin America, resource networks for displaced people in the U.S., and, more recently, crime.
Liron Lavi
Liron Lavi is a research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying elections and democracy, political representation, and collective identity in Israel and the United States. Her research focuses on how the changing landscape of "old" and "new" media shapes the democratic role of elections. She uses qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods, including discourse analysis, statistical models, and natural language processing.
Lucas Borba
Lucas Borba is a graduate student of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco - Brazil. His research investigates the relationship between perceptions of corruption and support for democracy in Latin American countries, using IRT models and a multilevel approach. He is interested in political behavior, public opinion, causal inference techniques, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis.
Markus Kollberg
Markus Kollberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at University College London (UCL). His research project investigates the strategic use of populist rhetoric in parliamentary debates in European legislatures and its effects on legislators, debates and voters. He employs a number of different quantitative and computational methods including supervised classification, natural language processing, and crowdsourcing. More broadly, Markus’ research interests lie in the areas of Political Behavior, Political Communication and European Politics.
Meng-Jung 'MJ' Lin
Meng-Jung 'MJ' Lin is a PhD candidate in Sociology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests are society and genomics, social stratification, gender, and advanced quantitative methods. She is also interested in using machine learning methods and network analysis to explore gene-environment interactions. Her dissertation examines how human inheritance and social environments affects men and women differently in STEM careers.
Michael Chong
Michael Chong is a graduate student in the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto. His doctoral research focuses on building statistical models for demographic estimation, particularly in contexts where data quality is poor. He is also broadly interested in applied statistics, interdisciplinary research, and reproducible workflows. Michael previously completed his undergraduate studies in Integrated Science at McMaster University.
Nina Obermeier
Nina Obermeier is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Her research focuses on domestic processes of contestation over international politics. In her current research, she uses quantitative text analysis and survey experiments to explore the effects of right-wing populist rhetoric on public opinion towards international economic integration.
Pranay Ranjan
Dr. Pranay Ranjan is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University. He is an environmental social scientist with interdisciplinary training in institutional analysis, social dilemmas, water governance, environmental policy, natural resource conservation, and action research. Dr. Ranjan holds a Ph.D. in Environment and Natural Resources from the Ohio State University and a Masters in Environmental Studies from TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) University. His research focuses on examining the dynamic interactions between society and environment, and evaluating how these interactions affect human behavior and collective decision making.
Regan Johnston
Regan is a PhD student in Political Science at McMaster University and a Data Analyst at Vox Pop Labs. Regan is also a Doctoral Fellow at the Digital Society Lab at McMaster University as well as a Mitacs Accelerate Fellow. She uses machine learning to research hate speech on social media. Her most recent research project analyzed the impact of COVID-19 on care-giving.
Rina James
Rina is a doctoral candidate in the School of Sociology. Their broad interests include culture, gender, and digital sociology, with particular focus in the growing area of male supremacy. Their current work analyzes male supremacist narratives in online communities, examining how discourse on race and gender in the incel community fosters such attitudes despite narratives of victimization. They are also developing a dissertation project that explores ideological variation across the loose network of male supremacist blogs and forums known as the 'manosphere', and aims to identify how such variation influences both radicalization processes and the outcomes of men's participation in male supremacist spaces.
Rongbo Jin
Rongbo Jin is a PhD student in political science at the University of Arizona. His research interests include American politics, political psychology, public opinion and computational social science. His current research uses unsupervised text analysis to analyze open-ended responses related to partisan affects.
Saber Khani
I am a sociology PhD student at Boston College. My area of interest mainly hovers around social movement and democratization in MENA region.
Sanghoon Kim
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research interest focuses on authoritarian nostalgia and related political behavior in post-authoritarian democracies. I am collecting empirical data from South Korea, Taiwan, and the US. I received my BA in Political Science and Economics and an MA in Political Science from Korea University. I began my PhD program at the University of Illinois in 2016.
Sanho Chung
Sanho Chung is a Ph.D. student majoring in Comparative Politics and minoring in Methodology in the School of Government and Public Policy (SGPP), University of Arizona. His current research interest lies in the dynamics in authoritarian and hybrid regimes regarding elite coalition as well as the influence of capital on institutions, with a particular focus on the region of East Asia (esp. Hong Kong and Taiwan). He also pays special attention to various computational social science methods, including social network analysis. He obtained his M.A. in International Relations from the Australian National University in 2016. Before that, he received his B.SoSc in Government and International Studies at the Hong Kong Baptist University in 2015. Prior to his doctoral study in the SGPP, he worked on several research projects concerning contentious politics and identity in Hong Kong.
Selim Yaman
Selim Yaman is a PhD student in Political Science at American University's School of Public Affairs, where he specializes in political methodology and comparative politics. His research uses geographic information systems and Bayesian statistics to investigate political conflicts, and military coups. Yaman also serves as a Fellow in the Center for Data Science at American University. Before starting doctoral study, he lived and worked in the UK, and Turkey.
Shatira Woods
Shatira Woods is a second year PhD student in sociology at The Ohio State University. She studies race, social stratification, culture, and criminology. As a computational social scientist, she is interested in how cultural discourse that occurs on social media platforms such as Twitter reinforces and legitimates racism, white supremacy, and stratification. Her current research involves a variety of different computational methods including machine learning and natural language processing.
Terrell Winder
Terrell Winder is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An urban ethnographer, Winder's research areas include race & ethnicity, sexuality & sexual health, qualitative and quantitative research methods, and education. He is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled, Unspoiling Identity: How Black Gay Men Learn to Overcome Stigma. In this book, he examines stigma response processes among stigmatized populations negotiating more than one stigma simultaneously. He received his B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Alejandro Beltran
Alejandro Beltran is a PhD candidate at the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. His research broadly explores corruption and violence in Mexico. In his dissertation he identifies the institutional and political determinants of corruption investigations performed by subnational audit agencies. A separate research agenda explores the diversification of drug trafficking organizations into fentanyl and its consequences on violence. As a computational social scientist, he uses machine learning and natural language processing to generate quantitative measures of these phenomena and implements methods for causal inference in his empirical work.
Kelsey Gonzalez
Kelsey E. Gonzalez is a PhD Candidate in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. Her research uses computational social science, network analysis and statistical methods to investigate social networks, the social determinants of health, and racial and panethnic identities. Outside of her research, she is a Carpentries instructor, Carpentries lesson maintainer and an avid R user.UCLA
All Participants
Alina Arseniev-Koehler
Alina Arseniev-Koehler is currently a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles pursuing a PhD in Sociology. Substantively, her research interests include culture, cognitive sociology, language, and health and illness. Methodologically, she is interested in computational social science and machine-learning, with a focus on the computational analysis of language. Her Master’s research aimed to provide a cognitively plausible, computational account of the schemata activated by news reporting on obesity. Alina also enjoys learning and teaching new computational techniques and helps coordinate the Computational Sociology Working Group at UCLA.
Jennie E. Brand
Jennie E. Brand is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is Director of the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) and Co-Director of the Center for Social Statistics (CSS) at UCLA. She is Chair-Elect of the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and an elected Board Member of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committte on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28). Prof. Brand is a member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey (GSS) and a member of the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She received the ASA Methodology Leo Goodman Mid-Career Award in 2016, and honorable mention for the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility William Julius Wilson Mid-Career Award in 2014. Prof. Brand studies social stratification and inequality, mobility, social demography, education, and methods for causal inference.
Pablo Geraldo Bastías
Pablo Geraldo Bastías is a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) affiliated to the California Center for Population Research (CCPR). His research examines how institutions influence inequality in education and the labor market, with a particular focus on skill formation systems and school-to-work transitions. He is interested in the intersection of causality, machine learning, and network analysis.
Bernard Koch
Bernard is a sociology graduate student at UCLA. He developed research interests in culture, science, and computational methods through previous experiences in comparative genomics/bioinformatics and science education research. His master's thesis adapted models from macroevolutionary biology to explain the historical trajectories of cultural populations like music genres, scientific fields, and industries. For his dissertation, he'd like to focus on how deep learning can be applied to network and causal inference problems to help identify how we can make science more efficient, productive, and equitable. Bernard is passionate about collaborative science and teaching, and has given workshops on programming, machine learning, and/or computational social science for the National Human Genome Research Institute (NIH), the UCLA Library, and the UCLA Sociology Department.
Margarita Boyarskaya
Margarita Boyarskaya is a PhD student at NYU Stern Technology, Operations, and Statistics group working on causal models for algorithmic fairness. She holds a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in theoretical mathematics from Moscow State University. Previously, Margarita was an intern with the FATE group at Microsoft Research.
Tania Cabello-Hutt
Tania Cabello-Hutt is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her main research interest is in gender inequality in the labor market, focusing on the transition to parenthood. For her dissertation, she draws on online data and experimental methods to study how 'family-friendly' benefits and workplaces shape discrimination against mothers and potential mothers. In collaborative projects, she examines gender and racial discrimination in hiring as well as family and employment trajectories over the life course.
Oscar Contreras
My focus is on computational methods to study and predict crime patterns and criminal networks.
Kimberly Clair
Kimberly Clair is a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior with training in ethnography (PhD, Gender Studies) and survey/administrative data analysis (MS, Community Health Sciences). Her research uses mixed methods to improve health services for trauma survivors, migrants, incarcerated youth, and veterans. Her current research examines factors associated with changes in health service use among homeless-experienced veterans who transition into supportive housing. She is interested in using computational social science to identify new data sources and innovative methods for evaluating clients’ experiences with health interventions.
Heather Harper
Heather Harper is a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego. She combines computational and comparative historical methods to investigate the conditions that explain policy content development and change. Her dissertation looks at the content and timing of changes in political attention using a case study of federal gendered pay inequity policies in the United States. As a member of the Fiscal Democracy Project at UCSD, she uses local tax policy texts in California to predict voter support for public finance proposals.
Nick Havey
Nick Havey is a 3rd year PhD student in the Higher Education and Organizational Change program in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. His research interests fall under three areas: the intersection of whiteness and queerness, queer romantic and sexual politics, and student political organizations and political engagement. His ongoing political work considers the key predictors that explain why students change their political orientation over the course of college and how students across the political spectrum engage in campus political discourse and understand themselves as political actors, particularly in reference to students identifying at the other end of the spectrum, and how they develop and implement rhetorical and political repertoires.
Hannah Hertenstein
Hannah Hertenstein is a doctoral student in the school of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests are in education inequality, school choice, and organizational ecology. Before coming to UC Irvine, she conducted research projects that involved geospatial analysis of school closures in Arizona. Hannah received her BA in sociology at the University of Arizona in 2019.
Cybele Kappos
Cybele Kappos is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at UCLA. Her research broadly focuses on democracy in the European Union. She is interested in disentangling how national interests and actors interact with the unique, supranational structure of the EU. She hopes to synthesize several different methodologies in her work including text analysis and supervised machine learning to understand the nuances of political discourse.
Benji Kaveladze
Benji Kaveladze is a PhD student in Psychological Science at UC Irvine. He studies online mental health support communities, aiming to learn how to improve user experiences on these spaces.
Hye Min Kim
Hye Min Kim is a doctoral candidate at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. She earned her B.A. in Mass Communication and M.A. in Communication from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. During her undergraduate years, she spent a year studying abroad at UCLA and she also worked as a news assistant intern at the CNN Seoul office for a semester. Her research interest revolves around the intersection of health, psychology, media, and communication, embracing diverse methodologies including experiment, survey, and computational methods. Her recent work explores psychological aspects of information seeking and processing as well as public discourse on social media especially about contentious health and other social issues.
Delaney Knorr
Delaney Knorr is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA broadly interested in women’s health across the life course. Her research focuses on the evolutionary processes that undergird modern social relationships surrounding motherhood, within which she is particularly interested in the grandmother-mother relationship. Working with a cohort of Latinx women living in Los Angeles, her dissertation pursues how social support and cultural stress influence pregnancy biology as well as mental health during the peri-natal period in effort to respond to health disparities in the US. Ms. Knorr holds a MPhil from the University of Cambridge in Applied Biological Anthropology and is a member of California Center for Population Research.
Hanzhang Liu
Hanzhang Liu is an assistant professor of Political Studies at Pitzer College. Prior to coming to Pitzer, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in political science from Columbia University in 2019. Hanzhang studies comparative authoritarian politics with a special focus on China. Specifically, she examines how various authoritarian institutions are deployed to mediate state-society relations. In her dissertation, Hanzhang investigates how the merit-based political recruitment system in contemporary China serves as an institution of upward mobility that co-opts ordinary citizens without further redistribution. In addition, Hanzhang also conducts research on behavior of authoritarian media and women in politics in China.
Michelle Luna
Michelle Luna is a PhD candidate in the Psychology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research examines how language affects cognition and vice versa among preschoolers. Her dissertation will consist of experimental studies that aim to increase the long-term retention of words preschoolers learn from shared book reading sessions. She is interested in learning more about machine learning in order to examine the mechanisms behind her behavioral work via computational models.
Stefanie Neumeier
Stefanie Neumeier is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. Her broad research interests include international migration, refugee protection, international norms, and political networks. She draws on a range of methods including surveys, social network analysis, and text analysis to explore the emergence and performance of a new public-private refugee protection network. Stefanie holds an MA in International Studies from the University of Oklahoma.
Jieun Park
Jieun is a Ph.D. student in political science at UCLA. Prior to UCLA, she was a professional researcher at Korea National Diplomatic Academy and Association of World Election Bodies. She completed a masters in International Relations at Seoul National University and a Bachelor degree in International Relations at Australian National University. Her research explores populism and anti-immigration sentiment. She is particularly interested in studying xenophobia/anti-immigration sentiment in Asian countries and the attitudes toward racial minorities in Western countries. Her ongoing project examines the causes of the attitudinal changes toward Asian immigrants in the US and Australia by analyzing survey results and text data of news coverage. She has published her work in Romanian Journal of Electoral Studies and presented at various conferences including MPSA, WPSA, and IPSA.
Nripsuta Ani Saxena
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. My research interests are, broadly, fairness in machine learning, AI for Social Good, and questions at the intersection of psychology and CS.
Fariba Siddiq
Fariba Siddiq is a Ph.D. student in Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles specializing in transportation policy and planning. She is a graduate student researcher at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. Her research interests lie in travel behavior, transportation equity and transportation and land use interaction.
Gilad Wenig
Gilad is a PhD student in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on war and the military in the Middle East and United States.
Valerie Wirtschafter
Valerie Wirtschafter is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include social media, public opinion, violent crime, post-conflict development, and quantitative methods. Her dissertation focuses on the effects of crowd-sourcing crime data through social media on political attitudes and perceptions of insecurity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In this project, she utilizes both text analysis on hundred of thousands of social media posts and an online experiment.
Alexandra Wollum
Alexandra Wollum is a PhD student in the Community Health Sciences Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. She studies the intersection of social norms, social structures, and social movements on reproductive health. She received a MPH from the University of Washington in Global Health concentrating on health metrics and evaluation and a Bachelor’s degree from Tufts University in International Relations and Community Health.
2019
Boston
All Participants
Ryan J. Gallagher
Ryan J. Gallagher is a PhD student at Northeastern University. At the Network Science Institute, he researches the dynamics of social networks using tools and theory from natural language processing and communications. He currently studies the affective phenomena of networked counterpublics. Ryan holds an MS in mathematics from the University of Vermont, where he worked with the Computational Story Lab at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, and a BA in math from the University of Connecticut.
David Hagmann
David is a Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He received his PhD from the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. His research looks at the desire to avoid information that may be painful to learn yet improve decision-making, persuasion on politically charged topics, and behavioral policy interventions (nudges).
Eaman Jahani
Eaman Jahani is a graduate research assistant pursuing a PhD degree in Social and Engineering Systems with a minor in Statistics at MIT IDSS. Prior to MIT, he was a software engineer at Google for 4 years. His main training is in statistics and computer science, but recently he has been appreciating econometrics and modeling in applied economics. His past research examined the extent of bubbles vs truth-seeking in cryptocurrency markets and socio-economic prediction in social networks. His current research focuses on structural factors such as networks or institutions that regenerate inequality at a micro scale. Eaman spends too much time reading political commentaries.
Yan Leng
Yan is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Human Dynamics group at MIT. She received dual masters in Computer Science and Transportation Engineering from MIT in 2016. Yan is interested in using a broad range of computational techniques to understand the network effect of social influence. In particular, she works on the inference, identification, and modeling of social influence and social learning with large-scale behavioral data in a networked environment. Besides, she also works on the combining network structure and personal attributes in maximizing cascading payoff.
Sanaz Mobasseri
Sanaz Mobasseri is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. She received her PhD from the Management of Organizations Department at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Her research examines the role of emotion, cognition, and culture in shaping social networks and labor market outcomes. Much of her work is situated in organizational settings, where she examine the microfoundations of workplace inequality. Although grounded in sociology and organizational theory, her work integrates theoretical insights from social psychology and sociolinguistics. Her research methods are similarly diverse, ranging from experimental studies in the lab to audit studies in the field to computational approaches applied to large archival data sets.
Andrey Fradkin
I am an economist who studies digitization and search and matching markets. I've written papers on topics such as the design of Airbnb’s search and matching algorithm, reputation systems, online job search, and 401(k) contribution choices by workers. I am currently an assistant professor of marketing at the Boston University Questrom School of Business. My research has been published in both economics journals (American Economic Review, The Review of Economics and Statistics) and computer science conferences (ACM-EC). I've provided expert input about the digital economy at the President’s Council on Science and Technology and the Federal Trade Commission. Prior to BU, I was a postdoc at the Initiative on the Digital Economy at MIT. I worked as a data scientist at Airbnb while completing a Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford University. In my free time, I climb, write, and make a podcast.
Moshe Hoffman
Moshe Hoffman is a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics Group and Lecturer at Harvard's Department of Economics. Moshe applies game theory, models of learning and evolution, and experimental methods, to try to decipher the (often subconscious) motives that shape our social behavior, preferences, and ideologies. Together with Erez Yoeli, he co-designed and teaches 'Game Theory and Social Behavior' which lays out this approach. Moshe obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business and his B.S. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
Abigail Z. Jacobs
Abigail Jacobs is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and in Complex Systems. Previously, she was a postdoc at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, where she was also a member of the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder, during which she spent several years at Microsoft Research NYC and received funding from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She received a BA in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and Mathematics from Northwestern University.
In Song Kim
In Song Kim is an Associate Professor of Political Science. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, where he received a Harold W. Dodds Fellowship for 2012-2013. His dissertation research on the effects of firms’ lobbying on trade policy-making received the 2015 Mancur Olson Award for the Best Dissertation in Political Economy. Professor Kim works at the intersection of statistical machine learning and political science. His research explores trade policies of various countries in the world on highly specific products, and political activities of firms that produce and trade goods internationally. He is also interested in developing statistical methods for causal inference with panel data, and text analysis for analyzing political documents.
Mohsen Mosleh
I am a research scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management. My work lies at the intersection of computational and social sciences. My interest includes misinformation, social media, social networks, and cooperation. In particular, I study how our cognition relates to our behavior on online social media. I use theoretical models based on (evolutionary) Game Theory, Network Science, and empirical (data-driven) models based on Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Online Experiments. Prior to joining MIT, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Department of Psychology at Yale. I received my PhD in Engineering with a minor in Business Intelligence and Analytics, my Masters in Management, and my undergraduate in Engineering. I also worked as a Systems and Software Integration Lead for five years prior to starting my PhD.
Laura K. Nelson
Laura K. Nelson is a sociologist who uses computational methods to study social movements, culture, gender, institutions, and the history of feminism. Using computer-assisted texts analysis and network analysis, her dissertation examined the political logics underlying women’s movements in New York City and Chicago from 1865-1975. She is interested in further developing automated text analysis methods and best-practices for sociology and digital humanities. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2014-2016 she was a postdoc in Management and Organizations in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and is on leave this year as a fellow for Digital Humanities @ Berkeley and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alex 'Sandy' Pentland
Professor Alex 'Sandy' Pentland directs the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited scientists in the world, and Forbes recently declared him one of the '7 most powerful data scientists in the world' along with Google founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the United States. He co-led the World Economic Forum discussion in Davos that led to the EU privacy regulation GDPR, and was central in forging the transparency and accountability mechanisms in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. He has received numerous awards and prizes such as the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review, the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, and the Brandeis Award for work in privacy. He is a founding member of advisory boards for Google, AT&T, Nissan, and the UN Secretary General, a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies including social enterprises such as the Data Transparency Lab and the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and leader within the World Economic Forum."
Brooke Foucault Welles
Brooke Foucault Welles is an Associate Professor in the department of Communication Studies and core faculty of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Combining the methods of network science with theories from the social sciences, Foucault Welles studies how online communication networks enable and constrain behavior, with particular emphasis on how these networks facilitate the pursuit of individual, team, and collective goals. Much of her work is interdisciplinary and collaborative, with co-authors from computer science, political science, digital humanities, design, and public health. Her recent contributions include a series of studies of the transformative power of networked counterpublics, techniques for the longitudinal analysis of communication networks using event-based network analysis, and guidelines for the effective use of network visualizations in scientific and lay publications. Her work is funded by grants from the US Army Research Office and US Army Research Lab, and has been featured in leading social science journals such as the Journal of Communication, Information, Communication and Society, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Web Science and was part of the team that developed the Network Literacy Essential Concepts and Core Ideas.
Jinhua Zhao
Jinhua Zhao is the Edward and Joyce Linde Associate Professor of City and Transportation Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prof. Zhao brings behavioral science and transportation technology together to shape travel behavior, design mobility system and reform urban policies. He develops methods to sense, predict, nudge and regulate travel behavior; designs multimodal mobility system that integrates autonomous vehicles, shared mobility and public transport; and reform urban policies to govern the new technologies and business models. Prof. Zhao sees transportation as a language to describe a person, to characterize a city, and to understand an institution. Prof. Zhao leads long-term research collaborations with major transportation authorities and operators worldwide including London, Chicago, Hong Kong and Singapore. He holds Master of Science, Master of City Planning and Ph.D. degrees from MIT and a Bachelor's degree from Tongji University. Prof. Zhao directs the Urban Mobility Lab (mobility.mit.edu) at MIT and is the founder of the MIT Automated Mobility Policy Project.
Frances Chen
Dr. Frances Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia State University. Her research is focused on biosocial bases of antisocial behavior and related constructs, and includes topics at the intersection of criminology and psychology. Her quantitative works examine how life events and turning points in life (e.g., marriage) shape antisocial behavior, and how environment interacts with individuals’ biological characteristics (e.g., stress system, fear conditioning) to exacerbate or limit antisocial behavior throughout the life-course. She employs both psychophysiological recording and salivary bioscience research methods in furtherance of this work. Her current research on psychobiological and social characteristics of active, noninstitutionalized hardcore street offenders is an endeavor to advance our knowledge of the persistence in offending.
Yuhao Du
Yuhao Du is a PhD student in Computer Science Department at University at Buffalo. His research interests include computational social science, natural language processing, computer vision and machine learning. Currently, he is working on: (1) measuring to what extent fake news is spread via online image memes, (2) incorporating Affect Control Theory to build a sentiment aware deep reinforcement learning chatbots.
César Garro-Marín
César is a Ph.D. student in Economics at Boston University. His research interests include migration and gender inequality. His current research explores how the industrial structure of local economies adjusts to international migration inflows. He previously held a position as lecturer at the Universidad de Costa Rica. César received his master’s degree in Economics and Finance from Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros (CEMFI) and his bachelor’s degree in Economics from Universidad de Costa Rica.
Rebekah Getman
Rebekah Getman is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Northeastern University. After working in global public health for several years prior to graduate school, her research focus shifted to the United States. She focuses on feminist healthcare models, reproductive health, and health social movements, and is working on projects investigating vaccine-hesitant parent communities, abortion politics and polarized media networks, and the ways urban and health infrastructures overlap. She is interested how researchers can use qualitative and quantitative methods in complementary ways to identify and solve problems. Previously, Rebekah earned an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an B.A. from Harvard College in History and Government.
Ariella Kristal
Ariella is a doctoral student in Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School where she studies behavioral design. Specifically, she is interested in how environments can be structured to reduce bias in the workplace, in educational settings, in the online context, and in many others. She is also interested in using big data methods, such as computational text analysis to understand ways of improving feedback-giving. Previously, Ariella worked for the Behavioural Insights Team in London, where she applied findings from behavioral science to public policy. She has focused on delivering policy advice and designing and implementing field experiments related to sustainable transportation, criminal justice, and organizational behavior. Ariella graduated from Yale University with a BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics.
Muyang Li
Muyang Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at University at Albany, SUNY. She holds a BA in Communication from the Communication University of China and an MSc in New Media from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research is organized around a key question: how does media interact with democracy and social justice. Her research is interdisciplinary in scope, which relies on methodological and theoretical frameworks across disciplines and fields, including sociology, communication, cultural studies, political science, and computer/information technology. Given these interests and her interdisciplinary background, Muyang’s dissertation applies mixed-method in exploring the negotiation between the authoritarian state and the individual in defining democracy through the social media, and try to reveal how the authoritarian regimes survived the ideological crisis in the social media era through the combination of repressive and hegemonic media control strategies.
Amanda Lu
Amanda Lu is a PhD Student in Education Policy at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on how school choice policies and markets shape the educational experiences of students in traditionally underserved communities and is informed by economics, sociology, and political science. It seeks to understand how school choice changes political participation and facilitates the rise of new power structures and organizations in urban school systems. Before graduate school, Amanda was a high school teacher in New Orleans, LA where she taught high school math and served as the college counselor at Edna Karr High School. She earned a joint masters in Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies from the Stanford GSE and MPP from the Stanford Public Policy Program in 2017, and a bachelor’s degree in Government from Harvard College in 2011.
Tyler McDaniel
Tyler McDaniel is a PhD student in the Sociology department at Stanford University. His current research focuses on how racial segregation affects the daily lives of individuals. He draws from a variety of data models and algorithms in order to investigate social systems. Broadly, he is interested in schooling, meritocracy, and inequality. Tyler holds Bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and Mathematics from the University of Utah.
Harry Oppenheimer
Harry Oppenheimer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University with a focus on international relations and technology. His dissertation examines the role of interest groups in ICT security and governance, and utilizes text-as-data, document forensics, and survey experiments to understand how actors constrain one another through laws, standards, and policy diffusion. His other interests are in the political and psychological impact of cyber attacks, and elite social media engagement strategies during security crises. Prior to beginning his doctorate, he was a research associate for national security at the Council on Foreign Relations. Harry received his B.A. in International Relations from New York University and his A.M. in Government from Harvard University.
Shomon Shamsuddin
Shomon Shamsuddin is Assistant Professor of Social Policy and Community Development at Tufts. He studies how institutions define social problems and develop policies to address urban poverty and inequality. His research examines the effects of local and federal housing policy on socioeconomic mobility for low-income families. In addition, he studies programs to overcome barriers to educational attainment for underserved groups. At UEP, he teaches courses on housing policy and statistics. Prior to joining Tufts, Shomon was a National Poverty Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban Policy and Planning from MIT, M.Arch. from Yale University, and Sc.B. in Neuroscience from Brown University.
SuYeong Shin
SuYeong Shin is a doctoral candidate in Educational Policy as well as a master’s student in Informatics at The University of Iowa. Her scholarly lens blend frameworks from multiple disciplines such as higher education, sociology, and data science. Her research agenda aims to uncover the changing landscape of inequality amid educational expansion. She is interested in analyzing unstructured data to understand the complex interplay among students, educators, and local communities. Her current research examines access and equity in education, with a focus on college admissions.
Jeffrey Sternberg
Jeff Sternberg is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northeastern University. He is primarily interested in charting the shifting geographies of employment opened up by post-industrialization. His research focuses on how young people make decisions regarding their future and where to invest their mobility. Jeff’s dissertation research investigates these processes by looking at mobile populations including backpackers, temporary-workers, and digital nomads in the context of urban co-living spaces. He utilizes a mixed-methods approach, using text analysis and social network analysis techniques from the computational social sciences coupled with multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles, CA and Dharamsala, India. His work as a research assistant investigates the potential application of computer vision to social science inquiries, specifically looking at the intersection between representations of place/neighborhood and their effects on greater urban social and economic processes.
Melodie Yunju Song
Melodie Yunju Song is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Social Media Lab, Ryerson University. She received her PhD in Health Policy from McMaster University, Canada, where she was a graduate fellow at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship. Her dissertation looked into the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy on Twitter and how decision-makers are making sense of social media to inform immunization policymaking. Her academic interests intersect public health communication (esp. vaccine-preventable diseases, substance abuse and misuse, mental health), evidence-informed policy making, and the role of emerging technologies (such as social media) to inform the former two. Melodie received a graduate certificate in Global Health from the University of Washington, an MSc in public health policy and management, and a BSN from the National Taiwan University, Taiwan.
Amir Tohidi
Amir Tohidi is a graduate research assistant pursuing a PhD degree in Social and Engineering Systems at MIT Institue for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). His research interests lies at the intersection of Network Science, Causal Inference, and Behavioral Economics. He has been studying how ad hoc theoretical models of opinion dynamics in social networks can be derived from bounded rationality and behavioral biases. Most recently, he has been investigating the causal effect of online native ads on user’s perception of News publishers credibility in long run. Amir received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics from Sharif University of Technology.
Kartik Trivedi
Kartik Trivedi is a Ph.D. student at the Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. His research focus is on low wage labor policy, and disability policy. He is currently involved in research projects concerning housing policies for persons living with disabilities and with a study of federal minimum wage policy. Before joining the Ph.D he was a research at University of Massachusetts Boston, where he worked on federal grants with focus on increasing workforce inclusion of people with disabilities. Kartik is trained in advanced statistical methods and is equally comfortable with qualitative research methods. You can talk to him in Hindi, English, R and STATA. Because of his interests in disability inclusion he is always on a lookout for inclusive data dissemination strategies.
Eitan Tzelgov
Eitan Tzelgov is a Lecturer in Politics at the School of Politics, Languages, Philosophy and Communication Studies, University of East Anglia. He is interested in political representation and legitimacy, and in the impact of issues of such ideology and migration on democratic institutions and the structure of political coalitions. Methodologically, his work combines applications of text analysis with causal and experimental methods. He has previously worked as a research fellow at the Varieties of Democracy Institute, where he was part of a team developing Bayesian models measuring various aspects of democracy over time.
Yilei Zeng
Yilei Zeng is a PhD Student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. Broadly construed, her research focus on human decision making and behavioral patterns in gamified environments. Currently, she is working on (1) Utilizing social media and network data to extract knowledge from online gaming communities; (2) Training AI agents that can learn and interact according to human behaviors in multiplayer games; (3) Modeling personalized motivations and incentives in gamification environments and transfer discovered patterns to real life. Her research draws upon methods from natural language processing, network science, agent-based models, statistics and machine learning (with an emphasis on deep learning and reinforcement learning).
Emily H. Ho
Emily H. Ho is a PhD student at Fordham University in the Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology program. Her research looks at decision-making under uncertainty and forecasting, particularly in policy contexts. Prior work has included examining how people communicate about uncertain outcomes in climate change and intelligence analysis and the psychological factors that might demotivate concern about climate change. Her recent interests include natural language processing and sentiment analysis, as it relates to uncertainty communication, and she is currently working on investigating ways of optimizing forecasting accuracy and looking at individual differences that produce good forecasters. Previously, at The College Board, Emily worked on assessing reliability and validity of large-scale educational assessments. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and The College Board, among others. Emily has a Bachelors in Psychology at New York University and a Masters in Psychology at Fordham University.
Erin Tichenor
Erin Tichenor graduated with her B.A. in Sociology from Boston University in May 2019. Her coursework focused on on racial and economic inequality, punishment and social control, and health disparities. Based on field work and interviews she conducted while studying abroad in New Zealand, her senior thesis was about the decriminalization of sex work in New Zealand and its exclusion of migrant sex workers. She is a research assistant at BU Sociology and in the Business School, working on Jessica Simes’ projects on solitary confinement, the geography of mass imprisonment, and with Sanaz Mobasseri on developing a study on workplace misconduct and labor market consequences.ETH Zurich
All Participants
Elliott Ash
Elliott Ash is Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich Department of Social Sciences, where he chairs the Law, Economics, and Data Science Group. Professor Ash's research undertakes empirical analysis of law and political economy, with methods drawn from applied microeconometrics, natural language processing, and machine learning. Professor Ash was previously Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Warwick, and before that a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. He received a PhD in economics and JD from Columbia University, a BA in economics, government, and philosophy from University of Texas at Austin, and an LLM in international criminal law from University of Amsterdam.
Elena Labzina
Elena is a postdoctoral associate in the Law, Economics, and Data Science Group in the Lab of Law & Economics at ETH Zurich. Elena works on the intersection between causal inference and machine learning in the context of the political media and its effects. Recently, her work has been focused on natural language processing. She is an enthusiastic proponent of computational social science in general. In 2018, she received her Ph.D. in political science and MA in statistics at Washington University in Saint Louis. Also, she holds MAs in political science from Central European University in Budapest and economics from New Economic School in Moscow. Her undergraduate degree in Applied Math and Computer Science is from Moscow State University.Live Stream
Matt Salganik, Chris Bail, more coming soon.
Dirk Helbing
Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences and affiliate of the Computer Science Department at ETH Zurich. In January 2014 Prof. Helbing received an honorary PhD from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Since June 2015 he is affiliate professor at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft, where he leads the PhD school in 'Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future'. He won various prizes, including the Idee Suisse Award. He co-founded the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, the Risk Center, the Institute for Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP) and the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL). While coordinating the FuturICT initiative, he helped to establish data science and computational social science in Europe, as well as global systems science.
Dominik Hangartner
Dominik Hangartner is an Associate Professor of public policy and faculty co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab. After pre-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University, Washington University in Saint Louis, and the University of California, Berkeley, Dominik received his Ph.D. in social science from the University of Bern in 2011. In the same year, he joined the London School of Economics as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 2013, before joining ETH in 2017. Dominik uses field work and statistics to study the effects of migration policies and political institutions. His work has been published in leading scholarly journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science, and has received several awards including the Philip Leverhulme Prize.
Christoph Stadtfeld
Christoph Stadtfeld is Assistant Professor of Social Networks at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. He holds a PhD from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and has been postdoctoral researcher and Marie-Curie fellow at the University of Groningen, the Social Network Analysis Research Center in Lugano, and the MIT Media Lab. His research focuses on the development and application of theories and methods for social network dynamics.
Roger Wattenhofer
Roger Wattenhofer is a full professor at the Information Technology and Electrical Engineering Department, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He received his doctorate in Computer Science from ETH Zurich. He also worked some years at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Roger Wattenhofer’s research interests are a variety of algorithmic and systems aspects in computer science and information technology, e.g., distributed systems, positioning systems, wireless networks, mobile systems, social networks, deep neural networks.
Kornélia Papp
Kornélia Papp is a senior data scientist at Swiss Re. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Semantics and has over 10 years' experience in building and managing analytics capabilities in legaltech, e-commerce and the automotive industry. She is the founder of the NLP Zurich group, an AI-driven language technology focused event series in Switzerland. Her current work focuses on document understanding solutions using rule-based programming, machine learning and deep learning techniques. She previously worked on several projects developing language technology applications in the area of speech technology, machine translation, fraud detection and natural language generation.
Alessandra Stampi-Bombelli
Alessandra Stampi-Bombelli is a Research Assistant at University of Zurich’s Chair of Political Economy of Development. She received a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Roma Tre and a M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Lausanne in 2017. This summer she will be starting a PhD at ETH Zurich, jointly with the Center for Law & Economics, the Public Policy Group and the Immigration Policy Lab. Her PhD will focus broadly on applying machine learning techniques to topics of empirical economics and policy and, in particular, on migration. She is currently working on a project that assesses the effect of immigrant group size on integration during the period of Mass Migration in the US. Her research interests include migration economics and policy, identity and integration, and behavioral development economics.
Elena Fernandez
Originally from Spain, Elena Fernandez is a PhD student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research profile incorporates Intellectual History, Cultural Studies, and History of Ideas. She is expanding her research interests to the fields of Cultural Analytics, Culturomics, Computational Social Sciences, Digital Humanities, and Natural Language Processing. She is presently working on a research project that aims to quantify mutations of the social construction of time by relating technological advancements and information fluctuation in the printed press of several countries.
Roza Kamiloglu
Roza is a PhD candidate in psychology at University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on vocal expression and perception of emotions using wide range of methods including cross-cultural comparisons. Her interests include evolutionary origins of emotional vocalizations and computational models of acoustic patterns of emotional information across species and cultures. She completed a double major in physics and psychology, followed by a master’s degree in social psychology.
Kieran Mepham
Kieran Mepham is a PhD student in the Social Networks Lab at ETH Zürich, with a BSc in social psychology and MSc in interdisciplinary social science from Utrecht University. His research interests include the development of culture, group formation, and opinion polarization, focusing on the micro-macro perspectives of these issues in networks. He currently explores these topics using traditional and novel data-gathering and analytic methods.
Arto Kekkonen
Arto Kekkonen is a doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki's Faculty of Social Sciences. He is currently researching the relationship between political polarization and social media, with a specific focus on affective polarization and ingroup-outgroup dynamics. Arto has a background in media and communication studies and computer science and is broadly interested in how computational methods could be better used to answer theoretically interesting questions in social sciences.
Germain Gauthier
Germain is a doctoral student in Economics at Ecole Polytechnique, CREST. He holds an MSc in Business Administration from HEC Paris and an MSc in Economics from the Paris School of Economics. He is interested in the formation, persistence and unravelling of social norms and of beliefs. Relying on social networks, surveys and administrative data, his main focus has been on the evolution of gender norms. More broadly, any topic related to political economy is likely to arouse his curiosity.
Moritz Hoferer
Moritz Hoferer is a PhD candidate in Economics at ETH Zurich. His research is about Political Campaigns on Complex Networks. In particular, he concentrates on theoretical modeling of opinion formation as well as analyzing campaign related data. Before, he studied Physics at LMU Munich and University of Milan focusing on Theoretical Biophysics.
Gabrielle Mantell
Gabrielle Mantell is a master's student in European and Nordic Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her current research focuses on the use of computational and memetic propaganda within the context of global politics. She holds a MA in Science and Security from King’s College London and a BA in International Relations from Mount Holyoke College. Gabrielle’s research interests include computational international relations, machine learning and geopolitics.
Valentina Rizzoli
Valentina is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Health Awareness and Communication, Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie (Legnaro, Padua). She received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences and her M.Sc. in Social, Communication, and Work Psychology at the University of Padua. In her dissertation she applied and compared computational text analyses to chronological corpora pertaining scientific literature to portray the history of a discipline. She is currently involved in various research projects on risk communication. Her research interests include qualitative and quantitative methods in social psychology, particularly, computational text analyses applied to social issues. Main topics treated: food risk communication, history of social psychology, economic crisis, ageing.
Philine Widmer
Philine is a second-year Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of St. Gallen. Her research interests include media, political, and development economics. In particular, she studies news reporting in the digital age, relying on web-mining approaches to describe which kinds of players and contents dominate news flows around the world and how they depend on institutions.
George Boateng
George Boateng is a PhD candidate and doctoral researcher doing applied machine learning research at the Center for Digital Health Interventions at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He is currently developing a smartwatch-based emotion recognition algorithm for chronic disease management among romantic couples. His research interests are at the intersection of machine learning, mobile health, and wearable computing. He seeks to develop AI-powered mobile and wearable health apps that leverage sensor data to improve the health of people. He is also the Cofounder and President of Nsesa Foundation, an education nonprofit whose vision is to spur an Innovation Revolution in Africa. George has a B.A. in Computer Science and an M.S. in Computer Engineering, both from Dartmouth College in the U.S.
Karen Nershi
Karen Nershi is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie at the intersection of international political economy and conflict, and she is particularly interested in the economic factors that drive conflict and the economic consequences of conflict and organized crime. Her dissertation examines how private financial sector interests affect countries’ enforcement of anti-money laundering laws. Before coming to Penn, Karen earned a bachelor’s degree in international studies at the University of Alabama.
Laura White
Laura White is a third year Ph.D. student in the Politics Department at the University of Virginia, specializing in international relations and quantitative methodology. Her research interests focus on questions of reputation formation, public opinion and the electoral cycle, the role of leaders in international relations, and how states strategically interact with the domestic politics of adversaries and allies. She is especially interested in applying these themes to US-Russian relations, both past and present. Prior to attending UVA, Laura received an M.A. in Political Science from Georgia State University and a B.A. in Political Science and International Affairs from the University of Georgia.
Cantay Caliskan
Cantay Caliskan is an Assistant Professor of Data Analytics at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. His research focuses on social media, political communication, lobbying, and policymaking. He uses network analysis, text analysis, visualization, and machine learning to understand how the diffusion of ideas and the distribution of political money shape and complicate the way people engage in politics.
Anastasia Voloshina
Anastasia received the Master of Science degree at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, Lomonosov State University in Moscow. Now she works as a graphic designer and visual artist in Berlin, finishing her second education, Visual Communication, at the Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin, after studying Graphic Design at British Higher School of Art and Design Moscow and Hertfordshire University, as well as Digital Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She was being exhibited in Moscow, Berlin and Vienna. At the moment Anastasia is developing her project on metadata portraits, at the same time she illustrates social aspects of everyday life in Berlin, works on visualisations for other various projects and her research on interface design project at the Fachhochschule Potsdam, University of Applied Sciences.
Saddaf Naaz Akhtar
I am a Ph.D. student in the field of Population Studies at Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. I received M.Sc. in Statistics and Computing from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi and Master of Population Studies from International Institute for Population Sciences (I.I.P.S.), Mumbai, India. My research broadly focuses in combining computational methods with large-scale datasets to study demography and public health phenomena with a particular emphasis on mortality, aging, and health, specifically the methodological challenges, gender differential in mortality, as well as in the lifespan inequality, healthy aging and longevity in mortality studies. Cumulatively, my research work contributes to the fields of computational social science and public health policymaking.
Marco Ramljak
Marco Ramljak is currently working as a Geospatial Data Analyst at the consultancy Ramboll, carrying out evaluations for the public sector. Being placed in the Social and Economic Impact unit, Marco utilizes contrafactual and spatial analysis methods in projects concerning regional development as well as labor market integration. His current research interests span across developing economic smart specialization strategies for regions and cities, by drawing on ideas from economic and knowledge complexity, using network analysis as well as geographic agent-based modeling. He holds a BA in Political Science from Zeppelin University in Germany where, in his Bachelor Thesis, he scrutinized the importance of municipal politics and elections on state and federal elections, using a regression discontinuity design. In September 2019 he wants to continue his master studies in the field of social science research methods and statistics.
Carolin Nast
Carolin Nast is a Research Master student in Urban and Economic Geography at Utrecht University. She is interested in applying complexity theory and system thinking to the city context, more specifically to the process of developing public policy in response to current challenges we are facing. Using this theoretical lens, Carolin’s Master thesis focuses on revealing the interconnectedness among the Sustainable Development Goals, using machine learning and network analysis. Carolin received her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Zeppelin University in Germany and currently works as a Teaching Assistant at the Vitality Data Centre of Utrecht University.
Lukas Fesenfeld
Lukas Fesenfeld is a PhD student at the chair of international relations and political economy at ETH Zurich. He previously studied at the University College Maastricht, the University of Seville, and the Hertie School of Governance. His main research interests lie in the field of (international) environmental governance, political economy and political psychology. His dissertation concentrates on the political feasibility of ambitious climate policies. Lukas is particularly interested in the nexus of food and climate policy. He has conducted several large-scale survey-embedded experiments to study public support for policies reducing the climate impact of the food sector. Methodologically, Lukas is especially interested into experimental methods (survey/field experiments), event-history analysis, social network analysis, machine learning and mixed method approaches including qualitative interviews, focus groups and process tracing. His academic work has been supported by the German Academic Foundation and the Heinrich Boell Foundation.
Romina Jafaryanyazdi
Romina studies Master of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. She is also Research Assistant at Law, Economics, and Data Science Group in the Lab of Law & Economics at ETH Zurich. She works on Natural language processing. Previously she was Research Assistant at Automated Software Engineering Laboratory in Computer Engineering Department at Sharif University of Technology. Also, she worked in Sharif E-commerce & E-government Research & Innovation Office. Generally, she is interested in Data mining, Machine learning, Natural language processing, and text Analysis. She did her Bachelor in Software Engineering at Sharif University of Technology.Hunter College
All Participants
Maria Y. Rodriguez
is an Assistant Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work, part of the City University of New York’s Hunter College. She is a faculty affiliate at the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR), and graduate faculty at the CUNY Grad Center. Her research interests intersect demography, computational social science, housing policy and social welfare. Currently, she has two active areas of research: (1) understanding the impacts of algorithmic decision-making in human services (with particular attention to racially marginalized groups), and (2) using Twitter data to understand the lived experience of marginalized communities in the United States. She can be found on Twitter [@HousingTheCity](https://twitter.com/HousingTheCity).
Josh Raines
Josh Raines is the Assistant Director of the Social Science Research Center at Ball State University. He has conducted practical and community-based research in local, state, national, and international settings for more than 20 years. Currently, he has designed a virtual reality (VR) simulation program that introduces/reinforces practice skills for social work students and human service trainees. Additionally, the simulation software collects research data by compiling various behavioral-level indicators from users. His current research examines the role of client race and implicit associations on users’ assessments of risk and protective factors during virtual home visit activities.
Desmond Patton
Desmond Upton Patton is a Public Interest Technologist who is a pioneer in the use of social media and artificial intelligence in the study of gun violence and coined the term Internet Banging. Dr. Patton is the founding Director of the SAFElab and Associate Professor of Social Work, Sociology and Data Science at Columbia University. He is the recipient of the 2018 Deborah K. Padgett Early Career Achievement Award from the Society for Social Work Research (SSWR) and 2017-2018 Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is a Presidential Leadership Scholar and Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard Kennedy School. His worked is featured in the A&E show: Secret Life of a Gang Girl: The Untold Story. Dr. Patton studies the ways in which gang involved youth conceptualize threats on social media, and the extent to which social media shapes and facilitates youth and gang violence. In partnership with the Data Science Institute, he is developing an online tool for detecting aggression in social media posts. Dr. Patton’s research on “internet banging” has been featured in the New York Times,Chicago Tribune, USA Today, NPR, Boston Magazine, ABC News, and Vice. It was cited in an Amici Curae Brief submitted to the United States Supreme Court in Elonis v. United States, which examined the interpretation of threats on social media.
Melanie Sage
Melanie Sage, PhD, MSW, is an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work. She is a co-chair of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare’s Grand Challenge: Harnessing Technology for Social Good. She chairs the international Human Services Information Technology Association (husita.org), a non-profit organization which oversees the publication Journal of Technology and Human Services. Her research is focused at the intersection of technology and child welfare, and she is especially interested in how technology can be leveraged to support positive outcomes for foster youth.
Lauri Goldkind
Lauri Goldkind, PhD, MSW, is an Associate Professor at Fordham University's graduate School of Social Service. Dr. Goldkind has a longstanding interest and practice background in nonprofit leadership, capacity building, and organizational development. At Fordham she teaches across the foundation and advanced years. Her practice experience has been centered in the youth development, education, and juvenile justice realms. Prior to joining the faculty, she served as the Director of New School Development and the Director of Evaluation at The Urban Assembly (UA), a network of new specialized public schools located in the Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan. At UA she supported principals through the new school process, helping them earn start-up grants valued at over $500,000 per school; additionally, she provided technical assistance to principals and school-based staff on data-driven decision making, development and maintenance of data management structures and the effective use of data to improve student achievement. She has had the privilege of working with youth in NYC at organizations such as CASES, the Posse Foundation and the DOME Project.
Richard Smith
Richard Smith has been using computational social science methods for over a decade to study sustainable community development, poverty, inequality, and migration. He is an experienced R user and also has advanced training in Geographic Information Systems with a little bit of exposure to Python. He has experience with the following methods: HLM, spatial regression, spatial filtering with eigenvectors, sequence analyses, Bayesian model averaging, quasi-experimental design with matching using machine learning, survival analysis, longitudinal data analysis, and count data models. He has published research on technology in human services, age friendly communities, ecocity mapping, neighborhood change and gentrification. He is currently part of a multidisciplinary, tri-campus, 4 year, $1.5 million National Science Foundation project that will investigate communication between water and health systems about water disruptions and how they engage the community to promote resilience.
Angelo Cabrera
Angelo Cabrera is the Founder and a Board of Director of Masa-MexEd Inc. and Founding Board Member of the American Dream Charter School in the South Bronx. He has an extensive track record creating and promoting educational programs for the recent immigrant community in New York City, as well as returning migrants to Mexico. He is currently managing a research project at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs-Baruch College.
Anne Kou
Anne is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at New York University. Her research interests include inequality, race/ethnicity, gender, and social policy. She is working on collaborative projects examining the relationship between childhood experiences and socioeconomic attainment, and early childhood education in New York City.
Carrie Hamilton
Carrie Hamilton is a program assistant for the Social Data Initiative at the Social Science Research Council. Prior to joining the SSRC, she worked as a research technician at the Center for the Study of Adolescent Risk and Resilience at Duke University. She graduated with highest honors from UNC Chapel Hill in 2017 with a BS in environmental science and geography. At UNC, she conducted independent research projects through the National Science Foundation and Ernest F. Hollings Scholarship Program and spent a year living and working in Ecuador through UNC’s Global Gap Year Fellowship.
Daejun Park
Daejun Park is a Ph.D. candidate in social work at University at Albany. His research interests include alcohol and other drug use, as well as health disparities. He has served as a research assistant at UAlbany.
Diane Yoong
Diane (they/them) is currently a graduate student in Critical Social/Personality and Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Broadly, their work is on understanding the relationality between systems of oppression (e.g. racism, homo- or trans-phobia) and the individual. Outside of academia, they are busy with creating a digital webspace for queer Asians in North America (hopefully broader!), and exploring the binaries that seem to divide academic work production and creative work.
Feng-Yi Liu
Feng-Yi Liu received his BA and MA degree in Social Welfare at National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. He also completed a second MA at Columbia University in Mathematical Statistics. Now he is a Ph.D. candidate in the school of social work at Rutgers University, and a graduated statistician recognized by the American Statistics Association. His broad research interests include immigrant family and child development, American immigration policy, and American child care policy. His dissertation thesis focuses on how family instability and child welfare interventions might influence child development among low-income immigrant children.
Friederike Windel
Friederike Windel is a PhD student in the Critical Social and Personality Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on how white Germans position themselves in relationship to Germans of color and people of color in Germany. She uses narrative research to explore positionality and currently examines how white German volunteers construct themselves in relationship to refugees.
Hannah Szlyk
Hannah is currently a NIMH T32 postdoctoral research scholar at The Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. Hannah earned her doctoral degree in social work at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin in May 2018. There, Hannah studied suicidality among minority and underserved youth. Her dissertation consisted of a mixed methods project that examined suicidal ideation, sexual and ethnic identity, external stressors, and academic progress among students attending a public alternative high school. Hannah is currently exploring the evidence base and implementation of technology-enhanced interventions for youth suicidality. She is specifically interested in understanding who uses text-based message hotlines to address suicidality and how these crisis interventions can be better adapted for hard-to-reach and minority youth populations. Hannah would also like to gain skills in computational science in order to analyze large-scale datasets and hotline conversations. Hannah enjoys practicing yoga, traveling, and spending time with her partner and their four cats.
Jiyeon (Siyeona) Chang
Jiyeon (Siyeona) Chang is a student in Columbia’s PhD program in Sociology, where she studies the consequences of global economic inequality on cultural and artistic diversity. She is interested in how the dynamics of cultural production and consumption are shaped by inequality engendered by the structural transformation and globalization of economies, and what this tells us about how we construct cultural and artistic boundaries. She is also increasingly interested in how automation-induced changes in the labor market shape the meaning of work, and how we think about innovation and creativity. Prior to coming to Columbia, she worked as an economist and policy analyst on issues related to international trade and global value chains at the United Nations (FAO), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank.
Jon Phillips
Jon Phillips is a PhD student in the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. He is involved in mental health services research using health care databases as well as intervention research aiming to improve services for incarcerated individuals with mental illness.
Kasey Zapatke
Kasey is a third-year doctoral student in Sociology at The Graduate Center (CUNY). He is broadly interested in urban inequality, and specifically focuses his research on housing inequality, residential segregation, affordable housing, neighborhood change, gentrification, and suburbanization. Kasey is working on developing a dissertation project that looks at how neighborhood patterns of inequality and residential segregation shape spatial patterns of neighborhood affordability for the middle class.
Maya Godbole
Maya is going on her 5th year in the Basic and Applied Social Psychology PhD program at CUNY Graduate Center. Maya’s research focuses around understanding, and intervening against, factors that contribute to disparities in the representation and achievement of women in competitive contexts (e.g., leadership). She is particularly interested in using social psychological research to inform policy and practice within organizations—for example, her dissertation research investigates how sex discrimination policy can impact women’s perceptions of organizational climate, motivation, and achievement. In her free time, Maya likes running around Prospect Park, doing/attempting the NYTimes Crossword, and reading.
Nga Than
Nga Than is a Ph.D student in the Sociology program at City University of New York – The Graduate Center. Her research interests are in entrepreneurship, work, immigration, and consumption. She is in the process of writing a dissertation proposal, focusing on how technological advancement changes work relations in contemporary work place. She was born and raised in Vietnam, then moved to the U.S. for higher education. She is fluent in Vietnamese, English, German, as well as conversant in Chinese.
Pedro Rodriguez
Pedro Rodriguez Martinez is a Research Fellow at the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). His areas of interest include the evaluation of social programs within the developing world and the economics of gender violence, education and crime. Prior to joining the IDB he worked in Miami and Ecuador as a consultant performing statistical data analysis. He holds a BA in Political Economy and an MSc in Economics.
Salar Khaleghzadegan
Salar Khaleghzadegan is pursuing a Master of Public Policy with a concentration in Health Policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and is a Research Coordinator at the Johns Hopkins Medicine Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. He is currently exploring research focused on understanding how to improve equitable access, quality, and outcomes of care with an emphasis on maintaining cost-effectiveness through high-value care. One of his current projects uses textual analysis to examine healthcare documents using NLP methods. Another project studies the linguistic and paralinguistic features of patient-provider communication to assess how these dynamic interactions drive outcomes (i.e. compliance with complex care regiments; patient experiences of respect, dignity, and satisfaction with care). This fall, he will be applying to doctoral programs in Health Policy and Management, where he hopes to focus on health services research while integrating emerging quantitative and computational methods such as machine learning, causal inference, and automated text analysis.
Sapir Soker Elimaliah
Sapir Soker Elimaliah, is a doctoral student in the developmental psychology program at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Prior to their Ph.D studies, Sapir owned a clinic for Applied Behavior Analysis therapy and worked with toddlers with autism. Sapir's research interests focus on motor development in autism and specifically restricted and repetitive behaviors. Sapir is also interested in the physiological markers of restricted and repetitive behaviors in autism.
Sarah Riley
Sarah Riley is a PhD student in information science at Cornell University, where she is focusing on bias in automated decision-making systems. She is interested in computational methods and policy interventions for identifying and mitigating bias. Sarah has a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College and a master’s in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.
Shashi Goel
Shashi Goel is specialized in Political Science and Women’s and Gender studies. She has done research in many areas in Political Sociology, International relations, Women’s studies and Human Rights, Migration. She is currently working as Honorary Fellow in the Center for Women and Gender studies at University of Wisconsin. Previously she has worked as visiting faculty at Qatar University.
Tim Ittner
Tim Ittner is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. Before arriving at Columbia, he graduated from Brown University in May 2018 with an Sc.B. with Honors in Social Analysis & Research. Tim has a penchant for interdisciplinary work and using innovative data, methods, and designs in his research. His interests revolve around population geography, spatial demography, and inequality dynamics.
Zoe Carey
Zoe Carey is a PhD Candidate in sociology at The New School for Social Research. She is interested in the impact of data-driven technologies on organizations and issues of expertise and accountability in algorithmic decision-making. Her dissertation addresses these questions in the field of policing. By tracing algorithmic assemblages from creation to implementation across private and public sectors, her project will map the social life of a predictive policing algorithm. Zoe has worked as a Teaching Fellow, Associate Editor, and Research Assistant at The New School, and she served on the SENS-UAW bargaining committee as the union of academic student workers negotiated their first contract with the university.
Gleneara Bates-Pappas
Gleneara E. Bates-Pappas, LMSW, is currently working on her PhD at CUNY Graduate Center. Her doctoral research explores the environmental risk factors for lung cancer mortality among racially ethnic minorities living in New York. Her current research projects aim to elucidate the bio-physiological aspects of tumor resistance in response to chemotherapy and the use of telemedicine to improve quality-of-life and cognitive function in post-treatment cancer survivors, in addition to exploring ways to use virtual and augmented reality to reduce anxiety during treatment of oncology patients. She is currently an American Cancer Society doctoral fellow and CUNY Graduate Center Provost pre-dissertation fellow.
Sebastian Hoyos-Torres
Sebastian Hoyos-Torres is a Criminal Justice PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center/John Jay College. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Criminology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse NY. In his studies, he is particularly interested in the spread of data analytics within the criminal justice system. This includes examining the use of risk assessment tools within the criminal justice system and racial bias. Additionally, Sebastian is interested in looking at social movements on Twitter and how they are portrayed differently across different groups across the web.Kadir Has University
All Participants
Matti Nelimarkka
Matti Nelimarkka is a researcher at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University. He examines the intersections of political science and data science as well as political science and human-computer interaction. His current work focuses on racism in hybrid media systems, circulation of news, political polarization, agendas in political communication, power of algorithmic systems and politics in human-computer interaction.
Akın Ünver
Akin Ünver is an assistant professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University, specialising in conflict research, computational methods and digital crisis communication. He is the Resident Fellow of Cyber Research Program at the Centre for Economic and Foreign Policy Research (EDAM), a Research Associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs, Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow at GUARD (Global Urban Analytics for Resilient Defence) at the Alan Turing Institute.
Güneş Aşık
Güneş Aşık is an Assistant Professor of Economics at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara. She has an MPA in International Development from Harvard Kennedy School and she received her PhD from London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is a labour economist with research interests in employment and regional development. She works on a wide range of data intensive projects which include measuring stock of skills and the degree of mismatch in Turkish labour markets using large administrative data, exploring the impact of terrorism on female employment, evaluating the impact of employment subsidies in Turkey, estimating regional income per capita series for Turkish provinces covering the years between 1880 and 2010, and exploring how the mass minority movements at the beginning of twentieth century in Anatolia affected East-West development gaps.
Evgeniia Shahin
Evgeniia Shahin is a PhD Candidate and a project assistant in the Department of International Relations, Bilkent University, Turkey. In her dissertation focusing on the effects of economic sanctions on targeted leaders’ attitudes she uses both qualitative and quantitative approaches, especially text analysis. Her interests include such areas of international relations as foreign policy analysis, international political economy and conflict studies. Evgeniia holds an MA in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from Sabancı University and a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University.
Safiya El Ghmari
Safiya El Ghmari is currently a doctoral candidate at the National Institute of Territorial and Urban Planning in Rabat. In 2017, she was awarded the Excellence Research Grant from the National Center for Scientific Research and Technology (CNRST). She has a strong background in Architecture, Urban Planning and Design, and a passion for Computational Social Science. Safiya’s current research focuses on exploring and modelling the social dynamics in risk-prone informal urban areas in Morocco. Recently, she has learnt about a set of analytical tools combining both Model Thinking and Network Science that could help better grasp these dynamics in order to enhance life quality inside these settlements such as: Cellular Automata, and Agent-Based Models.
Meltem Odabaş
Meltem Odabaş is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona, and soon will join Indiana University-Bloomington as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Social Science, affiliated with the Department of Sociology. Her current research examines how social embeddedness and communication in online settings influence collective action, behavior, perceptions, and decision-making in various settings, including economic markets, online communication platforms, and social movements. As such, her research sits at the intersection of economic and cultural sociology, and computational social science. Her future research at Indiana University will address the opioid crisis, including access to treatment, community-based risk-factors, drug-seeking behavior, overdose, and stigma. Meltem holds both Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts degrees in Economics from Boğaziçi University.
Sercan Canbolat
Sercan Canbolat graduated summa cum laude from the Izmir University of Economics with BA degrees in International Relations and European Union and Economics (double major). He earned his MA degree in International Relations from Bilkent University with a full scholarship and graduated cum laude. Sercan's MA thesis focused on the political psychology of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political leaders. Sercan received the Fulbright scholarship to pursue his doctoral studies at the University of Connecticut. He studies and teaches International Relations and Comparative Politics with leadership and political psychology spins. Sercan writes his doctoral dissertation on patterns of Middle Eastern leaders’ learning to survive in the face of post-2011 Arab Uprisings. Sercan's doctoral dissertation and broader research agenda revolve around computational social science with a focus on automated text analysis, leadership and elite network analysis, and development of non-English text coding schemes such as Turkish and Arabic content analysis schemes and dictionaries. Sercan has published several scholarly works in notable peer-reviewed outlets including, Political Research Quarterly, Polity, and Perceptions.
Doruk Tunaoğlu
Doruk Tunaoğlu is a Computer Scientist who is doing a Master's in Social Psychology at Boğaziçi University. He has a Master's degree from Computer Engineering of Middle East Technical University where he has studied motion learning for robotics. He is interested in using computational methods in social sciences, especially in psychology, and wants to develop better tools in this field. He thinks that there is a vast potential in analyzing the enormous online data as well as offline data such as books, movies and speeches.
Aslı Ebru Şanlıtürk
Ebru Şanlıtürk is a PhD student in Public Policy and Administration at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Her area of research is migration policies and demography, with a special focus on the recent Syrian refugee crisis in the Mediterranean region. More specifically, she is interested in the digital traces and online social interactions of migrant populations as well as data visualization techniques to map internal and international migration flows. In this regard, her research interests frequently require the use of computational social science methods, especially for the collection and interpretation of online-generated data and for advanced data visualization.
Didem Türkoğlu
Didem Türkoğlu has just defended her PhD in sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and will join New York University – Abu Dhabi as a postdoctoral associate this fall. Her research interests lie in the intersection of political sociology, social movements, and studies on social inequalities. In her book project, she conducts a comparative analysis of higher education policies and the protests against tuition hikes over the last two decades in 34 OECD countries with a special focus on England, Germany, Turkey, and the United States. She has been interested in the computational methods within the context of analyzing the media coverage of social movements and the formation of political discourse through social media use. She is in the process of developing her next project, which analyzes the effectiveness of social movement alliances in influencing policy outcomes during significant transformations in the political structures. This study will also use a mixed methods approach that combines computational methods with qualitative comparative methods, and quantitative analysis of survey data. Before UNC, she received BA degrees in political science& international relations and history, as well as an MA degree in modern Turkish history, from Boğaziçi University.
Emil Smith
Emil Smith is a PhD student in Educational Sociology at Aarhus University. He holds an MSc in social sciences in education science. His main research interest is the role of institutional contexts in the generation of social- and gender-inequality (e.g. classroom peer-effects and school culture). Methodologically Emil’s doctoral thesis will approach these issues through survey-based data and Danish register data as well as digital trace data from e-learning platforms and learning apps.
Melike Ayşe Kocacık
Melike is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Sabancı University. Her main fields of interests are foreign policy analysis and political violence along with quantitative methods. Her interest in computational social science is mostly on automated text analysis. In her thesis, she focuses on the third-party involvement in civil conflict examining via leader statements.
Aycan Katıtaş
Aycan Katıtaş is a Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at the University of Virginia. Her area of research is international political economy, with a specific focus on public opinion on trade and Foreign Direct Investment in the United States. Her dissertation investigates the conditions under which politicians choose anti-trade messages in their election campaigns and this strategy’s effects on public attitudes and behavior. She employs causal identification and text analysis techniques combined with large-scale quantitative analysis to trace the influence of candidates’ televised campaign advertising on voters’ trade preferences. She holds a double major BA in Political Science and International Relations and Business Administration from Boğaziçi University, and an MA in European Interdisciplinary Studies from College of Europe.
Dilara Kekulluoglu
Dilara Kekulluoglu is a PhD student in School of Informatics at University of Edinburgh. Her research interests are privacy, computational social science and online social networks. Specifically, she is interested in privacy leaks that happen on online social networks. Currently she is focusing on collateral damage - information leak about you by your connections in a network, e.g. a friend celebrating your birthday online publicly. Dilara holds both BS and MS degree in Computer Engineering from Boğaziçi University. Her master’s thesis was about negotiation strategies for privacy in online social networks.
Mert Can Yılmaz
Mert Can Yılmaz is an MSSc student in the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. Currently, he is working as a teaching assistant in a project called the Violence Early-Warning System (ViEWS). He is also the submission officer of a semi-academic journal called Pax et Bellum Journal which is published by the graduate students of his department. He is quite active in some of the civil society organizations formed by Turkish diaspora in Sweden and he is a board member at Turkiska Student- och Akademikerföreningen (Turkish Students and Academics Association). Additionally, he is one of the contributors in the Ankara-based independent fact-checking organization called teyit.org. He holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University.
Ali İhsan Akbaş
Ali İhsan Akbaş is a second-year MS student in the program of Digital Media and Society at Uppsala University. He has received his BA degree from the department of Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University. His studies, in a broader sense, aim to understand political opinion formation in fragmented informational contexts that are prevalent with the advent of the internet-based media. Specifically, he approaches polarization through the effects of misinformation and partisan news over opinion leaders within social networks. He is a motivated student about the emerging research methodologies in social sciences, both qualitative and quantitative, to advance in the studies of public opinion and political behavior.
Hande Sodacı
Hande is a junior researcher who is interested in psychology of language. She recently worked in projects investigating the influence of culture and language on bilinguals’ speech and gesture, language change in third-generation immigrants, and second language tutoring using social robots. Hande's current research concerns the intersection of bilingualism, cross-language interactions, and language change. Her most recent work examined whether cognitive mechanisms of bilingualism have a role in the change observed in the Turkish spoken by the Dutch Turks. She would like to apply the computational methods and utilize the availability of mass data in her future projects for they can enormously contribute to this field of research. Hande holds a BA in Psychology with a minor in Linguistics as well as a research master's degree in Linguistics.
Nezih Onur Kuru
Nezih Onur Kuru is a PhD candidate and research assistant at Political Science and International Relations department in Koç University. His current research focuses on political psychology, migration and political economy. Kuru is currently focused on his PhD thesis, titled as “How Do Emotions and Partisanship Influence the Relationship between Threat Perceptions and Refugee Hostility? The Case of Turkish Citizens and Syrian Refugees”. He obtained his B.A. degree from Galatasaray University in Political Science. Kuru completed his M.Sc in the department of Political Science and Public Administration in Middle East Technical University. In his master’s thesis, he analysed the relationship between social conservatism and voting behaviour through a comparison between the AKP and the CHP voters based on World Values Survey data.
Şeyma Topçu
Şeyma is a masters student in Political Science department at Sabancı University. She holds a double major BA degree in Political Science and International Relations and History from Boğaziçi University. Her research interests are polarization and political behavior, along with the ways in which social media can be integrated in those fields through computational methods.
Saloni Bhogale
Saloni Bhogale is a Research Fellow at the Trivedi Centre for Political Data at Ashoka University. She has pursued an inter-disciplinary MA in Liberal Studies with a concentration in Computer Science at Ashoka University. Her research applies computational methods to questions in the political science domain, particularly related to understand legislative behaviour in the Indian Parliament, through unpacking identities of parliamentarians by linking them to substantive concerns expressed by them. She is also interested in data dissemination, aiding in both the replication and expansion of computational research through building web applications for publicly available datasets.
Mustafa Yavaş
Mustafa Yavas is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. He is interested in inequality, class & culture, sociology of work, political sociology, and social networks. In his dissertation, he explores how globalization and class formation intertwine, focusing on the quality of work life of elite Turkish business professionals with high-prestige & high-salary corporate jobs. He also works on a project that aims to map the field of political opinion in contemporary Turkey and its change over time via combining social networks analysis with automated text analysis of columns in daily newspapers.
Faiz Ahamad
Faiz Ahamad is a PhD candidate at the School of Management and Labor Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India. He is working in the area of Organizational behaviour with special focus on the recruitment process and social media. He has examined the advantages as well as challenges in the online recruitment process such as applicant’s job search behaviour, recruitment effectiveness, gender and ideological based discrimination, etc. He applies both fields as well as digital experiments involving computational social science methods.
Bann Seng Tan
Bann Seng Tan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science & International Relations, Bogazici University. He received his PhD from the Graduate Center at the City University New York. His research revolves around the causes and effects of democratization. My recent work is on the effective use of foreign aid in democracy promotion. A second focus is on authoritarian reactions to disaster aid.
İrem Aydaş
İrem Aydaş is a second-year master student in Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Sabancı University. Her main areas of interests are public opinion, persuasion, political communication, and political participation. In her master thesis, she focuses on the effect of interpersonal discussions on political participation.
Hossein Kermani
Hossein Kermani is a PhD candidate of Social Communication Science at Tehran University, where he received his master degree working on political participation and Facebook usage in Iran. He is currently working on his PhD research project in Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich. Hossein achieved first and second rank in Iranian M.A and PhD entrance exams respectively. His research mainly revolves around the discursive power of social media in making meaning, shaping practices, changing the microphysics of power and playing with the political, cultural and social structures in Iran. Following his interests, Hossein has done several studies to shed light on Iranians’ everyday life on social media. He is also contributing author to the recently published book Social Media in Iran. Moreover, his first book social media research in Iran will be published in 2019. Moreover, he currentlyworks on his second book: Textual Analyses on Social Media.
Yunus Emre Tapan
Emre is a master student at Middle Eastern Technical University in Middle East Studies program. He took his bachelor degree in Economics in Bogazici University. His main area of interests are social network analysis and computational sociology. He works on digital drivers of radicalization and extremism in digital space. He worked as a research assistant in a couple of funded projects employing tools of computational social science.
Ahmet Kurnaz
Ahmet is a PhD student at Çanakkale 18 Mart University’s Department of Political Science. Ahmet comes from a computer science background and has advanced knowledge of R. He works on polarisation and political communication online and specialises in text mining and analysis. He was a visiting researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute in 2017 and 2018, and the University of Maryland, College Park in 2015.
Damla Partanaz
Damla is an Interactive Media Designer. She has recently completed her master’s degree at Kadir Has University’s New Media Department and serves as a teaching and research assistant there. Damla is interested in design implications of Artificial Intelligence, Human-Machine Collaboration, mental models and system design. Currently, she is working on her system design project in which human creativity meets with machine learning in coping with undesired behavior models. She is also in the design committee of Kadir Has University’s Computational Thinking undergraduate program curriculum and has an interest in teaching computational tools for non-computer scientists.
Prof. Bruno
Prof. Bruno received his PhD in purrrrrrology several years ago. Their research has explored the dilemma: should one stay inside or go outside after the door has been opened after multiple meows. Their research is published in the best journals of their field: Paw & Society, European Journal of Whiskers Studies, and, Annual Review of Fluffiness. Many of their close colleagues participated international documentary 'Cats of Istanbul'.Oxford University
All Participants
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is associate professor of social demography and fellow of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She completed her DPhil in Sociology jointly affiliated with the University of Oxford and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Her research spans a number of substantive areas in demography and sociology, including gender, mortality and health, the diversification of family forms, and ethnicity and migration. Her work has sought to adopt computational innovations both in terms of modelling approaches such as agent-based models and digital trace data from web and social media platforms to study social and demographic processes. She is currently leading a Data2X and UN Foundation supported project that uses big data from the web, in particular large-scale online advertising data that provide information on the aggregate numbers of users of online platforms by demographic characteristics, to measure sustainable development and gender inequality indicators.
Nicolo Cavalli
Nicolò is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He holds a BA in Politics from University of Bologna and a MSc in Economics from Bocconi University, Milan. Before joining Nuffield College, Nicolò worked as journalist, reporting on social issues and political movements from Italy, Greece, Catalunya, California and Peru. His Doctoral Thesis focuses on how intergroup emotional stratification emerged in Europe in times of economic recession.
Taylor Brown
Though a visiting scholar at NYU, Taylor Brown is a doctoral candidate in the Duke Sociology department, with association at the Duke Network Analysis Center. She has broad interests in computational methods and social media studies. Her dissertation explores gender inequality in creative professions. Taylor holds an MA in sociology from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MSc in evidence-based social intervention from the University of Oxford. Prior to beginning her PhD, Taylor fulfilled an appointment at the National Science Foundation in the division of Social and Economic Sciences.
Pablo Barbera
Pablo Barberá is an Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the London School of Economics. His research develops text and network analysis methods that improve our understanding of how exposure to political information through social media sites affects political behavior. He is also the authors of several R packages that allow scholars to collect and analyze social media data.
David Cox
Sir David Cox is a statistician known in particular for the proportional hazards model. This is widely used in the analysis of survival data and has been applied in the medical, physical, life, earth, and social sciences, as well as engineering fields. His 1972 paper introducing the model and its analysis is one of the 100 most-cited papers of all time for all fields. Cox’s career has included research positions in government supported research organizations, as well as academic appointments at Cambridge, University of North Carolina, Birkbeck College, Imperial College, and Nuffield College, where he was Warden, 1988-1994. He earned his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1949, after first studying mathematics at St. Johns College, Cambridge. Knighted in 1985, Cox is a fellow of the Royal Society, an honorary fellow of the British Academy and a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He has served as president of the Bernoulli Society, Royal Statistical Society and International Statistical Institute. In 2010, Cox received the Copley Medal, the Royal Society’s highest award, and in 2016, the International Prize in Statistics and shared the BBVA Foundation Prize for research in the physical sciences.
Xiaowen Dong
Xiaowen Dong is a Departmental Lecturer in the Department of Engineering Science, a faculty member of the Oxford-Man Institute, and a research fellow of Somerville College, all at the University of Oxford. He is primarily interested in utilising graphs to model relational structure within the data, and developing novel techniques that lie at the intersection of machine learning, signal processing, and complex networks to study questions across social and economic sciences, with a particular focus on understanding human behaviour, decision making and societal changes.
Ray Duch
Ray is an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and the Director of the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS), which has centres in Oxford, Santiago (Chile), Tianjin (China) and Pune (India). Previously, he was the Senator Don Henderson Scholar in Political Science at the University of Houston. He received his PhD from the University of Rochester. He is currently the Long-Term Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Toulouse School of Economics. Ray’s research uses experiments, digital trace and public opinion analysis to explain individual decision making. He has published extensively, including an award-winning book (The Economic Vote) on how economic outcomes affect democratic accountability. His work has appeared in forty leading journals in political science and economics. Ray’s current research agenda investigates the role of information acquisition in decision-making. In 2015, Ray was selected as a member of the UK Cabinet Office Cross-Whitehall Trial Advice Panel to assist Whitehall departments in designing and implementing experiments to assess policy effectiveness. He is a member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network.
Scott Hale
Dr Scott A. Hale is a Senior Data Scientist and Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford, UK, and a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He develops and applies techniques from computer science to research questions in both computer science and the social sciences and puts the results into practice with industry partners. He is particularly interested in mobilization/collective action, agenda setting, and antisocial behaviour (e.g., hate speech) and has a strong track record in building tools and teaching programmes that enable social science researchers to access new methods and forms of data. At Oxford, he directs the Social Data Science programme, supervises postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and teaches postgraduate students.
Melinda Mills
Melinda Mills (MBE, FBA) is the Nuffield Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College and the Director of the new Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science in Oxford She completed her PhD in Demography at the University of Groningen (Netherlands), and has further studied bioinformatics and genetics. She was the Editor of the European Sociological Review (2012-2016). Mills’ research spans a range of interdisciplinary topics at the intersection of demography, sociology, molecular genetics and statistics. Her substantive research specializes in fertility and human reproductive behaviour, assortative mating, labour market, nonstandard employment and chronotypes, life course and inequality. She currently leads the ERC funded programme SOCIOGENOME (www.sociogenome.com). Mills has published various statistics textbooks in R on survival and event history analysis (2011, Sage) and has a forthcoming book on applied quantitative genetics statistical analysis (2019, MIT Press). She serves on various national science Boards such as the Executive Council of the Ecnomic and Social Research Council RCUK, the non-Executive Supervisory Board of the Dutch Science Council (NWO) and the NHS Digital Research Advisory Group.
Neave O'Clery
Originally from Dublin, Dr Neave O'Clery is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford where she leads a research group focused on data-driven models for economic development and the emergence of complexity for urban systems. Neave was previously a Fulbright Scholar and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School following her PhD (mathematics) at Imperial College. She is also founder and Editor in Chief of Angle – a journal based at Imperial College focusing on the intersection of policy, politics and science – since 2009.
Nick Ruktanonchai
Nick Ruktanonchai is an infectious disease epidemiologist, currently working as a senior research fellow in the WorldPop Project at the University of Southampton. He is interested in understanding how vectorborne diseases move on complex landscapes of transmission, particularly when carried by human hosts. This has involved using human mobility data from a variety of sources, including from Android smartphones, feature phones, satellite imagery, and microcensus data. Through collaborations with organisations such as the Clinton Health Access Initiative, he works to ensure his research helps inform malaria elimination strategy worldwide.
Mariarosaria Taddeo
Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo is Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where she is the Deputy Director of the Digital Ethics Lab, and is Faculty Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Her recent work focuses mainly on the ethical analysis of Artificial Intelligence, cyber security , cyber conflicts, and ethics of digital innovation. Her area of expertise is Philosophy and Ethics of Information, although she has worked on issues concerning Epistemology, Logic, and Philosophy of AI. She has been listed among the top 50 most inspiring Italian women working in AI in 2018. Dr Taddeo has been awarded The Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She also received the World Technology Award for Ethics acknowledging the originality and her research on the ethics of cyber conflicts, and the social impact of the work that she developed in this area. Since 2016, Taddeo serves as editor-in-chief of Minds & Machines (SpringerNature) and of Philosophical Studies Series (SpringerNature).
Sonja Vogt
Sonja Vogt received her PhD at the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS) at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. She was then a senior research associate in the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. From Zurich she moved to Oxford, where she was a senior postdoctoral officer at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences in Oxford. Currently, Sonja is associate professor for sustainable social development at the University of Bern, and she is affiliated with Nuffield College and the Sociology Department at the University of Oxford. Sonja has published in Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Her research focuses on social development, with a particular emphasis on culturally sensitive topics where attitudes and behavior are hard to measure. Examples include female genital cutting, prenatal sex-selection, corruption, and various types of discrimination. Sonja has projects in Sudan, Armenia, Columbia, Brazil, Kenya, and Nigeria.
Roberto Cerina
Roberto Cerina is a third-year DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, with an interest in Election Forecasting, Bayesian Statistics and non-representative surveys. His recent work has focused on making inference on electoral preferences from revealed behaviour on social-media; in particular, together with Professor Raymond Duch, he has forecasted the 2018 mid-term elections in Texas using likes from pages of public candidates on Facebook, leveraging the latest technology in prediction and post-stratification, and achieving results comparable to state-of-the-art surveys, at a fraction of the cost (see here from more: http://raymondduch.com/forecasts/). Currently he is working on forecasting the 2019 Indian Lok Sabha Elections using a convenience sample and Mechanical Turks. He is also working on finalising a Machine Learning pipeline to produce fully automated Opinion Polling from Twitter.
Charles Rahal
Charles Rahal is a social science methodologist and applied social data scientist with a background in high-dimensional econometrics, having completed his PhD in 2016. He currently holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship entitled 'The Social Data Science of Healthcare Supply' which develops data driven tools for analysing healthcare procurement processes. He is particularly interested in unique data origination processes, be they unstructured or otherwise, and is an advocate for open source and reproducible academic research, particularly in the forms of Python, LaTeX and Linux. He was a co-recipient (with Aaron Reeves, Sam Friedman and Magne Flemmen) of the 2018 European Academy of Sociology Best Paper award, and he presently teaches 'Python for Sociologists' in Michaelmas Term. Other current areas of interest include civic technology, applied econometrics (predominantly spatial and time series), scientometrics, data wrangling, software development, and social stratification and social mobility. He is increasingly interested in sociological applications of text mining algorithms. Follow his projects on [github](https://github.com/crahal) and [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=8bd7KNgAAAAJ&hl=en)!
Chris Barrie
Chris is currently a DPhil Candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. From September 2019, he will be Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield. His research interests include protest, conflict, and nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa. In the realm of computational methods, he is particularly interested in historical GIS techniques and the use of social media data.
Samira Barzin
Samira Barzin is an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). She holds a MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has recently completed her PhD (Civil Eng.) at Imperial College London. Samira’s research particularly focuses on various topics of economic and international development, particularly its spatial and dynamic components, and transport economics. She is passionate about interdisciplinary work and curious about exploring the novel options big data and computational methods offer for research, particularly for research on data sparse developing countries.
Pablo Beytía
Pablo Beytía is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Sciences of Humboldt University of Berlin and a DAAD-CONICYT scholarship holder. He is specializing in what might be called ‘digital sociology of knowledge’, with a thesis on how biographical information is being globally structured in multilingual Wikipedia. Pablo was a lecturer at the Catholic University of Chile, director of the Social Research Centre of the international NGO ‘TECHO’, advisor to the Government of Chile, and visiting researcher at the University of Warwick and the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences. He is a sociologist and holds a master's degree in both sociology and philosophy.
Jorge Cimentada
Jorge Cimentada is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Pompeu Fabra University and soon to be Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Demography. He's involved in projects at the RECSM institute where he builds scientific software to analyze survey data with measurement error as well as on ERC funded projects from Bocconi University on trust and fertility. His research is focused on combining ideas from computer science and statistics to the study of achievement inequality, population dynamics and inequality in spatial/social mobility. To check out some of his work, you can visit his website or follow him on Twitter under @cimentadaj.
Aidan Combs
Aidan is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Duke University, where she is associated with the Polarization Lab and Duke Network Analysis Center. Her research interests are in the application of computational methods to questions in political sociology, social psychology, and the sociology of gender. She holds a BS in Engineering Physics and Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Emmanuelle Afaribea Dankwa
Emmanuelle is a DPhil candidate in Statistical Science at the University of Oxford, where she studies as a Rhodes Scholar. Before moving to Oxford, she worked as a teaching assistant in the statistics department of the University of Ghana where she had earlier obtained a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Statistics. Emmanuelle’s research interests lie in experimental design and statistical epidemiology and her current research explores the links between branching processes and the mechanisms of infectious disease spread in a stochastic environment. She is also interested in applying statistical methods to increase the impacts of environmental campaigns.
Arran Davis
Arran recently finished his DPhil (PhD) at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar. He is now teaching quantitative methods at both the undergraduate and graduate level at Oxford, as well as working part time as a data scientist at TextureAI. Using evolutionary theory to understand human behaviour, he has studied the cultural activities that lead to bonded, cooperative relationships among humans. Arran's DPhil focused on the effects of social relationships on human health and wellbeing. Specifically, he used experimental, observational, and 'big data' approaches to understand how social support and cohesion can enhance the performance of physical exercise through reducing perceptions of pain and fatigue. Particularly relevant to the SICSS, he built social networks using data from over 10 million runs at parkrun (a free, weekly, community based 5 km run that happens at over 600 locations around the world) to demonstrate how the presence of close social relationships can improve run times and exercise adherence. Arran is excited to advance his (largely self taught) knowledge of the network sciences, web scrapping, Python, and R, especially with regard to how these methods and tools can be successfully applied to answering the challenges we face as a society.
Xuejie Ding
Xuejie Ding is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, and a research fellow at Nuffield College. She receives her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2018. Her research interests are primarily directed towards adopting a sociogenomic approach to bridge the knowledge on contextual, social and biological influences on health and behaviour outcomes. She is particularly interested in applying computational methods to large-scale genetic and behavioural data to understand gene-environment interaction and correlation.
Arun Frey
Arun Frey is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Oxford. His research examines the ecologies of ethnic conflict and discrimination during the “European refugee crisis”, studying how threatening events shape patterns of violence, discrimination, and political polarisation. Methodologically, he is very interested in high-frequency data and text analysis, and uses computational social science approaches to identify novel data sources and quantify local anti-immigrant sentiment. Prior to commencing his doctoral research, Arun worked as a social affairs consultant at the United Nations Secretariat in Bangkok, Thailand.
Clemens Jarnach
Clemens is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. His recent research focuses on the application of social network analysis to political sociology topics. His thesis focuses on investigating digital media usage by voters and politicians in British politics. His research addresses topics such as political polarization, echo chambers, Brexit, and media diversity.
Adam Kenny
Adam Kenny is a DPhil candidate in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His doctoral research focuses on the effects of group identity and intergroup competition on human prosociality. He mostly analyses quantitative data generated through field experiments employing behavioural economic games. He also holds a BA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Human Evolution and Behaviour from University College London.
Rishemjit Kaur
Rishemjit Kaur recently completed her PhD in utilizing the optimization capabilities of human decision making process by understanding their conflicting integrative and individualisation tendencies. She is currently working as a Scientist at CSIR-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, India. Her research interests include the study of human behaviour, particularly moral behaviour and understanding the inter-cultural differences or similarities using social media data. She is also interested in studying the effects of policy decisions on specific groups, e.g. farmers using big data sources such as "Farmers Call Centre queries" and provide solutions in order to alleviate some of the problems they face.
Judith Koops
Judith Koops is a PhD candidate at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague (The Netherlands). Her research focusses on cross-national differences in the link between childhood disadvantage and family formation of young adults. Judith also works as a researcher for the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP). The GGP is a social science research infrastructure that provides open access micro- and macro-level data with the aim to improve the knowledge base for social science and policymaking in developed, low-fertility, countries. GGP is currently examining the outcomes of a Push-to-Web experiment in three European countries and they will soon conduct a Social Media experiment using the Facebook advertising platform. In 2019, the team will develop infrastructure needed to collect voice recordings during CAPI or CAWI administered interviews of the Generations and Gender Survey.
Kan Li
Kan Li is a DPhil candidate in international relations at University of Oxford. Her research focuses on applications of agent-based model to international crises and conflicts; her current project studies how challengers alter international status quo through asymmetric military build-up and how this shapes unique dynamics of asymmetric conflicts. Prior to Oxford, she received her Master's degree in political science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and her Bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Hong Kong.
Timothy Monteath
Timothy Monteath is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics and is also Researcher in the Department of Law. His doctoral research is focused on the high end of London’s residential property market, and looks at questions of value, ownership and property relations. He maintains a broad interest in broad area housing studies, wealth, inequality and the application of computational methods to research in this area.
Julia Mikolai
Julia Mikolai is a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. Her background is in sociology and demography. Her research interests include partnerships, families, and fertility; residential mobility and housing; life course research; and cross-national comparisons. She uses individual-level longitudinal data and longitudinal methods to study these topics. Previously, she has been a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool. She holds a PhD in social statistics and demography from the University of Southampton and has studied at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), Utrecht University, and the European Doctoral School of Demography (hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Centre for Economic Demography at Lund University).
Tobias Rüttenauer
Tobias Rüttenauer completed his PhD in sociology at the University of Kaiserslautern, where he is currently working as a postdoctoral research assistant. In his research, he uses large-scale register-based data to analyse the connection between socio-demographic characteristics and the exposure to environmental pollution, with a particular focus on selective migration processes. He is also working on econometric models for spatial and longitudinal data analysis, and recently published the R package feisr to estimate fixed effects individual slope models.
Florian Schaffner
Florian Schaffner is a doctoral student in Politics at Balliol College, University of Oxford. His research interests include political psychology, direct democracy, elections, research methods and data science. In his doctoral research he uses surveys, experiments and quantitative text analysis to study the determinants and consequences of citizens’ perceptions of the integrity and legitimacy of referendums and elections. He holds an MSc in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BA in Social Sciences from the University of Zurich.
Kayla Schulte
Kayla Schulte is a PGS with the Department of Sociology and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on air pollution exposure, inequality, health-protective behaviours and open-access air quality data. Kayla worked previously with the U.S. EPA on air quality and citizen science research, and is now involved with DEFRA-funded research on air quality management in Oxford city. Kayla has a background in social science, politics, human geography and graphic design. She received her BA from Franklin & Marshall College and her MSc from the University of Oxford.
Giacomo Vagni
Giacomo is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford and a member of the Centre for Time Use Research, University College London. His PhD thesis focuses on the structure of daily life, collective rhythms and the social stratification of time use. His research interests include causal inference, sequence analysis and visual sociology. He holds a BA in Anthropology and Sociology from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and a MA in Sociology from the University of Geneva.
Fjinanda van Klingeren
I am DPhil student in Sociology at Nuffield College, researching heterogeneity, trust and cooperation in common pool resource settings. I use laboratory and artefactual field experiments with common pool resource games to analyse human behaviour under different treatments. I'm also interested in agent-based models to analyse behaviour, and hope to apply this to my research.
Mark Verhagen
Mark Verhagen is an incoming PhD student in Sociology at Nuffield college. He holds Masters in Econometrics (University of Amsterdam) and Sociology (University of Oxford) and is interested in incorporating exciting new quantitative techniques into social science research. Mark has been active in the past years as a data scientist through his companies Delph and Apadana.io, working for municipalities, SME's, research institutes and large corporations to make data an intrinsic part of their business strategy. Academically, his more recent work has focused on law, building large databases of court cases through web scraping and using Machine Learning and NLP techniques to identify determinants of court rulings.
Vadim Voskresenskii
Vadim Voskresenskii is doing PhD in Free University of Berlin and working as a research assistant in Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. His research is focused on how right-wing actors use the affordances of social media platforms for the creation of transnational ties and exchange of information. In the current project, he studies online communities formed by European right-wingers migrating to Russian social media due to the censorship policy on Facebook. In the project, he uses text mining and network analysis methods.Princeton University
All Participants
Matthew Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he is affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers: the Office of Population Research, the Center for Information Technology Policy, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of *Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age*.
Chris Bail
Chris Bail is 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 the Duke Population Research Institute. His research examines political polarization, culture and social psychology using tools from the field of computational social science. He is the author of *Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream*.
Abdullah Almaatouq
Abdullah Almaatouq is a Research Assistant in the Human Dynamics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is pursuing a PhD in Computational Science & Engineering. Abdullah's work includes conducting theoretical and empirical research on human behavior using innovative approaches and tools ranging from complex systems theory and agent-based modeling, to network analysis, econometric techniques, and behavioral and experimental methods.
Justin Grimmer
Justin Grimmer is a Professor in Stanford University's Department of Political Science. His current research focuses on American political institutions, elections, and developing new machine-learning methods for the study of politics. He is the author of *Representational Style in Congress: What Legislators Say and Why It Matters* and *The Impression of Influence: Legislator Communication, Representation, and Democratic Accountability*.
Annie Liang
Annie Liang is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2016, and she spent 2016-7 as a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research-New England. Her research is in economic theory (in particular, learning and information), and the application of machine learning methods for theory building and evaluation.
Alondra Nelson
Alondra Nelson is President of the Social Science Research Council and Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where she served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science. Her research focuses on how science and its applications may shape the social world, including aspects of personal identification, racial formation, and collective action. She is the author of multiple books, most recently *The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome*.
Beth Noveck
Beth Noveck is a Professor in the Technology, Culture, and Society department at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, where she directs the Governance Lab. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first Chief Innovation Officer in 2018. Previously, Beth served as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative under President Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government.
Jennifer Pan
Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Stanford University. She focuses on the politics of authoritarian countries in the digital age. How autocrats constrain collective action through online censorship, propaganda, and responsiveness. How information proliferation influences the ability of authoritarian regimes to conduct surveillance. How public preferences are arranged and formed. She combines experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity in China and other authoritarian regimes to examine these questions.
Eric Schwartz
Eric Schwartz is the Editorial Director of Columbia University Press. He was previously senior editor for sociology and cognitive science at Princeton University Press and psychology editor at Cambridge University Press.
Brandon Stewart
Brandon Stewart is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Arthur H. Scribner Bicentennial Preceptor at Princeton University. He develops new quantitative statistical methods for applications across computational social science, with a focus on tools that facilitate automated text analysis and model complex heterogeneity in regression.
Chris Wiggins
Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times. At Columbia he is a founding member of the executive committee of the Data Science Institute, and of the Department of Systems Biology, and is affiliated faculty in Statistics. He is a co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY, a nonprofit which since 2010 has organized once a semester student hackathons and the hackNY Fellows Program.
Bedoor Al Shebli
I am a Post-Doctoral Associate at New York University, Abu Dhabi. I received my PhD in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, and my MSc in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research focuses on using data science techniques to study social phenomena, with a particular emphasis on social and economic benefits of diversity and the dynamics of social interaction and cohesion. I frame social science problems in the contexts of data science, big data, and machine learning. Cumulatively, my work contributes to the fields of computational social science, data science, and machine learning.
Victoria Asbury
Victoria Asbury is doctoral student in sociology at Harvard University. Her research interests include social stratification, immigration, political discourse, and social policy. She draws on sociological, psychological, behavioral economic, and computational methods to explore relationships between discourse, group-boundaries, and social preferences. Before coming to Harvard, Victoria worked as a booking production-assistant at MSNBC. She received her MA in education and BA in African & African-American Studies from Stanford University.
Felix Busch
Felix is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Job Market Monitor, University of Zurich. He received his PhD in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. In his dissertation, Felix examined the extent to which gender segregated labor markets produce wage inequality between occupations. In his current position, he builds applications that retrieve large amounts of job ad data from the web in order to monitor labor demand in Switzerland. His main academic interests are wage inequality, gender inequality, occupations, and labor market segregation. In his spare time, Felix thinks about how to use digital tools to solve social problems.
Nicholas Camp
Nick Camp is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, where he received his PhD in social psychology in 2018. His research examines racial disparities in the everyday encounters between police officers and citizens, bridging psychological and sociological perspectives on these institutional interactions. To understand the causes and consequences of these inequities, his work draws on a range of methods, from computational studies of officer body-worn camera footage, experiments in community and lab settings, to analyses of traffic stop data. Nick received his B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University in 2009.
Karina Caro
Karina Caro is an Assistant Professor of Informatics at the Faculty of Administrative and Social Sciences of the Autonomous University of Baja California in Ensenada, Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education of Ensenada, Mexico (CICESE Research Center). She worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Computing and Informatics and in the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University. Her research interests are in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, accessibility, and videogames for health. Her research focuses on designing and evaluating technology to support cognitive and motor development of children with neurodevelopmental and genetic disorders such as autism, Down Syndrome, and Cerebral Palsy. All her current research projects intersect computing, medical and social sciences. She works very closely with specialists in the care of children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as neuro pediatricians and physical and occupational therapists, as well as, psychotherapists and special education teachers. Her overall research aim is to create technology for supporting the care of children with neurodevelopmental disorders, contributing to the acquisition and practice of the necessary skills to achieve children's independence.
Keng-Chi Chang
Keng-Chi Chang is a PhD Student in Political Science at University of California San Diego. His research interests include political methodology, the intersection of causal inference and statistical machine learning, and political economy. He is broadly interested in all aspects of computational social science. He completed his undergraduate studies in Economics at National Taiwan University.
Naniette H. Coleman
Naniette H. Coleman is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley. Her work sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Her research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws. Naniette holds a Master of Public Administration with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and both an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. A non-traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience includes local, state, and federal service, as well as for two international organizations, and two universities.
Thomas Davidson
Thomas Davidson is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Cornell University. His dissertation examines why far-right social movements and political parties have been so successful at using social media to build large online audiences and the extent to which these groups have influenced public debates on contentious political issues including immigration, Islam, and Brexit. More broadly, he is interested in combining computational methods and online data with more traditional quantitative methods to study politics and culture.
William Frey
William Frey (he/they) is a doctoral student at Columbia University's School of Social Work, coordinator of the SAFElab, and researcher in the Cogburn Research Group. His research focuses on race and whiteness within the context of digital technoculture, and the individual and collective role of white people in the perpetuation of socio-technological systems of domination and power (e.g., digital racism). He has expertise in contextual analysis of social media, social media data ethics, and community/domain expert involvement in computational mixed methods research. William received his M.S.W. in community organizing from the University of Michigan's School of Social Work.
Anton Gollwitzer
Anton Gollwitzer is a PhD student in the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation Laboratory at Yale University. He completed bachelor's degrees in psychology and computer science at New York University before joining Yale. Broadly construed, his research focuses on social cognition, individual differences, social perception, and motivation. Currently he is working on: (1) How do people think and feel about patterns and pattern deviancy, and how do these judgments impact social phenomena, (2) Generalized person perception: How the individual perceives people in general, and (3) Behavior-change interventions and motivational processes.
Malka Guillot
Malka Guillot is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Law and Economics at ETH Zürich. She received her Ph.D. in Economics with a focus on taxation and inequality from the Paris School of Economics. Her research applies computational approaches to problems in empirical public finance. She explores both dimensions of big data: its length, by using administrative data such as income tax returns and its width with text corpora such as the tax code.
Jaren Haber
Jaren Haber is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research applies computational methods to study how organizational contexts shape the impacts of structural inequalities. Jaren’s dissertation—a complex project assisted by a dozen apprentices—researches whether ideological differentiation amongst charter schools reflects and reinforces stratification by race and class. In doing so, he uses web-crawling, mixed-effects models, and computational text analysis. Jaren also co-coordinates the Computational Text Analysis Working Group and the TextXD (Text Across Domains) symposium at UC Berkeley.
Masyhur Hilmy
Masyhur is a PhD student in Economics at Boston University. His research interests include the economics of education, social protection, and migration. He previously worked at J-PAL Southeast Asia, where he was involved in RCTs to evaluate a community block grant program, a nationwide welfare eligibility census, and the expansion of Indonesia's national health insurance program to the informal sector. Masyhur received his bachelor’s degree from Institut Teknologi Bandung and his master’s degree from Kyoto University, both in Astronomy.
Brooke Jarrett
Brooke Jarrett is a doctoral student of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. She is broadly interested in how technology can lessen inequalities in healthcare access. Her dissertation explores the ethics and mental health impact of chatbots — computer programs that mimic human-to-human conversations. Methodologically, she hopes to use text analyses to quantify and describe potential harms of chatbots. Brooke holds an BS from MIT and MS from Northwestern University in environmental engineering.
Jae Yeon Kim
Jae Yeon Kim is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of California, specializing in comparative historical approaches to the study of race, ethnicity, and politics. His research examines coalitional dynamics within minority communities, focusing on the conditions under which ethnic minority groups form a race-based coalition in the United States and elsewhere. Kim is interested in leveraging computational text analysis and machine learning to study how racial solidarity works in the post-civil rights era. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Kim worked in the tech industry.
Monika Leszczyńska
Monika Leszczyńska is Assistant Professor of Empirical Legal Research at the Maastricht University Faculty of Law, Netherlands. She received her PhD in law from University of Bonn (Germany). In her research, she uses laboratory and online experiments as well as content analysis to deliver evidence-based insights to legal decision-makers on the impact of law on human behavior. She studies how individuals make decisions in the online environment. She is looking at the contractual terms of free and paid digital transactions, how zero-price offers affect people’s decisions about their contractual rights and privacy as well as how digital contract formation (e.g., by clicking on OK) influences impulsive decisions. Monika holds also a master’s degree in law from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland), LLM degrees from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (Germany) and New York University. In 2016/2017 she was a post-doctoral fellow at the New York University School of Law. During her doctoral studies, she was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn (Germany).
Katherine McCabe
Katherine McCabe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on public opinion, political communication, and political psychology. She uses surveys, experiments, and text analysis to understand how people’s social identities, attitudes, and personal experiences shape and complicate the ways they engage in politics.
Kevin Munger
Kevin Munger is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, and will begin as an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State University in the fall of 2019. He has conducted a series of field experiments on Twitter to study online norm enforcement. His current interests include the heterogeneity of online media effects — moderated by age and digital literacy — and developing a framework for conducting more "temporally valid" research in the rapidly-changing field of online social and political behavior.
Margaret Ng
Margaret Ng is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her current research is on (1) technology use discontinuance, (2) technology and information diffusion, and (3) social media in news contexts. Methodologically, she takes a hybrid approach that combines big data, machine learning, as well as survey, and experimental research on media platforms. She received her Ph.D. in Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Ng was an advanced analytics intern at Pew Research Center’s Data Labs and worked as a news artist at National Geographic Magazine, The Seattle Times and a data reporter for The Center for Public Integrity.
Nynke Niezink
Nynke Niezink is an Assistant Professor in Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD from the Department of Sociology at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on the development of statistical methods for network analysis, with applications in education, health sciences and management. For a recent project on criminal networks, she studied what drives violence among organized crime members.
Amin Rahimian
Amin Rahimian is a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). He received his masters in systems engineering and PhD in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and masters in statistics from the Wharton School at UPenn. His research interests include network science, statistics, control and decision theory, with applications to social and economic networks.
Sarah Rezaei
Sarah Rezaei is an assistant professor at the chair of Microeconomics at Utrecht University School of Economics. Her main fields of interest are Behavioral and Experimental Economics. She is particularly interested in social and economic networks, how they form, why they show certain patterns and how their structure impact on human behavior. Specifically, a large part of her research investigates the impact of the decision context on people's other-regarding and cooperative behavior theoretically and experimentally.
Elizaveta Sivak
Elizaveta Sivak is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow. She is also the head of the Center for Modern Childhood Research at the Institute of Education, HSE. Her dissertation project is concerned with modern parenting culture, or parents practices, folk theories on child-rearing, and discourse on parenting. Her other areas of interest include children’s everyday practices and well-being, gender bias in education, sociology of science and scientific communities, and the methodology of using digital trace data in social sciences.
Stephanie Teeple
Stephanie Teeple is an MD-PhD candidate and doctoral student in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in how nascent data technologies (machine learning, artificial intelligence) stand to harm marginalized populations in the healthcare setting and how we can do better. Stephanie received her BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and previously worked as a Post-Bachelor Fellow at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, WA.
Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. His research interests span public opinion, causal inference, climate change, and immigration. His current work explores how demographic changes affect political attitudes and policy opinion using experimental and computational methods. Andrew holds a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from Marquette University.
Austin van Loon
Austin van Loon is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at Stanford University. He’s interested in the human search for shared meaning and how this is tied to broader social structures in both determinants and consequence. Using this theoretical lens, he studies organizational culture, political polarization, and interaction within organizations. He approaches these questions using computational methods (especially text analysis, machine learning, and agent-based simulations), experiments, social network analysis, and causal inference.
Tiago Ventura
Tiago Ventura is a Ph.D. Student in Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research agenda focuses on comparative political economy, politics of crime and violence, with a regional focus in Latin America. His doctoral dissertation uses economic models of welfare to understand the impact of wealth inequality on citizens preferences for punitive policies and in the provision of security by the State. Additionally, Tiago has worked on a variety of projects using network analysis, experiments, and computational methods to understand framing, polarization, and social conflict on Twitter. Tiago is also an affiliated researcher at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Computational Social Science at the University of Maryland.
Florianne Verkroost
Florianne Verkroost is a second-year PhD candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She holds a BSc in Technology and Liberal Arts and Sciences, majoring in Applied Mathematics and Physics, from University of Twente as well as a MSc in Econometrics and Management Science from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Florianne’s main interests are in advanced quantitative methods, machine learning and the use of digital trace data. Given these interests and her interdisciplinary background, Florianne’s doctoral thesis focuses on applying such methods and data to questions of the reproduction of inequalities (e.g. gender, wealth and well-being) as a consequence of changes in family size and childlessness in particular.
Yuan Yuan
Yuan Yuan is a PhD student in the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. His research aims to understand human behavior on online social networks, with a focus on prosocial behavior and social contagion. His research draws upon ideas from machine learning, causal inference, experimental design, and game theory. Before coming to MIT, Yuan received his Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Economics from Tsinghua University.
Alex Kindel
Alex is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. He is interested in computational social science, historical sociology, and the formal organization of knowledge. His dissertation traces the development of statistical tools, methods, and standards in applied research since the 1950s.
Danielle Montagne
Danielle is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Duke University. She is interested in exploring cultural and economic sociology using computational and network methods. Her current research focuses on the organizational, structural, and cultural determinants of tie formation and multiplexity of roles using data about the popular music industry.
Cambria Naslund
Cambria is a PhD student in sociology at Princeton University. She uses computational methods to study questions in the sociologies of science, medicine, and technology. Her current research explores public understandings of medical knowledge and diagnoses using text and image data from newspapers and crowdfunding campaigns. She completed her B.A. in Social Research and Public Policy at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Tom Wolff
Tom is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Duke University. His interests include culture, networks, social psychology, inequality, and political sociology. Tom's current projects explore predictors of socioeconomic diversity in friendship networks and the ways in which political discourse changes in the presence of (in)complete information.
Simone Zhang
Simone is a PhD student in sociology at Princeton University. Her research examines how technology is reshaping how people interact with the organizations they encounter in everyday life. She draws on experiments and digital trace data to study the implications of these shifts for social inclusion, socioeconomic outcomes, and trust in institutions.RTI International
All Participants
Antje Kirchner
Antje Kirchner, PhD, is a Research Survey Methodologist at RTI International and an Adjunct Research Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Her research addresses challenges in survey methodology, including ways to examine nonresponse bias using machine learning techniques, adaptive/responsive designs, assessing the quality of survey and administrative data, and how to improve response quality in surveys using behavior coding and paradata. Her research has been published in journals such as Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. She recently organized the “Big Data Meets Survey Science (BigSurv18)” conference.
Craig A. Hill
Craig A. Hill, PhD, is the Senior Vice President for Survey, Computing, and Statistical Sciences division. He creates the strategy and vision for his business unit, and manages and directs a portfolio of more than 150 studies and more than 500 professional staff. Dr. Hill received his PhD in quantitative methods from the Political Science department at the University of New Orleans and has published in a variety of journals. He also was the lead editor for Social Media, Sociality, and Survey Research (Wiley, 2013). Recent presentations include “Thoughts, Ruminations, and Twitter-ready Soundbites on Data Science, Big Data, and Social Science Research” (2017 Royal Statistical Society) and “Moving Social Science into the Fourth Paradigm” at BigSurv18 in Barcelona.
Alan Blatecky
Alan Blatecky, PhD, is a Visiting Fellow at RTI International and has broad expertise in high performance computing, international networking, computational science, Artificial Intelligence and advanced cyberinfrastructure. As a Visiting Fellow, Alan focuses on integrating and deploying advanced technologies to transform research and education. Alan previously was the Director for the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) at the National Science Foundation, Deputy Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, Executive Director of Research and Programs at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, and Vice President of Information Technology at MCNC and NCREN (North Carolina Research and Education Network). Alan recently co-authored a book; “Reproduciblity: A Primer on Semantics and Implications for Research.
Helen Jang
Helen Jang, Senior Director at RTI International, leads Project Catapult, a company initiative focusing on applying computational social science and directs the Center for Digital Innovation in Education and Workforce Development division. Her work leverages data and emerging technologies to improve policy and practice. Pivotal work includes the National Center for Education Statistics’ [DataLab](https://nces.ed.gov/datalab/index.aspx), which offers public access to data from 50 federal studies, [USAID’s Early Grade Reading Barometer](https://earlygradereadingbarometer.org/), which offers a wealth of actionable assessment data to improve literacy outcomes, and the [Evaluation Engine](https://evaluationengine.org), a quasi-experimental impact evaluation tool designed to help states use their longitudinal education data to improve instruction.
Jacqueline Olich
Jacqueline Olich, PhD, is an administrator, educator and entrepreneur with experience building partnerships and developing innovative initiatives. She joined RTI International in 2014. As RTI’s first senior director of University Collaborations, she leads RTI International's University Collaboration Office (UCO), which serves as a catalyst and hub for outreach at the university level. She develops and manages partnerships with leading regional, national and international academic institutions. She leads the [RTI University Scholars Program](https://www.rti.org/rti-university-scholars-program) and the [RTI Internship Program](https://www.rti.org/internships). Dr. Olich is an adjunct associate professor in the [UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health’s](http://sph.unc.edu/) Public Health Leadership Program.
Sam S. Adams
Sam Adams is a Senior Artificial Intelligence Researcher at RTI International and also the Mission Architect for Project Catapult, a company initiative focusing on applying computational social science. He applies artificial intelligence and knowledge graph techniques to the unique data curation and integration challenges that data scientists face. He holds 29 patents and previously spent more than 2 decades with IBM Research, where he was appointed one of the first IBM Distinguished Engineers. Mr. Adams played a leading role in various strategic initiatives—including artificial general intelligence, autonomous learning, end-user programming, contextual data fusion, big data and analytics, enterprise-scale data curation, and massive multicore programming and high-performance graph database acceleration; he also applied Internet of Things data and reactive knowledge graphs to the challenges of global elder care.
Rob Chew
Rob Chew is a Research Data Scientist and Program Manager in RTI International's Center for Data Science. He uses his expertise in machine learning, software development, and computational social science to help subject matter experts solve their complex problems. Dedicated to interdisciplinary research, he has successfully integrated data science into projects spanning health care, criminal justice, public health, and the environment. In addition to [publishing](https://www.robchew.com/#publications), Mr. Chew has also developed open-source [analytical software packages](https://github.com/RTIInternational/rollmatch) and [applications](https://rtiinternational.github.io/SMART/). He was named a 2018 Data Fellow by the National Consortium for Data Science.
Kasey Jones
Kasey Jones is a Data Scientist with over four years of experience solving client problems using data analysis techniques in R and Python. He applies predictive modeling, simulation techniques, text analysis, and machine learning to produce impactful solutions. While at RTI, Mr. Jones has developed several modeling algorithms in conjunction with RTI's synthetic population. Projects include - predicting underage drinking rates in D.C., developing a social vulnerability index, and creating an agent-based model that calculates healthcare acquired infection rates for hospitals in North Carolina for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Georgiy Bobashev
Georgiy Bobashev is an RTI Fellow in the Center for Data Science at RTI International with more than 20 years of experience in health research. His current research interests follow two major areas - predictive modeling and studies of substance use and risky behaviors. His models often combine mechanistic (e.g., agent-based and system dynamics) and machine learning techniques. Dr. Bobashev has applied modeling, statistical analysis and experimental design to a variety of health- and policy-related areas, including substance use, HIV, child/maternal health, influenza, cancer, diabetes, and violent behavior. He has been a principal investigator and co-investigator on numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Ben Allaire
Mr. Allaire is a health economist in RTI International’s Public Health Economics Program. His research promotes understanding of the economic implications and burden of chronic disease, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, asthma, and HIV. He specializes in using econometric and simulation modeling techniques to identify the drivers of impact, costs, and cost-effectiveness in preventing and treating chronic disease.
Kyle Chan
Kyle Chan is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interest is multi-level governance and politics in Western Europe. Kyle looks at the implications of decentralization reforms to party politics, electoral politics and policy coordination across different levels of government. In particular, he is interested in how regionalist parties behave strategically after decentralization reforms. For example, he has an ongoing project that seeks to tease out the sources of regionalist party program variations on immigration in Western Europe. His research was published on Regional and Federal Studies. He obtained his research master's degree at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and completed his undergraduate studies at the Hong Kong Baptist University.
Wei Chang
Wei is a doctoral candidate in health policy at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on gender, household decision-making, and health in developing countries. With a background in economics, public health, and social work, she conducts cross-disciplinarily population research and evaluates interventions in maternal, sexual, and reproductive health. Her work aims to improve women’s agency through producing and synthesizing research evidence for policy decisions in low-resource settings.
Mateo Villamizar Chaparro
Mateo Villamizar Chaparro is PhD student in Political Science at Duke University. He holds a master’s degree in International Affairs (UCSD) and Political Science (Universidad de los Andes). His research focuses on the interactions between political economy, migration and violence with a regional focus on Latin America. He draws on methods as causal inference and experimental design. Mateo is also part of DevLab@Duke and the Duke/UNC Latin America Working Group.
Michelle Corea
Michelle Corea is an incoming PhD student in the Political Science department at UNC Chapel Hill. Her research interests revolve around contentious politics and violence under authoritarian regimes. Methodologically, she is interested in a variety of computational approaches that include network and text analysis. Prior to graduate school, Michelle worked as a software developer at IBM and HCL Technologies. She received her BS in Mathematics from UNC Chapel Hill.
Karishma D’souza
Karishma is a PhD student in the Department of Health Policy and Management at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is interested in studying dual health markets - the simultaneous existence of private and public healthcare markets, and how the interplay of the two health markets influences health seeking behaviors in developing countries. Her current research focuses on the Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) telehealth market and its effect on primary healthcare markets in resource-constrained settings.
Claire Chipman Gilliland
Claire Chipman Gilliland is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill. She studies how religious groups both combat and perpetuate inequality, focusing primarily on U.S. Christian institutions. She is developing computational text analysis methods to investigate sermons, or weekly religious messages, following important social and religious events for her dissertation. Claire holds a BA in Sociology and History from Furman University and an MA in Sociology from UNC-CH.
Christopher Inkpen
Christopher Inkpen is a research sociologist and demographer in the Division for Applied Justice Research at RTI International. At RTI, Dr. Inkpen leads research and data collection for several projects focusing on criminal justice and security in Central America. His substantive research focuses on public opinion of the criminal justice system and justice issues as well as extracting narratives on the criminal justice system from massive text corpora. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of International Education, and the Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.
Molly Jacobs
Molly M. Jacobs is an Assistant Professor at East Carolina University in Health Services and Information Management. She received her PhD from the George Washington University Department of Economics with a concentration in econometrics and labor economics. She holds a master’s degree in economics from George Washington University and degrees in economics and German from Duke University. She engaged in research grants from the US Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and Commerce on a variety of topics including food stamps receipt, veterans’ disability rating, food security and patient activation measures. Dr. Jacobs served for four years as an agricultural economist for the USDA and was named a Fulbright Scholar to Berlin, Germany. Her research has focuses is on the design, implementation and evaluation of community health interventions targeting mental and physical well-being outcomes. She has extensive experience in collection and analysis of individual level health data examining the relationship between body perception and weight change as well as social and psychological influences on physical development.
Sophie Kelmenson
Sophie is a PhD Candidate in City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is interested in natural resource and food systems planning processes, and their interaction with economic development and equity considerations. She employs statistical and qualitative methods, as well as text and social network analysis in her research. She received her bachelor’s degree in government and legal studies from Bowdoin College, and a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Kelly Kilburn
Kelly Kilburn is a Research Scholar at the Duke Global Health Innovation Center. As a social and economic policy researcher she applies interdisciplinary quantitative techniques to analyze the causal impacts of development policies on health and human resources and their pathways of influence. Before joining Duke, Kelly was a postdoctoral scientist at George Washington’s School of Public Health and at UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases. She holds a PhD in Public Policy and has years of experience working on experimental evaluations of social protection policies for poor and vulnerable populations across the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.
Eleftheria Kontou
Eleftheria Kontou is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests lie in the fields of sustainable transportation planning and operations, emerging mobility, as well as transportation and energy sectors interdependencies. She is proposing new models and algorithms to improve sustainable mobility operations to serve communities in an equitable manner. She received her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Florida and conducted research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Elena Leonchuk
Elena Leonchuk is a postdoctoral research scholar at North Carolina State University, where she received her PhD in psychology. She specializes in research consulting and evaluation of science, technology and innovation programs and partnerships and their diverse stakeholders. Themes of her projects include R&D management, economic impacts, innovation process, and acquisition of social capital. Elena is the most passionate about bringing different sectors and disciplines together to solve current business and societal problems. She is a former division I varsity tennis player at Virginia Commonwealth University where she received her BS in political science.
Chao Liu
Chao is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at North Carolina State University. He is interested in computational social science, social network analysis, and organization. His current research explores the conditions under which work-based collaboration is possible in a virtual platform. Specifically, he investigates how network embeddedness within an online community affects individual contributions to team-based production using both numerical and textual data from the GitHub Community.
Jiangmeng Liu (Helen)
Jiangmeng Liu (Helen) is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication in Communication Department at Seattle University. She received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Miami in 2017. Her research centers on individual and organizational use of social media, particularly regarding the influence of social media usage on individuals’ cognition, emotions, and behaviors.
Zhifan Luo
Zhifan Luo is a Ph.D. candidate of sociology at the University at Albany—State University of New York. Her research interests include political sociology, computational social science, elite politics, global hegemony, and political narrative. Her current project examines the role played by the political, the economic, and the military elites in shaping the China policy in the United States. She is also collaborating with colleagues on projects using big-data techniques to analyze political discourse on Chinese social media.
Tim McDade
Tim McDade is a PhD student in the Political Science department at Duke University. His research employs quantitative methods to analyze democratic backsliding, the effects of bilateral financial flows on the state capacity and market structure of recipient countries, and countries’ decision-making processes during conflicts. His undergraduate degrees are in Mathematics (with Honors) and Chinese from the College of William & Mary. Prior to arriving at Duke, Tim worked for Microsoft Azure in Seattle and Beijing.
Becca Merrill
Becca Merrill will be graduating this Spring with a PhD in Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has accepted a position as a researcher with Education Northwest, which currently houses the REL Northwest. Her work focuses on policy, leadership, and school improvement. Specifically, she employs qualitative and quantitative methods to study aspects of the teacher labor market. These include attracting quality teachers, hiring practices, teacher mobility and retention, teacher working conditions, and exit from the teacher work force.
Samantha Mosier
Samantha L. Mosier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a core faculty member of the Master of Public Administration program at East Carolina University. Her main fields of interest are public policy and public administration. Samantha’s research utilizes mixed methods to study the development and implementation of subnational environmental initiatives and sustainable food and agriculture policies. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Colorado State University and her M.P.A. from Auburn University Montgomery.
Ioanna Pavlidou
Ioanna Pavlidou is a PhD Student at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include online social media and data analysis with special focus on online crowdfunding industry. Her current work explores how online crowdfunding platforms can help to bridge geographical, socioeconomic and cultural disparities in capital access. In her research, she experiments with computational social science, data mining and network graphs.
Derek Ramirez
Derek Ramirez is a data manager and social science researcher at RTI, International. His research interests include behavioral health, criminal justice, prevention science, wearables, machine learning, economics, and statistics. He is broadly interested in applying data science techniques and advanced quantitative methods in social research settings. Derek holds a BS in Applied Mathematics with a concentration in Computer Science and a Minor in Spanish from North Carolina State University and a MS in Applied Economics from East Carolina University.
Nestor Ramirez
Nestor Alexis Ramirez is a Research Education Analyst at RTI International and a PhD candidate in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Nestor works on postsecondary student surveys including the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study and the Beginning Postsecondary Students Study, contributing to post-data collection activities such as variable derivation, data management, and publication tasks. His research agenda is broadly focused on college access for underrepresented students in the United States—his dissertation is focused on the role of geographic location and students’ willingness to relocate for college in the college decision-making process.
Marwa Salem
Marwa Salem is a Senior Economist at RTI International. She received her PhD in Economics from North Carolina State University and in her dissertation, examined how household water consumption has responded to price and non-price demand side management policies. In her current position, she conducts quantitative analyses in different areas of environmental economics and management. She is interested in expanding the use of computational methods as complements to conventional econometric models in analyzing environmental policies and climate change impacts.
Jonathan Schlosser
Jonathan Schlosser is currently a PhD student in the School of Media and Journalism at UNC Chapel Hill, where he studies the effects of disinformation on the public’s perception of social and political issues. Current projects focus on the ways in which disinformation on social media can disrupt the process of learning, the development of beliefs/attitudes, and, consequently, political discourse in the public sphere. Jonathan is originally from Sullivan County, New York, but completed his MSc at Lancaster University and earned his BS from Binghamton University. He has worked in education, digital marketing, environmental science, broadcasting, and many other fields; these experiences have resulted in interdisciplinarity and multidimensionality being major factors in his work. He is excited for this opportunity and anticipates learning new things, meeting new people, and engaging with the SICSS community.
Katherine Tait
Katherine Tait is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Her research examines the interrelationship between economic conditions and social movements, particularly the politicization of work and use of direct action during times of high economic inequality. Her dissertation on the expanding worker cooperative sector in New York uses qualitative and computational methods to investigate how employees of democratic workplaces, advocacy organizations, and local institutions are coordinating their goals and efforts to create secure employment, and to inquire into what worker-ownership means to different actors in the NYC cooperative ecosystem.
Eugene Uwiragiye
Eugene Uwiragiye is a PhD student at North Carolina A&T State University in Computational Science and Engineering. He is interested in medical images classification using deep learning (Convolutional Neural Networks, VGG16, VGG19, Resnet and Xceptions. He also works in Biostatistics (Post-Translational Modification of proteins) as Graduate Research Assistant. Eugene holds BS and MS in Operational Research and Stochastic Calculation from Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah in Morocco. He uses Python in different predictive models and machine learning.
Felecia Vega
Ms. Felecia Vega is a researcher and intelligence analyst at the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences (LAS), a Department of Defense organization located on NC State’s Centennial Campus. The LAS is a collaborative effort between government, industry and academia, established to address the Intelligence Community (IC) analytic challenges. Ms. Vega is currently the technical lead for the LAS Computational Social Science & Triage team. The team is focused on innovation and deployment of new methods, techniques and tools for analyzing large volumes of quantitative and qualitative data. Ms. Vega’s research includes utilizing interdisciplinary methods to characterize and prioritize radicalized individuals along a “virtual spectrum” through triaging and machine learning algorithms. She has also pioneered a major framework to recognize and address an immediate IC need for developing Open Source tradecraft. Ms. Vega holds a Master’s of Science degree in Computer Science from Bowie State University and a Bachelors of Arts degree in Mathematics from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Ms. Vega lives in Raleigh, NC and enjoys watching football and spending time with family.
Siri Warkentien
Siri Warkentien is a researcher in the Education and Workforce Development division of RTI International where she researches how family, school, and neighborhood contexts affect youth outcomes and evaluates educational programs for historically underserved youth. She received her PhD in Sociology and MA in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Johns Hopkins University where she focused on the causes and consequences of racial school and neighborhood segregation. Her research interests also include how information and networks influence families’ residential and school decisions.
Tara Weatherholt
Tara Weatherholt, PhD, is an early childhood development researcher in the International Education Division of RTI International. Working primarily in low- and middle-income countries, she is responsible for designing and testing measures of child development and quality of learning environments, managing evaluation activities of RTI-supported pre-primary education programs, and leading large- and small-scale research studies, such as investigations into the factors related to education system efficiency in Uganda and the state of pre-primary education in Tanzania. Her research interests include cognitive development of children in disadvantaged environments, development of valid and reliable measures of learning for use in low-income contexts, and the use of data to inform quality early learning programming.
Lawrence Whitley
Lawrence Whitley, Manager and Technology Lead in Clinical Research Informatics for RTI International, is expert in informatics and technology projects. His work on epidemiological research solutions includes surveys and longitudinal studies, collecting demographic, neurocognitive, clinical, biospecimen, medical history, family history, and genetic data. He serves as visionary, architect, lead developer and project manager for the implementation of a large custom software solution for mapping and harmonizing data across 70 cohorts for the ECHO Program, a large grant under NIH. He is focused on enhancing epidemiological and clinical research through machine learning, including deep learning with neural networks. He is very interested in how computational social science might augment that research. As a Technology Lead, he is uniquely positioned to help other staff expand their skills and experience in AI.
Qinghua Yang
Qinghua Yang is an Assistant Professor at the Bob Schieffer College of Communication, Texas Christian University. Her academic interests lie in health communication, new media, and quantitative research methods. She received her PhD in Communication from University of Miami and completed two-year postdoctoral research at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where she focused on tobacco regulatory science, particularly on electronic cigarettes, and analyzing large datasets to answer otherwise unsolvable research questions. She is currently interested in leveraging computational methods to understand online social networks, retransmission of health information, and the dynamics of social support.
Emily Hadley
Emily Hadley is a Data Scientist with the Center for Data Science at RTI International. She uses her technical skills on a variety of health, education, and computational social science projects. Emily has experience with machine learning techniques, natural language processing, predictive analytics, data visualization, and data ethics, as well as expertise programming in Python, R, and SQL. She holds a BS in Statistics with a second major in Public Policy from Duke University and a MS in Analytics from the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University.
Marcus Mann
Marcus Mann recently received his Ph.D. in sociology from Duke University and is an incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. He studies science, politics, knowledge, and media using computational methods. His current research uses data from Twitter to examine how political media consumption patterns affect susceptibility to political disinformation. He also holds a BA in English from UMass - Amherst and MA's in religious studies and sociology from Duke University.Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon
All Participants
Oscar Mendez
Oscar Mendez is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Monterrey, Mexico. He earned his Ph. D. in economics from the University of California, Davis. His fields of specialization are Labor Economics and International Trade. Between 2015 and 2018, Oscar was a Program Associate in the Economics program of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Adaner Usmani
Adaner Usmani is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University. He received his PhD in Sociology from NYU. His dissertation examined the rise and fall of labor movements over the 20th and early 21st centuries, and considered the effects of these facts for political change. In other work, he has written about American mass incarceration, with an eye on the racial politics of its origins and reproduction.
Alejandro Martín del Campo
Alejandro is an MBA and PhD at Tecnológico de Monterrey. He researches communication and public opinion at the intersection of traditional and emerging media and is currently researching political discourse and propaganda in social media. His interests are e-Democracy, Digital Culture, Internet & Human Rights. Alejandro has over a decade of experience in the broadcast industry, serving as executive producer. He holds degrees in engineering and law.
Alejandra Escobar
Alejandra is a Computer Science Engineer currently studying her Masters in Industrial Economics in the School of Economics at Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, her research interests are in Labor Economics, especially in Human Capital Productivity. A non-traditional student, Alejandra’s prior professional experience includes regional management and service in one of the oldest firms in México.
Bianca Chacon
Bianca Chacon is a PhD student in Economics at Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Mexico. Her research interests include the economics of education, social mobility and human capital. In the summer of 2015 she made a research stay in Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health, Glasgow Cadelonian University, Scotland, United Kingdom. Bianca received her bachelors degree in mathematics and her masters degree in economics both from Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Carlos Saldaña
Carlos is studying the doctoral program in economics at the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon. His areas of interest are industrial organization, labor economics and spatial econometrics applied to regional studies.
Cecilia Cuellar
Cecilia Cuellar has a degree in International Relations and is currently a master's student at the School of Economics, U.A.N.L. She works in Labor Economics research, specifically on Human Capital and Gender Inequality. Currently, she is awaiting acceptance for the PhD program at the same school.
Cesar Olivares
César is a student of the Master in Industrial Economics at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. His main research interest is studying the effects of monetary policy using a machine learning approach using textual data. In general, he is interested in computational models for economics and social sciences. He was part of the Consorcio en Inteligencia Artificial in 2019
Christofer Rodriguez
Chris is a doctorate student in economoic science in the School of Economics of the UANL. He previously earned a mathematics degree and a Masters degree in social sciences.
Claudia Sánchez
Claudia Sánchez is a full time professor at Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. She obtained a Ph. D. in Economics from the same university, a master's degree from the University of Rochester and an Electronic Systems Engineering Degree from Tecnológico de Monterrey. Her areas of interest are growth, inequality, public finance and institutions.
Jair Faz
Jair is a M.Ec Student at the School of Economics and has a B.Sc in physics, both from the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in Mty, México. He is interested in the analysis of macroeconomics, finance and social events from a perspective of chaotic systems and complexity as a metodology to understand the dynamics of emerging, self-organized and adaptive phenomena. His current work focuses on the political business cycle present in the Mexican economy and its relationship to Public Expenditure exercised by the elected political party.
Jeyle Ortiz
Jeyle received her Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. She completed her Master of Economics and Public Policy at Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. She earned a Fulbright scholarship to complete her PhD in Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington. She works as a Professor at the School of Business of Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. She is member of the National System of Researchers in Mexico, level 1. Her research interests are gender, family, and wellbeing.
Jorge Moreno
Jorge Moreno obtained his Ph. D. and Masters degrees in Economics from the University of Chicago. He has been part of the faculty as Assistant and Associate Professor at El Colegio de México, the University of Chicago and Institutio Tecnológico Autónomo de México's Business School. He is currently Professor in the School of Economics of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. His research interests include: Human Capital Theory, Family Economics, Labor Economics, Education Economics, Microfoundations of the Financial System and Economic Development, and Banking Theory and Financial Intermediation.
Josue Salgado
Josué holds a BA in International Economics from the Autonomous University of Chihuahua (UACH), a Master in Economics from the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) and is currently studying the Ph.D in Economic Sciences at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León. He has worked in different companies and associations such as Telcel Corporative (Development Analyst), Profuturo Corporative (Savings for retirement), Economic Development Council of Chihuahua and the National Electoral Institute of Nuevo León respectively. He has published articles related to strategy and innovation. His current interests are focused on Macroeconomics, time series and business cycle.
Juan Valdez
Juán has a Bachelor’s degree in physics and is currently a graduate student at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León studying a Master’s degree in industrial economics. His areas of interest are finanacial economics and industrial organization.
Leidy Andrade
I am currently studying for a doctorate in regional economics at the Center for Socioeconomic Research (CISE) of the Autonomous University of Coahuila. My thesis project is oriented to the analysis of inequality of opportunities especially in the area of housing quality in Mexico. Currently I am expanding my field of action focusing on the topic of networks, communities and the impact of culture on personal development.
Lizette Serna
Development professional currently enrolled in Economics master. I have 6 years of experience in International Organizations and Research Centers both as researcher and grant management (mainly in agriculture and development topics). In the private sector I have 4 years of experience in an agricultural enterprise.
Martha Rodríguez
Martha received her Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Master of Business Administration with a specialty in Finance from the School of Business of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (UANL). A Doctorate in Mathematical Methods in Financial Economics from the University of Barcelona. She is member of the National System of Researchers in Mexico, level 1. Her research interests are Corporate Social Responsibility and Eco-efficiency in Finance. She has recently been interested in Big Data, Data Science and their impact in the financial performance.
Matías Milia
Matías Milia is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Science Research with a mention in Sociology at FLACSO-México. His dissertation takes a semantic-statistical approach to different text sources such as scientific papers, written media, and Congress debates in order to see how technical debates and social expectations on renewable energy have developed through time in two Latin-American countries, México and Argentina. Since memory and present are inextricably bound to futurity, he follows concepts as a way to see how this horizon ties to national visions and imaginaries. He has worked and lived in three different Latin-American countries, so he is keen on using computational social methods to better understand the region, its history, and the way it stands towards the Grand Challenges of our time.
Mauricio Acosta
My name is Mauricio Acosta. I'm currently studying a Master Degree in Economics at Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. My fields of research are Industrial Organization and Applied Econometrics. I´m interested in statistical computing softwares and Big Data models. In the past, I've worked as a Master Planner for a company and as a Research Assistant at Universidad de Guadalajara.
Miriam Valdés
Computer Systems Engineer with Master and Phd degree in Regional Economics. Professor at Centro de Investigaciones Socioeconomicas, Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila. My research projects are directed toward regional economic analysis, combining different non-parametric techniques.
Monica Cardozo
Mónica Cardozo is a PhD student at the Department of Economics at Universidade Federal do Pará - Brasil. Currently, she is in an exchange program in México, at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. She is interested in Intraregional Trade and Industrial Economics. In addition, her research project is oriented to study the trade relationships between China and Latin-America using Panel Data Analysis.
Oscar Almendárez
Oscar Almendárez is a PhD student in Economoics at Autonomous University of Nuevo León. He received his master's degree in Applied Economics from the College of the Northern Border at Tijuana. His main fields of research are Industrial Organization and Labor Economics. His current work focuses on competition in the financial sector, social security and labor market structure. He has a deep interest in the acquisition of computational techniques for the adaptation of economic models to diverse fields of research.
Phelipe Matos
My name is Phelipe André Matos Cruz, I am a Brazilian PhD student in Economics at Universidade Federal do Pará. I'm intereted in gaining a better perspective for my research through computational techniques, especially those related to Social Network Analysis (SNA). My current work focuses on the Brasilian Innovation System. I intend to analyse the Brasilian Triple Helix Model through the productivity of the relationships between its companies and universities.
Edgar Luna
Edgar is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Monterrey, México. He obtained his Ph. D. degree in Economics from the University of Washington, Seattle. His research interests include: Times Series, Applied Macroeconomics, and Public Finance.University of Bamberg
All Participants
Julian Hohner
Julian Hohner is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Bamberg University. He also works in the Management of the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences and is particular interested in machine learning, quantitative text analysis, inferential statistics as well as populist, party and governmental behaviour studies. Moreover, Julian is participating as Teaching Assistant of the ECPR Winter/Summer Schools on a regular basis.
Thomas Saalfeld
Thomas Saalfeld is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bamberg and Director of the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences. Prior to joining Bamberg in 2009, he held research and teaching positions at the Universities of the German Federal Armed Forces Munich, Hull, Dresden, Kent and Bamberg. He was Member of the Council of the German Political Science Association from 2015 to 2016 and joined the Executive Committee of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in 2018. Since 2015 he has been the local organizer of the ECPR Winter School in Methods and Techniques. He has a particular interest in text-as-data applied to legislative studies.
Carsten Schwemmer
Carsten Schwemmer is currently finishing a PhD in Sociology at Bamberg University, Germany. His research focuses on computational methods for the study of ethnic minorities and social media communication. Carsten is particularly interested in natural language processing, data mining and software development. He gave courses on computational social science at University of Bamberg, University of Constance and Humboldt University of Berlin.
Andreas Jungherr
Andreas Jungherr is a Juniorprofessor (Assistant Professor) for Social Science Data Collection and Analysis at the University of Konstanz. He studies the impact of digital media on politics and society. He has worked on the uses of digital media and technology by publics, political actors, and organizations in international comparison. He also addresses challenges for scientific research in reaction to digital change in order to realize opportunities emerging from new data sources and analytical approaches. In this, he has focused on harnessing the potential of digital methods and computational social science while addressing methodological challenges in its integration into the social sciences. Depending on the object under study, he also uses traditional quantitative and qualitative empirical approaches. Currently, he is lead investigator of 'Communicative Power in Hybrid Media Systems', a project financed by the Volkswagen Stiftung (2017-2020). The interdisciplinary project, featuring computer and information scientists, focuses on the interconnection between political coverage in legacy, online media, and political talk on online platforms in Germany, UK, USA, and South Korea.
Fariba Karimi
Fariba Karimi is a researcher at the Department of Computational Social Science at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. She received her PhD in Physics with specialization in network science. Her current research focuses on computational approaches for addressing societal challenges such as gender inequality, bias in algorithms and sampling hard-to-reach groups and minorities. Her main expertise is analyzing large-scale socio-technical systems using network theory and data analysis.
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is associate professor of social demography and fellow of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She completed her DPhil in Sociology jointly affiliated with the University of Oxford and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Her research spans a number of substantive areas in demography and sociology, including gender, mortality and health, the diversification of family forms, and ethnicity and migration. Her work has sought to adopt computational innovations both in terms of modelling approaches such as agent-based models and digital trace data from web and social media platforms to study social and demographic processes. She is currently leading a Data2X and UN Foundation supported project that uses big data from the web, in particular large-scale online advertising data that provide information on the aggregate numbers of users of online platforms by demographic characteristics, to measure sustainable development and gender inequality indicators.
Oliver Posegga
Oliver Posegga is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Systems and Social Networks at the University of Bamberg, an affiliate of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a principal investigator of the project 'Communicative Power in Hybrid Media Systems', funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. His research focuses on understanding the collective dynamics of digitally enabled networks, such as collective behavior and intelligence in organizational and societal settings, and touches a variety of topics, such as the dynamics of social networks, crisis management, crowdsourcing, data- and information quality, and discursive power in contemporary media systems.
Martijn Schoonvelde
Martijn Schoonvelde is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at University College Dublin. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of Exeter and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. In his work, he analyzes the rhetoric of politicians. Is this rhetoric driven by strategy, ideology or aspects of their personality? Do they shift blame to others when topics are sensitive with the public? And when do they use emotional appeals? More broadly, his interests include political communication, EU politics, computational social science, and text as data.
Milena Tsvetkova
Milena Tsvetkova is Assistant Professor at the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to that, she was Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Cornell University, where she worked with Michael Macy. Her interests reside in the field of computational social science. In her research, she uses large-scale web-based social interaction experiments, network analysis of online data, and agent-based modeling to investigate fundamental social phenomena such as cooperation, social contagion, segregation, and inequality.
Alexander Brand
I am a master student in the field of sociology at the University of Bamberg. My research focuses on applying computational methods for the studies of dynamic systems. I’m particularly interested in agent- based modeling, social network analysis and non-linear effects. I presented part of my research at the Historical network research conference last year and at the Studentischer Soziologiekongress 2017 in Chemnitz.
Endre Borbáth
Endre Borbáth is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair for Political Sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin, and at the Center for Civil Society Research at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. His research concerns party competition and protest politics in a comparative, European perspective. He tweets @eborbath.
Meng Chen
Meng Chen is an Assistant Professor in Communication at Webster University, Vienna. She is interested in utilizing computational analysis to explore the interactions among linguistic features of cancer patients’ online posts, their personal network structures, and social capital flow on social support platforms. Before coming to Vienna, she completed a PhD in Communication at University of California, Davis.
Lea Cohausz
I am currently pursuing a MSc in Data Science and a MA in Sociology from the University of Mannheim. I am interested in combining methodologies from the fields of computer science and social science in particular regarding Big Data, network analysis, and agent based modeling. My main focus lies on getting a better understanding of the micro-macro-link of various social science problems.
Jannis Denecke
Jannis Denecke is currently pursuing a master’s degree in psychology, as well as in social and economic data science at the University of Konstanz. He holds a B.Sc. in Psychology. His interests lie within the field of cognitive psychology and research methods. Especially modelling aspects and memory, with a focus on neurodegenerative processes are of special interest to him. His current research project focuses on interference with and protection of memoranda in short term memory.
Nourhan Elsayed
Nourhan Elsayed is a MA student at the University of Mannheim’s Political Science department. Her research interests include authoritarian regimes, migration and refugees, the politics of the far right and the role of emotions in politics. She is equally interested in how research can drive political and social change. Nourhan received her BS in international politics from Georgetown University.
Susanne Freund
Susanne Freund just finished her PhD in social and organizational psychology at the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (KU). Her main research interests concern prosocial behavior, social justice, communication and conflicts, organizational development, innovative communities, evaluation methods as well as impact research. She has worked in and managed serveral research projects concerning these topics. Additionally, she lectures in social psychology and research methods at the KU.
Johannes Geiger
Johannes is a master's student at the University of Essex and the University of Bamberg, where he is pursuing a degree in conflict resolution and political science. His main interest lies in cybersecurity and how governments respond to the emerging threat of high-level cyber attacks. In his master's thesis, he is exploring potential macro-level determinants of interstate cyber disputes and their connection with the onset of more traditional types of warfare.
Leonie Geyer
Leonie Geyer currently is an MA student of Political Science at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg (2017-2019). Before that, she did her undergraduate studies in Political Science and Historical Studies at the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz (2014-2017). Her core academic interests lie in analytical political philosophy and ethics, game theory and computational analysis.
Florian Gilberg
Florian Gilberg is completing his MA in Political Management, Public Policy and Public Administration at the NRW School of Governance in Duisburg, Germany. As a research assistant for Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte, he works in the field of corpus linguistics and text mining. He is broadly interested in data and network visualization, as well as political communication and healthcare management.
Andrea Hasenkopf
Andrea is a research assistant and a PhD candidate in International Relations at the University of Bamberg, Germany. Her primary research interest concerns the evolution of institutional complexes and their consequences on international governance. She has a keen interest in exploring how big data and computational social science can be used to advance the study of international politics in general and of inter-organizational networks in particular. She is also broadly interested in political sociology, social media, and computational analysis.
Sophie Horneber
Sophie is completing her master's degree at the University of Mannheim. Her primary research interests concern survey design and methodology with a special focus on survey experiments and response biases. She is also broadly interested in political sociology, development research, experimental designs and causal analysis. Sophie holds a bachelor's degree in Sociology with a minor in methods of empirical social research from the University of Bamberg. She has been working as research assistant at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories and Kantar Public and was supervisor of the fieldwork in Uganda for the German Institute for Economic Research. At the moment, she is working as research assistant in the department of Cross-Cultural Surveys at GESIS Mannheim.Manuel Kleinert
Manuel Kleinert is a PhD candidate at the department of Sociology at Giessen University. His research focuses on integrating theories and applying diverse methods of CSS in multilevel and longitudinal contexts in order to generate new insights on causes and effects of group-based values and attitudes. Manuel holds a Bachelor and Master Degree in Political Science from the University of Bamberg.
Marc Luettecke
Marc Luettecke is a Master's student in Social and Economic Data Science at the University of Konstanz. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Finance from Loyola University New Orleans and a Master's degree in Finance from the University of Texas (Austin). His preferred research interest lays with individual and group decision behavior, for which he currently learns techniques from the realm of Deep Learning and financial risk behavior for current class and research projects. His past endevaors include positions as a financial consultant and social involvement for housing projects in the Austin area.
Daniel Mayerhoffer
Daniel Mayerhoffer is a PhD candidate at the chair for Political Theory, University of Bamberg and an M.A. student in Ethics of Textual Cultures at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. He received his B.A. in Philosophy & Economics from University of Bayreuth, an M.A. in Political Science from University of Bamberg and an M.Sc. in Social Research Methods from University of Surrey. Daniel develops agent based computational simulation models to understand and explain social, political and economic phenomena.
Muhammad Quasim Pasta
Qasim Pasta is Assistant Professor at Usman Institute of Technology. He recently received his Ph.D. (Network Science) from PAF-KIET, Pakistan. His recent work contributes to the development of network models enabling the embedding of ground-truth community structures. He is also leading an interdisciplinary research project SPLOP (Socio-Political Landscape of Pakistan) to analyze the usage of social media in the context of general and political conversation by people of different regions of Pakistan.
Liane Rothenberger
Liane Rothenberger is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Media and Communication Science at Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany. Her research focuses on journalism and communication in an intercultural perspective, norms and values in communication studies and in the social sciences, and crisis communication.
Lucas Sage
Lucas Sage is a Ph.D. student in sociology at Sorbonne University and at the University of Trento. In his dissertation, he analyzes the causes of wage inequality between observably similar workers (within group wage inequality). He is also interested in the interplays between residential and school segregation dynamics. His research relies on econometric methods and agent based models. He was previously a student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris-Saclay and he holds a M.Phil in Sociology (Sorbonne University), and a MSc. in Applied Economics (Panthéon-Sorbonne University).
Christopher Schmidt
Currently: MSc Computing in the Humanities. Before: BA Sociology & Psychology. Python, R, NLP, Knowledge Graphs, Understanding & Visualizing Data.
Indira Sen
Indira is a first year doctoral researcher in GESIS, Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences, Cologne. Her interest lies in understanding biases in inferential studies from digital traces, with a focus on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Before, GESIS, Indira completed her Bachelors and Master's in India and has interned at NTU, Singapore and EPFL, Switzerland.
Stephan Simon
Stephan Simon is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Chair of Political Sociology at the University of Bamberg. He holds an MA in Social Sciences from the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on how different types of immigration policies affect immigrant integration outcomes, and citizens’ views toward the political system. He is interested in applying computational social science methods to examine how social media use shapes citizens’ views toward immigration and democracy.
Aleksandra Urman
Aleksandra is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies, University of Bern, Switzerland. She focuses on political communication online and actively uses computational methods in her research. Aleksandra is particularly interested in news consumption on social media platforms, the role of social media in authoritarian regimes, algorithmic personalization, and polarization online. She also teaches social media analysis with R.
Franziska Weeber
Franziska Weeber is currently pursuing her MSc in Social and Economic Data Science at the University of Konstanz. Her research interests include spatial aspects of inequality with a focus on gentrification and social segregation as well as spatial interaction in both small and large scale contexts. She is also interested in data retrieval using computational methods such as web scraping. Franziska holds a BA in sociology with a minor in computer science from the University of Konstanz. During her Bachelor, she completed an internship and a freelance contract for the Federal Statistical Office of Germany.
Jonas Reissmann
Jonas Reissmann is a Master’s student in Survey Statistics at the University of Bamberg and holds a BA in Political Science from the same institution. He is particularly interested in R programming, quantitative modelling and the field of interest group research. Jonas has gained experience as a teaching assistant for statistics and R on various occasions both at the university and at the ECPR Winter School in Methods and Techniques.University of California at Los Angeles
All Participants
Friedolin Merhout
Friedolin Merhout is a doctoral student in the Duke Sociology department. He enjoys exploring how computational methods provide a new lens to view longstanding social science debates, and pondering the potential inherent in the wealth of digital trace data. Before starting the doctoral program at Duke, he earned a BA from Freie Universitaet in his hometown Berlin.
Alina Arseniev-Koehler
Alina Arseniev-Koehler is currently a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles pursuing a PhD in Sociology. Substantively, her research interests include culture, cognitive sociology, language, and health and illness. Methodologically, she is interested in computational social science and machine-learning, with a focus on the computational analysis of language. Her Master’s research aimed to provide a cognitively plausible, computational account of the schemata activated by news reporting on obesity. Alina also enjoys learning and teaching new computational techniques and helps coordinate the Computational Sociology Working Group at UCLA.
Jennie E. Brand
Jennie E. Brand is Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is Director of the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) and Co-Director of the Center for Social Statistics (CSS) at UCLA. She is Chair-Elect of the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and an elected Board Member of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committte on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28). Prof. Brand is a member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey (GSS) and a member of the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She received the ASA Methodology Leo Goodman Mid-Career Award in 2016, and honorable mention for the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility William Julius Wilson Mid-Career Award in 2014. Prof. Brand studies social stratification and inequality, mobility, social demography, education, and methods for causal inference.
Pablo Geraldo Bastías
Pablo Geraldo Bastías is a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) affiliated to the California Center for Population Research (CCPR). His research examines how institutions influence inequality in education and the labor market, with a particular focus on skill formation systems and school-to-work transitions. He is interested in the intersection of causality, machine learning, and network analysis.
Bernard Koch
Bernard is a sociology graduate student at UCLA. He developed research interests in culture, science, and computational methods through previous experiences in comparative genomics/bioinformatics and science education research. His master's thesis adapted models from macroevolutionary biology to explain the historical trajectories of cultural populations like music genres, scientific fields, and industries. For his dissertation, he'd like to focus on how deep learning can be applied to network and causal inference problems to help identify how we can make science more efficient, productive, and equitable. Bernard is passionate about collaborative science and teaching, and has given workshops on programming, machine learning, and/or computational social science for the National Human Genome Research Institute (NIH), the UCLA Library, and the UCLA Sociology Department.
Tim Dennis
Tim Dennis is the Director of the UCLA Library Data Science Center where he provides data science support, including instruction, one-on-one consulting, and community building. He is a regular user of R, Python, SQL and command-line tools and has extensive experience helping researchers and students with these tools. He's also an instructor with The Carpentries, a global volunteer run educational community that teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers.
Dennis Feehan
Dennis Feehan is a demographer and quantitative social scientist whose research interests lie at the intersection of networks, demography, and quantitative methodology. He is an Assistant Professor of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the demography department at Berkeley, he received his Ph.D. at Princeton’s Office of Population Research and worked as a Research Scientist at Facebook.
Erin Hartman
Erin Hartman is an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Political Science at UCLA. Her recent research focuses on creating new methods–including both theoretical approaches and new estimation strategies–for identifying and validating causal effects. She also studies survey design methodologies, including a new survey sampling method that reduces reliance on post hoc weighting methods and alleviates non-response bias, and an automated raking methodology that selects the optimal auxiliary vector on which to weight.
Jungseock Joo
Jungseock Joo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received is Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 2015 and worked as a Research Scientist at Facebook before returning to UCLA to join the Department of Communication.
Ka-Yuet Liu
Ka-Yuet Liu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, UCLA, whose research mostly focuses on the intersections between social network analysis and social epidemiology. She received her D.Phil. (Sociology) in 2008 from the University of Oxford and completed a post-doc at Columbia University before joining UCLA as a faculty member in 2012.
Judea Pearl
Judea Pearl is a computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks. He is credited for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models. He is the 2011 winner of the ACM Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science.
Sam Pimentel
Sam Pimentel is an Assistant Professor in the Statistics Department at UC Berkeley. His research centers on methodology for causal inference in observational studies. He develops new ways to form matched comparison groups in large observational datasets using approaches from discrete optimization. These tools allow transparent and interpretable inferences about the effects of interventions, and provide opportunities to study the impact of potential unobserved confounding variables. He is also interested in applying these methods in health services research, public policy, and the social sciences.
Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld
Zachary C. Steinert-Threlkeld is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. His research interests are at the border of international and comparative politics, exploiting in particular vast social media data to study subnational conflict. His current research focuses on the mobilization of mass protest during the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests, as well as elite behavior and state repression in authoritarian regimes.Live Stream and Lectures
Christ Bail, Justin Grimmer, Alondra Nelson, Beth Noveck, Matt Salganik, and Chris Wiggins
Caitlin Ahearn
Caitlin Ahearn is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the sources and consequences of inequality in educational attainment. For her master’s thesis she studied the sources of alignment of educational and career expectations among adolescents, and her dissertation will examine the effects of differential college experiences on the transition to adulthood. She is interested in applications of causal inference, particularly heterogeneity in causal effects and causal mediation analyses, using large-scale survey data. Caitlin is also an affiliate of the California Center for Population Research and a research assistant for the Los Angeles Education Research Institute.
Mohammad Atari
Mohammad is a Ph.D. student in social psychology at USC. He uses experimental, psychometric, and computational methods to study personality and morality. He takes an evolutionary perspective to examine cross-cultural differences and similarities in human behavior and its portrayal in social media.
Bonnie Bui
Bonnie Bui is a postdoctoral research fellow for the Center for Studies of Displaced Populations in the Department of Global Community Health & Behavioral Sciences at Tulane University’s School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine. Her interests are in population health and aging using social network analysis and demographic analytical methods. Her current work focuses on immigrant and refugee health, focusing on how displacement impacts health and well-being through disruption of personal social support networks.
Osman Celik
Osman Celik is pursuing Ph.D. in Political Science at UCLA. His research includes survey data, online political information, and voter behavior and currently focuses on explaining foreign policy change via political psychology of policy-makers and voters. He is using mixed methods - process tracing, textual analysis of foreign policy-makers' public speeches, and experimental survey of voters' perception of foreign policy - to study and explain foreign policy changes of emerging state actors in regional and global politics.
Kristine Chan
Kristine Chan is a social worker and a doctoral student in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Her research focuses on the juvenile justice system, particularly the experiences of juvenile reentry youth and factors related to recidivism and improving outcomes. She is interested in integrating technology in data collection and using programming to expand research methods.Catherine Choe
Catherine Choe is a 2nd year PhD student in Higher Education and Organizational Change at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Prior to the program, she received her master's degree in Educational Counseling from USC, as well as bachelor's degrees in English and Art History from UC Berkeley. Catherine currently works as a Counselor at El Camino College and as a College Academic Mentor at UCLA, and she has previously worked in first year experience programs, disability services, career centers, and writing centers at 2- and 4-year institutions. Catherine's research interests focus on organizational theory, community colleges, and faculty and administrators of postsecondary institutions.
Hanyu Chwe
Hanyu is an incoming second-year PhD student at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. He graduated with a degree in Economics and Political Science from Swarthmore College in 2016, and then worked for the Global Attitudes team at the Pew Research Center before starting his PhD. He is broadly interested in computational social science, natural language processing, and exploring the interdisciplinary nature of network science.Angela Clague
I am a second year Sociology PhD student interested in health trauma. In addition to my graduate studies, I also work as a Program Analyst the West LA VA Medical Center. Prior to coming to graduate school, I worked as a Research Assistant for two years at the RAND Corporation.
Sarah Cooney
Sarah Cooney is a second year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. Her research interest is in the intersection of technology and computing for social good.
Cody Couture
I am currently a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine pursuing a PhD in economics. Broadly speaking, my research investigates the interaction between monetary policy and financial markets. In my recent work, I have been examining the impact that central bank communication, particularly that of the Federal Reserve, has on market expectations. I hope to pursue future research using textual analysis in order to better quantify central bank communication and market feedback.
Aline Duarte Folle
Aline is currently a PhD candidate in Epidemiology, studying potential causes and effects of sleep problems in Parkinson's disease. She is from Brazil, where she was a local pharmacist working and researching in the area of Pharmaceutical Services within different levels of care of the Brazilian Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde - SUS). Her research interests lie in evaluating general risks factors and promoters of health, focusing on the older adult population, with the goal of improving health indicators within this group.
Mai ElSherief
Mai ElSherief is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate at the Computer Science department at UC, Santa Barbara within the Mobility Management and Networking (MOMENT) Lab, advised by Elizabeth Belding and William Wang. Her research interests lie in the intersection of Social Computing, Natural Language Processing, and Online Social Networks, specifically causes of social good. Her Ph.D. thesis focuses on developing computational methods for improving the detection and characterization of online hate speech and communities of hate in addition to characterizing offline street harassment and online anti-gender-based violence social movements. She has been a summer research intern at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University understanding anti-immigration sentiment and the discursive practices of online hate groups. She was awarded the 2017 Fiona and Michael Goodchild Graduate mentoring award for her distinguished research mentoring of undergraduate students. Prior to entering the field of Social Computing, she earned her M.Sc. in the area of Wireless Communication and Information Technology from Nile University, Egypt. Funded by a Google Research Award, she devised novel Information-theoretic models for Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks. She is the recipient of both the IEEE best project award for the Cairo University Student Branch (CUSB) and the Ideal student award for Cairo University in 2009.
Ross Graham
Ross Graham is a first year PhD student in sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Before attending UCSD, he completed a BA in anthropology from Durham University, an MS in sustainability studies from Lipscomb University, and worked as a researcher in the Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. His research interests span the sociology of science and technology, ethics, intelligence and cognition, big data and existential risk.
Wanyang Hu
Wanyang Hu is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration (tenure track) at the University of Macau. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California Los Angeles in 2018, a M.S. and a B.E. from Tsinghua University in 2013 and 2010, and a B.A. in Economics from Peking University in 2012 (double major degree). Her research focuses on urban and regional development, particularly the intersection between urban policy, labor mobility, and economic development. She also works on housing market analysis and housing policy. She is a quantitative researcher with extensive experience in large-data set computing. She is especially interested in spatial econometrics, discrete choice modelling, models with latent variables and causal inference.
Ryan Hyon
Ryan is an incoming PhD student in UCLA's Psychology program. He received his BA in Neuroscience at Dartmouth College and has spent the past two years as a research associate in Dr. Carolyn Parkinson's Computational Social Neuroscience Lab. Broadly, he integrates neuroimaging and social network analysis to study how we shape and are shaped by the social networks that we inhabit. His recent work has involved using machine learning to identify multivariate signatures of neural activity across the brain that are predictive of individuals' real-world social network characteristics. He is also interested in studying how individual differences in the use of language and in interpretations of narratives may relate to meaningful individual differences in neural activity and social network position. Ryan is particularly excited to learn about text analysis!
Linle Jiang
I am a first-year PhD student in the Social Psychology Program at USC. I am interested in using computational methods to systematically investigate and model the effects of individual and contextual factors on human decision-making processes and behaviors, based on the natural data collected from social media.
Jay Kao
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. My research interests include politics in authoritarian regimes, disinformation, political communication, Chinese politics, causal inference, as well as political economy of development.
Alexander Kwako
As a third year PhD student in education, I am broadly interested in social research methodology and how research can be used to understand and improve educational systems, particularly for underrepresented and marginalized students. Currently, at UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, I am analyzing a national survey of high school principals' civic leadership beliefs and practices. One civic leadership practice that we are examining is principals’ school-wide communication of racial and religious tolerance, and what leverage points exist for supporting this kind of communication at public high schools.
Tianjian Lai
I am a 3rd year PhD student in sociology at UCLA interested in examining the stratifying effects of immigration policy, in particular legal status categories, on the social, economic, and political lives of immigrants and their children. My MA thesis examined how legal status shapes the civic participation of Latino immigrants in Los Angeles. I hope to apply computational methods to impute legal status when such measures are not fully available, gain familiarity with new data sources and data collection methods, and disentangle the causal effects of legal status acquisition.
Jihye Lee
Jihye Lee graduated from Yonsei university with a double major in computer industrial engineering and psychology. After graduating from Yonsei university, she received an M.A. in criminal justice at SUNY-Albany. Her research interests are family and child development, social network, and criminology. Prior to her admission to the USC, her academic work focused on criminal justice issues and appeared in academic journals such as the International Criminal Justice Review and Criminal Law Bulletin. Her master’s thesis in Sociology examines how U.S. family values embedded in non-immigration policies (re)shape the lives of spouses of international students from gender and social class perspectives. Her dissertation focuses on U.S. adolescents’ friendship networks and the effects of their friendship networks on educational inequality and behaviors.
Joyce Lui
Joyce Lui is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. She received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Washington State University. Joyce's research has focused on the precipitating factors, correlates, and outcomes of youth with conduct problems and psychopathic traits. She is extending this research to focus on optimizing the provision and coordination of evidence-based mental health services for youth with persistent conduct problems.
Jinwen Luo
Jinwen is a first-year Ph.D. student studying advanced quantitative methods at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies (GSE&IS) of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is interested in learning behaviors and how they impact students' learning outcomes under the schooling contexts. His current research includes jointly modeling different measurements of human abilities and the skills in schools. The techniques he is using include item response theory (IRT) models, network analysis, cross-classified models.
Patricia Martin
Patricia Martin is a current graduate student at UCLA in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in the Higher Education and Organizational Change program. Her research interests broadly include college access, organizational behavior, and university admissions and recruitment practices. Specifically, her research examines the unequal university recruitment practices that disproportionately create barriers to college access for underrepresented students. She is interested in using mixed-methodology including ethnography, geospatial analysis, and machine learning.
Oscar Mayorga
Prior to his graduate studies at UCLA, he has worked in various capacities in higher education institutions for the last fifteen years in the Northeast, where he was the director of a cross-cultural center and chief diversity officer. Oscar is earning his Ph.D. in Sociology with subfield specialty in race and ethinicty, economic sociology and quantitative methods. His focus is on identifying the social mechanism by which racial ideologies are embedded in markets and perceptions of the economy, at large.
Galen Murray
I’m interested in how corruption and criminal elements impede (or facilitate) public service delivery. My dissertation uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal impact of 'criminal' politicians on the delivery of state resources to citizens in India. To flesh out how local politicians influence benefit delivery, I study the geospatial distribution of the world's largest welfare program (NREGS in India). Specifically, I'm interested in how local politicians target their supporters by mapping the location of 20 million welfare projects to micro-levels of political support (estimated from polling station level results). I complement this quantitative research with over 12 months of on the ground interviews, with politicians, activists and local leaders in Bihar, India. Quantitatively, I’m interested in causal inference using observational data.
Kaye Nantah
Kaye Nantah is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. She is interested in the expression and formation of racial-ethnic identities, especially among second-generation immigrants. Having double majored in psychology and sociology at the University of Houston, she hopes to blend elements of demography, cultural sociology, and social psychology as well as to work at the junction between the race and immigration literatures.
Gwen Price
Gwen Price is a 3rd year doctoral student in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on language acquisition in infancy and childhood. In particular, she is interested in the effect that learning tools like comparison, contrast, and spacing have on children’s ability to construct categories, learn labels for them, and remember them for a lifetime.
Alejandra Regla-Vargas
Alejandra Regla-Vargas is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her broad research interests are in social movements, immigration, and digital sociology. Prior to her graduate studies, she received a B.A. in Chicana/o Studies from California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Julius Rüschenpöhler
Julius is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in Economics from Tilburg University and was a visiting research student at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in Jakarta, Indonesia. Julius' work lies at the intersection of Development and Behavioural Economics. He is interested in the psychology of poverty, individual decision-making, culture and identity economics, as well as work on the deep roots of development. In his research, Julius' has worked with micro- and small enterprises in Indonesia and Vietnam and on peer learning, aspirations, small-business growth, and business practices.
Pietro Spini
I'm an Italian student pursuing a PhD in Econometrics at UCSD. After getting my bachelor in Italy, I obtained a Masters in Economics from Cornell University. In my current research I focus on robustness procedures for the estimation of causal effects when identifying assumptions are doubted. In my applied work, I am interested in coupling data and nonparametric methods to inform effective policy making in public health. Lately, I have been curious to learn more about how price transparency in the health sector effects consumers' choice of provider. In my spare time I enjoy reading, chatting about math and philosophy and practicing martial arts.
Carmella N. Stoddard
Carmella is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Her interests include social networks, computational methods, culture, social psychology, and sociological theory. Her dissertation examines normative behavioral constraints as scope conditions of romantic and sexual relationship networks. Using Add Health and an original dataset of celebrity dating ties, she explores structural interactions between norms of partner selection and network processes such as homophily and multiplexity. Carmella holds a B.A. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and an M.A. in Communication from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
John Sullivan
John Sullivan is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at UCLA. He is also the Administrator of the UCLA branch of the US Census Bureau’s Federal Statistical Research Data Center network. His research focuses on segregation, residential mobility and neighborhood change. He is particularly interested in how individual age and population age distribution contour these phenomena. His recent work uses longitudinal data on the age distribution of American neighborhoods to identify patterns of population succession. With federal and academic collaborators, he also uses large volumes of linked administrative and census data to study the lasting effects of Hurricane Katrina on the mortality and residential trajectories of New Orleans residents.
Jacob Thomas
In terms of substance, my dissertation—“The Denied, the Deterred, and the Disenchanted: The Variety of Individuals that Do Not Travel or Migrate Abroad and Why” examines why more people do not travel or into the US. In terms of method, I am building and analyzing the first large scale individual-level survey dataset about three different types of individuals in China that do not travel or immigrate into the US--those that are denied visas, those that are deterred from applying for visas and going abroad, and ex-immigrants that previously intended to immigrate but then later change their mind and return. In terms of theory, I aim to draw on this data to better understand what we already know about immigrants and contribute new insights to longstanding perennial questions about migrant selectivity, state capacity to control migration and the relationship between social stratification/mobility/inequality and international migration and travel.
Burrel Vann Jr
Burrel Vann Jr is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at San Diego State University. His work tackles questions central to cultural and political change: how agents-of-change shift dominant perceptions of contested issues, and how policymakers and the general public respond to these attempts. This work includes investigations of politics, drugs, crime, and social movements using quantitative and computational methods. Prior to joining SDSU, in 2019, he completed his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine.
Rachelle Wang-Cendejas
Rachelle Wang-Cendejas is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on Family Sociology, Military Economics, and Social Stratification. Working as a research technician at a Federal Statistical Research Data Center, she has analyzed the migration patterns and associated socioeconomic outcomes of indigenous people in rural Alaska. Currently, Rachelle is completing her doctoral dissertation, studying U.S. military personnel’s long-term education and employment patterns. Based on sequence analysis and clustering solution, she examines and evaluates how individual social correlates are associated with different career pathways and corresponding life-course outcomes.
Zheng Yang
Dr. Zheng Yang is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She has a Ph.D. in Public Administration by North Carolina State University. Her research and teaching focuses on organizational theory and behavior, public and nonprofit management, social network governance, inter-organizational collaboration, performance management, as well as quantitative and qualitative research methods.
Hajar Yazdiha
Hajar Yazdiha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Southern California and a faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration. Her research is centered on explaining the mechanisms underlying the politics of inclusion and exclusion, using mixed methods to examine why different ethnoracial groups perceive exclusion and strategize against inequality in particular ways. Through previous research projects, she has examined how macro-structures like immigrant integration policies, proposed legislation, and news media produce exclusionary conditions, as well as how targeted groups perceive and organize through micro-processes of meaning-making. In a new stream of research, she is interested in using digital trace data to examine the relationship between political culture and individual life outcomes, connecting political and cultural theory to demographic analysis.
Ang Yu
Ang Yu recently graduated from Stanford University with a master's degree in East Asian Studies. In September, he is heading to University of Wisconsin, Madison to start his PhD in sociology. Ang is broadly interested in social inequalities and quantitative methodology. His master's thesis probes the impact of parental wealth on the interdependent timings of young people's financial independence and housing attainment. He also has some ongoing projects related to educational inequality at their preliminary stages.
Yawen Yu
Yawen Yu is a PhD student in the Department of Education, University of California, Los Angeles, in the division of Human Development and Psychology. Her research interest is primarily in language development, more specifically, understanding the role of environmental factors in early language and bilingual language development. Prior to coming to UCLA, Yawen received a M.A. in Humanities Study from the University of Chicago, a B.A. in Philosophy from Zhejiang Gongshang University, China.
Weijun Yuan
Weijun Yuan is a PhD student in Sociology at UC Irvine. Her research interests are political sociology, media, and urban sociology. Her research examines how state actions shape social movements in the digital age and how information proliferation influences the state's ability to conduct surveillance. She relies on computational text analysis, statistical methods, and ethnographic work to answer these questions. As for computational methods, she is especially interested in exploring tools to detect and retrieve protest events using media data. Before starting the doctoral program, she earned a BA from Tsinghua University (Beijing) and an MA from UC San Diego.
Boxiao Zhang
My research interest is Economic History, Urban Economics and Applied Econometrics. The research projects I am working on is focusing on long-term social mobility, modern education’s development and its impact on human capital accumulation and economic development.
University of Cape Town
All Participants
Vissého Adjiwanou
Vissého Adjiwanou is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Demography and Quantitative Methods at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), Associate Professor in Sociologie (Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM, Canada). His research interests include maternal and reproductive health, family dynamics, and female employment in sub-Saharan Africa. Vissého is the chair of the Panel on Computational Social Science at the Union for African Population Studies (UAPS).
Tom Moultrie
Tom Moultrie is Professor of demography, and Director of the Centre for Actuarial Research (CARe) at the University of Cape Town. His interests lie in the technical measurement and sociology of fertility in sub-Saharan Africa, and the sociology of demographic measurement. He holds a BBusSc (Actuarial Science) from UCT, a MSc (Development Studies) from the LSE, and a PhD from LSHTM.
Megan Bruwer
Megan Bruwer is a transportation engineer with a background in civil engineering. She joined the Civil Engineering Department of Stellenbosch University in 2015 as a lecturer and project coordinator of the Stellenbosch Smart Mobility Laboratory (SSML) researching ITS solutions for developing countries. Prior to joining Stellenbosch University, Megan worked as a transport engineering consultant, involved in the implementation and operational design of public transport systems and road based traffic accommodation for new developments. Her research interests include traffic flow theory and the application of Intelligent Transport Systems to improve traffic data collection for transport planning and traffic management. She is currently completing a PhD in this field.
Marshini Chetty
Marshini Chetty will be joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago in August 2019. She specializes in human-computer interaction, usable security, and ubiquitous computing. Marshini designs, implements, and evaluates technologies to help users manage different aspects of Internet use from privacy and security to performance, and costs. She often works in resource-constrained settings and uses her work to help inform Internet policy. She has a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA and a Masters and Bachelors in Computer Science from University of Cape Town, South Africa. Marshini is currently a research scholar in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University and prior to that, she was an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work has won best paper awards at CHI and CSCW and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Security Agency, Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, and multiple Google Faculty Research Awards.
Nick Feamster
As of July 2019, Nick Feamster is Neubauer Professor of Computer Science and the Director of Center for Data and Computation (CDAC) at the University of Chicago. Previously, he was a full professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, where he directed the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP); prior to Princeton, he was a full professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, with a focus on network operations, network security, and censorship-resistant communication systems. He received his Ph.D. in Computer science from MIT in 2005, and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. He was an early-stage employee at Looksmart (acquired by AltaVista), where he wrote the company's first web crawler; and at Damballa, where he helped design the company's first botnet-detection algorithm.
Kyle Finlay
Kyle runs an international data science team for a large market research firm. His team focuses on R&D, including in areas such as networks and NLP. In his spare time, he maintains a blog that applies a computational social science lens to understanding South African politics on social media.
Vukosi Marivate
Vukosi Marivate holds a PhD in Computer Science (Rutgers University, as a Fulbright Scholar). He is a senior Data Scientist and acting research group leader for Data Science at the CSIR, focusing on creating/using Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence to extract insights from data to tackle societal challenges. Vukosi is an organiser of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning. He supervises postgraduate students and leads the CSIR’s Data Science student development program.
Hussein Suleman
Hussein Suleman is Head of Department and Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. Hussein's main research interests are in digital libraries, ICT4D, African language information retrieval, cultural heritage preservation, Internet technology and educational technology. He has in the past worked extensively on architecture and interoperability issues related to digital library systems, with a growing emphasis on the relationship between low resource conditions and such architectures.
Nyamador Komla David Adenyo
Nyamador Komla David Adenyo is a PhD candidate in Statistics and Probability, at the Institute of Mathematics and Physical Science , University of Abomey-Calavi (Benin). He got a Master degree in Statistics and Probability. His research interests is Dynamic Panel data models with interactive fixed effects.
Lateef Amusa
Lateef Amusa is a lecturer at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. He is currently rounding up his PhD programme in Applied Statistics at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. He holds a BSc (First class honours) and a master’s degree in Statistics from the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. His research interests include the use of Spatial and data mining models, big data analytic methods with application to social science, health and medicine.
Boladé Hamed Banougnin
Boladé is a demographer with work experience of about six years in design and data collection, data processing, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination. In 2012, he graduated from the Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques—a regional institute for population studies—of the University of Yaoundé (Cameroon). He is currently undertaking his Ph.D. study in Reproductive Health Science at the Panafrican University, Life and Earth Sciences Institute at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His past and ongoing projects examine the relationship between poverty and fertility, the fertility of migrants in urban areas, the stall in fertility decline in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has also been teaching a variety of courses in demography and statistics at the University of Parakou and Abomey-Calavi (Benin) since 2014. Prior to this position, he worked as an intern at the Benin national institute of statistics where he was involved in several population and development projects.
Garikayi Chemhaka
Garikayi Chemhaka is a lecturer at the University of Eswatini. His current research interests focuses on sexual and reproductive health, family formation and fertility. His broad interests are in traditional quantitative methods and use of online data. Garikayi holds a PhD from University of the Witwatersrand, an MPhil from UCT, and MSc from University of Zimbabwe (UZ) in Demography and Population Studies. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Statistics from UZ.
Fidelia Dake
Dr. Fidelia Dake is a Lecturer at the Regional Institute for Population Studies at the University of Ghana. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy and a Master of Philosophy in Population Studies. She also holds a Master of Science in Global Ageing and Policy and a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition and Food Science. Her research focuses broadly on health demography, public health, and international health and development. Her interests include nutrition and physical activity, obesity and non-communicable diseases, socio-environmental determinants of health, urban health, health statistics (including vital statistics), and health-financing, particularly, universal health coverage. Her current research examines transportation-related physical activity and the public health impacts of physical inactivity.
Justin Dansou
Justin got a PhD degree in Reproductive Health from the Pan African University Institute for Life and Earth Sciences (PAULESI), located at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. Prior to his doctoral studies, he graduated with a master’s degree in Demography at the Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD) in Cameroon, and a Bachelor of Science degree in computing management at the Institut Universitaire de Technologie (IUT) of Université de Parakou in Benin. He worked as research assistant at the Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD). Currently, he gives lectures pertaining to demographic analysis at the École Nationale de la Statistique, de la Planification et de la Démographie (ENSPD) at the Université de Parakou. His research interest includes Population and Health; Reproductive Health including Maternal health and Child survival.
Dereje Danbe Debeko
Dereje Danbe Debeko is an assistant professor at Department of Statistics, Hawassa University. He had intensive research and teaching experience in last 11 years from where he was hired as graduate assistant at Aksum University in 2009. He has thought different practical and theoretical statistics courses for the last eleven years. Dereje have been involved and had good research experience in area of longitudinal data analysis. His research interest mainly focuses on modeling hierarchical and repeated observations trends in various fields of studies. Currently, Dereje is in the position of “Associate dean for research and technology transfer” at College of natural and computational sciences, Hawassa University.
Chodziwadziwa Whiteson Kabudula
Chodziwadziwa Whiteson Kabudula is a Senior Researcher and Head of Data and Analysis at the MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt), University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His research interest is on the application of demographic, statistical, computational and informatics techniques to investigate population-level morbidity, mortality and utilization of health services, and their social determinants in rural settings in Sub Saharan Africa.
Reesha Kara
Reesha Kara holds a Master's Degree in Population Studies from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and is in the final year of her PhD at Rhodes University. Her research focuses on marriage and childbearing among middle-aged women in South Africa. Using social statistics, Reesha's work identifies changes in trends of non-marital fertility among middle-aged women, key determinants of these trends and what these changes could possibly mean when focusing on the family as the basic building block of society. Reesha's research interests include family formation structures, gender dynamics within relationships, social statistical methodologies, adolescent fertility and safe sexual and reproductive behaviours. Reesha has completed a number of training courses in social statistical methods and aims to use her research to highlight the value and importance of using social statistics to understand complex social behaviour and phenomenon.
Caroline Kiarie
Caroline Kiarie is a PhD candidate at University of Kwazulu Natal in Durban, South Africa and a tutor fellow in the same institution. She holds a Masters in Science degree in Communication and Marketing from Franklin University in Ohio, USA. Her research interests include interpersonal communication, social media and social networks among employees. While in Kenya, she lectures corporate communication and public relations courses at Daystar University and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT). She specializes in corporate communication and public relations and has worked and trained with several organizations both in Kenya and USA.
Dagnon Eric Koba
Dagnon Eric Koba is a doctoral student at the Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD) at the University of Yaoundé II in Cameroon. With expertise in Demography, Digital demography and Social Statistics, his main research interests include, women’s reproductive health, gender inequality and migration.
Wim Louw
Wim Louw is a Senior Research Associate at J-PAL Africa. He works on randomized evaluations of signaling mechanisms in active labour markets, focusing on youth employment in Gauteng, South Africa. Before joining J-PAL, Wim worked as a researcher in the South African non-profit sector. Wim holds a master's degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science in social research methods, and from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in linguistics. Interests include: causal inference, metrics, political economy and governance, text analysis, applied machine learning for economics, reproducibility and open source development.
Katleho Makatjane
Katleho Makatjane is a PhD candidate in applied business statistics at the North West University Mafikeng campus South Africa and senior member of the South African Statistical Association (SAS) and certificated member of the Institute of Certificated and Chartered Statisticians of South Africa (ICCSSA). His research interests are focused on Financial forecasting, business analytic and risk analysis.
Kathryn McDermott
Kathryn is a Junior Research Fellow based at J-PAL Africa at the University of Cape Town. She has a Masters in Economics from Stellenbosch University. She does research about water and electricity use and household purchasing patterns. Her interests are in using non-traditional data for research and helping policy makers use administrative data to inform their policy decisions.
Elton Mukonda
Elton is currently a PhD student and Research Fellow in the Division of Epidemiology & Bio-statistics, University of Cape Town. He is a trained demographer and statistician with extensive experience in data management, statistical analysis and modelling. His research focuses on the use of simulation modelling to solve public health problems while his current work focuses on maternal and child health issues in the context of HIV and other co-morbidities. Other fields of interest include Bayesian Statistics, Simulation and Optimization, Decision Analytic, Modelling for Economic Evaluation, Statistical Learning, Big Data Analytics and Chronic Disease Monitoring.
Ronald Musizvingoza
Ronald Musizvingoza is a Social Scientist with a background in Sociology, Demography and Statistics. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Bursa Uludağ University in Turkey. He is working on the Social Determinants of Maternal Health in Zimbabwe. Furthermore, he received training in data analysis and demographic analysis. His research interests are sustainable development goals (gender, health and inequality), migration and ageing. He is also currently interested in exploring the use of big data to achieve SDGs, especially in developing countries.
Larissa Nawo
Larissa Nawo has just finished her Ph.D. in Applied Economy policy and Analysis at the University of Dschang, Cameroon. Currently, Larissa is a research fellow cohort 2019 at the Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces (STAARS) project of Cornell University. Her research interest is an intersection between development economics and data analysis studies, which include but not restricted to natural resources revenues management, behaviour sciences, impact evaluation techniques, computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling, computational social science methods, applied micro econometric and applied political economy. During her doctoral studies, she was a Ph.D. visiting fellow at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in Helsinki (Finland).
Sindiso Ndlovu
Sindiso Ndlovu is a doctoral candidate in Demography and Population studies at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. She hold a Masters and Honours degree in Health Demography and her research interests lie in the field of family and health demography with specific focus on fertility, child health and policy. Her PhD thesis focuses on the intersection of health and family demography in a SSA countries.
Baruwa Ololade
Baruwa Ololade is a doctoral student of Population and Health Studies at North West University Mafikeng, South Africa. Prior to this, he had completed his master’s Degree at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg South Africa. Beside his educational profile, he is also an associate researcher with the International Organisation for Migration/Wits School of Public Health. Baruwa have worked at various organizations and played active roles in dealing with interdisciplinary research projects such as social determinant of health, sexual and reproduction health, maternal and child health and HIV/AIDS among migrants among many others.
Douglas Parry
Douglas is a PhD candidate and junior lecturer at the Department of Information Science at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. As a member of the Cognition and Technology Research Group (CTRG) his research concerns the interplay between digital technologies, human cognition, behaviour, performance, and affective well-being across a variety of situations and contexts. He holds a bachelor’s degree majoring in Socio-Informatics and Economics, Honours and Master’s degrees in Socio-Informatics and is currently working towards a doctoral degree specifically focusing on media multitasking and cognitive control. The common thread across his projects rests on an interest in understanding how people use technology, how this use is shaped by personal, situational and societal factors and, in addition, how behaviour with technology shapes our personal, social, and working lives. He has experience with traditional, experimental and data-driven research projects across a variety of academic domains.
Arsene B. Sandie
Arsene B. Sandie is completing his Ph.D in Mathematics-Statistics at Pan African University at Nairobi. He had mixed academic background, which intersects within mathematics and computer science (Bsc), applied statistics (Msc) and demography studies (Msc). His current research is about developing statistical methods for the design and analysis of clinical trials. Nowadays, he is aspiring to capitalize his multidisciplinary background, the computational social science area is then a great and exciting opportunity for that purpose.
Patrick Tenga Shako
Patrick Tenga Shako is a Junior Lecturer/Teacher Assistant attached to the faculty of Computer sciences at the Nouveaux Horizons University and a candidate for a postgraduate degree at the University of Lubumbashi. Holder of an honour degree from the University of Lubumbashi and a master's degree from the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Senegal, he has developed a real interest for data sciences, numerical analysis and mathematical modelling. After attending schools on big data, computational neuroscience, he acquired a real passion for artificial intelligence (Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning). From this, he understood that one cannot do data analysis without understanding the domain in which these data belong. He expects to specialize in data science and mathematical modelling and plans to establish in the coming years an interdisciplinary research laboratory in data sciences in order to promote interaction and complementarity between different fields.
Henry Wandera
Henry Wandera is pursuing MIT in data science at University of Pretoria. He holds BSc Honours in Computer Science at University of Pretoria and BSc in Science Education at Busitema University - ganda. He is passionate about promoting technology usage in developing countries and applying data science for social good. His interests contribute to how policies may influence users’ perspectives and towards understanding the impact of policies on the use of technologies in educational context. In his MIT, he is applying machine learning algorithms to predict school performance in African countries (Sierra Leone, South Africa) using non-traditional data.
Chipo Zidana
Chipo Zidana holds a PhD in Statistics from Cukurova university, Turkey, which was funded by the Turkish Government. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the National University of science and Technology, Zimbabwe. She has published work in population health and her current research focuses on machine learning approach to problems in rural livelihoods and health.
Aldu Cornelissen
Aldu Cornelissen is a lecturer at the Department of Information Science at Stellenbosch University. He co-found the Computational Social Science group at Stellenbosch University, and is a member of the Centre of Artificial Intelligence (CAIR). The group’s research focuses on the impact of social media in society by investigating bot interference during political elections in Sub-Sahara Africa. Aldu specialises in Social Network Analysis, specifically individual and group social cognition.
Emmanuel Olamijuwon
Emmanuel Olamijuwon is a lecturer at the University of Eswatini, and a PhD candidate in demography and population studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His research uses social media, digital tools and also adapts computational approaches in helping adolescents and young African adults make better and informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health. Emmanuel also plays an active role in various interdisciplinary research projects many of which revolve around the social determinants of health, as well as sexual and reproductive health. He is the coordinator of SHYad.NETUniversity of Chicago
All Participants
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Northwestern University and a JD at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Her research focuses on investigating how the structure of data shapes research conclusions and broader sociological theory. Using machine learning methods, quantitative causal inference, and mapping techniques she primarily builds and analyzes large criminal justice datasets. She is especially concerned with the economics of fear, the working definition of homicide, and the general state of crime data. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota where she first began exploring the junction of computational methods and the social sciences.
Natalie Gallagher
Natalie Gallagher is doctoral student in psychology at Northwestern University. She is fascinated by the human ability to think about social phenomena that emerge from human interaction - social networks and social categories. Exploring these, her work lies at the intersection of social and cognitive research. She draws on psychological, sociological, and computational methods to pursue her questions, and is interested in how research can inform social change. Natalie received her BA in psychology and theater from Georgetown University, and has an MA in psychology from Northwestern.
Tina Law
Tina Law is a PhD student in sociology at Northwestern. Her research explores why we continue to live in unequal neighborhoods even as our cities are constantly changing. In particular, she uses computational methods and large-scale, digitized data from administrative systems and archival sources to understand how historical events shape contemporary neighborhood racial inequality. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She holds an MA in sociology from Yale.
Joshua Becker
Joshua Becker is a postdoctoral fellow with the Kellogg School of Management and the Northwestern Institute of Complex Systems. Their research on collective intelligence uses agent-based models, online experiments, and data science to examine how network dynamics shape group decisions. Joshua’s current research focuses on how communication networks can increase or decrease the accuracy of factual beliefs in areas such as financial forecasting, political beliefs, and medical diagnoses.
Sushmita Gopalan
Sushmita is a data scientist at the Northwestern Neighbourhood and Network Initiative at Northwestern University. She uses network and spatial analysis to understand the ways in which social ties, space and their intersection influence behaviour. She has a B.A./M.A. in Economics from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and an M.A. in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago.
Maira Khwaja
Maira is a first generation Pakistani-American, born and raised in Pittsburgh. She studied history at the University of Chicago, focusing on the South Side of Chicago. She interviews young people about their experiences with police, produces events and workshops, and guides outreach communications for the Invisible Institute, a 501(c) journalism production company.
Sharon Meraz
Sharon Meraz’s work resides in the interplay of political communication, networked journalism, social networks, and mass media theory. As a scholar centrally interested in political activism and political engagement online, she explores how mass media effect theories take shape and evolve due to the growth of networked, social media technologies that empower political publics. In bringing a social network analytic perspective to the evolving media ecology, she has explored such new theoretical premises as networked gatekeeping, networked framing, network agenda setting, memetics, and virality. Meraz is also interested in automated content analysis, natural language processing, and social network visualization of big data. Her work has explored political activity and activism networks in such social applications as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and online political forums during electoral cycles, disaster times, and social movements. Meraz is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Communication. She also serves on several diversity committees and initiatives at the university, including the Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) and Fellowship Committees for Minority Students.
Andrew Papachristos
Andrew Papachristos is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and he is the Director of the Northwestern Neighborhood and Network (N3) Initiative. He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern. His research aims to understand how the connected nature of cities—how their citizens, neighborhoods, and institutions are tied to one another—affect what we think, feel, and do. His main area of research applies network science to the study of gun violence, police misconduct, illegal gun markets, street gangs, and urban neighborhoods.
Aaron Shaw
Aaron Shaw studies organization, collaboration, governance, and inequality in online environments. His current projects try to understand why and how a few peer production communities (like Wikipedia) grow and sustain valuable public information resources when most do not. Aaron is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, where he directs the Media, Technology & Society (MTS) Program. He is also a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a member of the Community Data Science Collective, which he founded together with Benjamin Mako Hill. During 2017-2018, Aaron held a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.
Rochelle Terman
Rochelle is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where she’ll begin as Assistant Professor in Fall 2020. Her research examines international norms, gender and advocacy, with a focus on the Muslim world. She is currently working on a book project that examines resistance and defiance towards international norms. The manuscript is based on her dissertation, which won the 2017 Merze Tate (formerly Helen Dwight Reid) Award for the best dissertation in international relations, law, and politics from the American Political Science Association. She teaches computational social science at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including Machine Learning for Political Science at Stanford and Introduction to Computational Tools and Techniques at Berkeley. She is a certified instructor with Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science with a designated emphasis in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Chicago, she was a post-doc at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
Abigail Smith
Abby Smith is a PhD student in the Department of Statistics at Northwestern. She is interested in record linkage and missing data in the context of global health and human rights.
Andrew Szmurlo
Andrew will matriculate the PhD program in Information Science at Cornell University this fall. He is interested in network analysis, causal inference, online communication and incentives. He also likes: running, ML algorithms, cryptocurrency, and pizza.
Chad Van De Wiele
Chad Van De Wiele is a PhD student and NSF-IGERT Fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Chad employs a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to study social networks; specifically, his research focuses on political discourse, affect, visuality, and representations and reproductions of race, class, gender, and sexuality within networked spaces. Chad has presented his work at various academic conferences, including NCA, ICA, and AoIR, and has published work in proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Social Media + Society.
Christina Schoenberg
Christina Schonberg is a postdoctoral research associate at UW-Madison. They earned their PhD in Developmental Psychology from UCLA and BA in Psychology from Northwestern University. Christina studies how variability in early language experiences (e.g., infants who are raised in monolingual vs. bilingual homes) influences outcomes such as cognitive flexibility and vocabulary development. Their graduate training focused on behavioral lab-based methods such as eye-tracking, and they are now learning methods for incorporating larger-scale datasets (such as longitudinal speech corpora) into their work as well.
Crystal Shi
Crystal Shi is a PhD candidate in the School of Hospitality & Tourism Management at Purdue University. She received her Master’s in Hospitality & Tourism Management in December 2013 from Purdue University. Prior to returning to Purdue to pursue her PhD, Crystal spent four years working in the hotel industry. She started as a management trainee at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle After that, she was promoted to the position of Food & Beverage Manager at the Fairmont Peace Hotel in Shanghai. Crystal’s research area is primarily employee well-being, turnover intention, and psychological contract in the hotel industry. She is particular interested in conducting research regarding the daily fluctuation of hotel employees' daily well-being and turnover intention.
Donghyun Kang
Donghyun Kang is a Ph.D. student in Chicago Sociology Department, working at Knowledge Lab. His overarching academic interest centers on the hybridization of ideas. Using cutting-edge network and text analysis methods, he aspires to shed light on the social conditions, processes, and consequences of interdisciplinary research. He is also interested in employing experimental designs to study the social processes that generate consensus or dissonance when conflicting theories and evidence coexist. Prior to coming to the University of Chicago, Donghyun received a B.A. in Business Administration and M.A. in Sociology at Seoul National University. He also worked as a research associate at Social Network Computing Center (SNCC) in Seoul National University, where he collaborated with researchers from Cyram Inc.
Eric Dunford
Eric Dunford is an Associate Director and Assistant Teaching Professor for the Master of Science in Data Science for Public Policy program in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. His research focuses on the organizational and tactical behavior of violent non-state organizations. He is currently involved in a number of projects regarding event data integration, predicting conflict processes, and leveraging online video game data to study how groups innovate and adapt.
Erin Anderson
Erin M. Anderson is a PhD candidate in Psychology at Northwestern University. Her research examines our learning processes from infancy into adulthood. Currently, she is investigating what helps us recognize patterns across different contexts, and whether being surprised at an unmet expectation can motivate us to seek out more information and revise our beliefs.
Ikiltezilani Mazehuani
Ikiltezi is a graduate student at The University of Chicago where she studies sociology. She has also held public policy and political science fellowships at Princeton and Duke Universities. As an immigration scholar, her research currently explores the effects of legality on immigrants. Specifically, she studies the effects that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has had on the lives of young people who hold this work authorization, particularly their level of economic integration. Prior to graduate school, Ikiltezi worked for five years on behalf of unaccompanied migrant children through the Office of Refugee Resettlement and Heartland Alliance. She currently works at The University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration where she studies the impact that waiting (to regularize one's citizenship status) has on the lives of older undocumented adults.
JungHwan Yang
JungHwan Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research sits at the intersection of media effects, political communication, and political behavior. I study how the current media landscape affects the patterns of news media use of the public and political elites: from understanding people’s reactions to different political events on social media to examine the way some government uses their powers to influence the way people talk about politics. I am currently working on multi-wave panel survey data combined with online tracking data of the panels to understand the political effects of information use.
Kevin Pedraza
Kevin Pedraza is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University. His research interests generally revolve around using geospatial methods to study crime. He hopes to expand his in computational social science skills to develop more sophisticated research designs for understanding variations of crime at the meso-level unit of analysis.
Leah Castleberry
Leah Castleberry is a first year Master of Public Policy (MPP) candidate at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. Through her studies, she is exploring the ways in which the intersections of business, policy and innovative technologies can be used to create a more equitable future for marginalized communities. Her research interests include cultural competency in artificial intelligence, algorithmic bias and the digital divide. Prior to graduate school, Leah worked as a Senior Cognitive Consultant at IBM Global Business Services. She received a B.B.A. in International Business from Howard University in 2015.
Nick Hagar
Nick Hagar is a first-year PhD student at Northwestern University, where he’s a member of the Computational Journalism Lab. He researches the people and technologies that produce journalism online and how they impact each other. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and has worked in audience development and analytics for several digital newsrooms.Ole Hexel
Ole Hexel is a doctoral candidate in the joint Ph.D. program between Northwestern University and Sciences Po Paris. At Northwestern, I have worked with Prof. Lincoln Quillian on an international meta-analysis of racial discrimination in hiring. At Sciences Po, I participate in a field experiment on anti-discrimination training. I use Python, mostly for web scraping, and R, for exploring and visualizing data.
Peter Choi
Eungang (Peter) Choi is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. He is also a graduate affiliate for Institute for Population Research (IPR). His research focuses on identifying fertility trends and using verbal autopsies to analyze causes of death. Methodological interests include Network analysis and NLP. He is originally from Seoul, South Korea.
Rebecca Abbott
Rebecca Abbot is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Rebecca's areas of research are primarily focused on economic policy, inequality, racial attitudes and group violence. Rebecca's dissertation works on improving models forecasting mass atrocities using random forests, clustering and neural networks.
Richard Shafranek
Richard Shafranek is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. His research, which has appeared in Political Behavior, Political Communication, Political Psychology, and Weather, Climate, and Society, focuses on partisanship and polarization in American politics. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a market researcher, a political campaign operative, and in the non-profit sector, and was a Fulbright scholar to Indonesia (2011-12). He received a B.A. in Political Science from Allegheny College in 2010.
Subhayan Mukerjee
Subhayan Mukerjee is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania, where he researches political communication with a focus on online audiences and online political polarization. In his dissertation, he is studying the structure of online audience networks in India, and theorizing the manner in which audiences navigate cultural divides in India’s uniquely multi-cultural society. His general interest in using computational techniques to answer questions of substantive social import stems from his early childhood fascination with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and the fictitious science of psychohistory. In his spare time, he can either be found cooking or supporting Arsenal football club with an aching in his heart.
Tomoko Okada
Tomoko Okada is a PhD candidate in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of research interest lie in the intersection of science communication and political communication. She is especially interested in rural-urban divides in values about science and emerging technologies and unequal access to scientific news. In her dissertation, she explores these issues by combining survey data, text data of newspapers, and Twitter data.
Zixi Chen
Zixi Chen is a PhD candidate from the Measurement and Quantitative Methods program of College of Education of Michigan State University. Her research interests include social network analysis, hierarchical linear model, and sensitivity analysis in social science. She is a quantitative research member of the Teachers in Social Media project, where she gains extensive experience of using traditional and exploratory/computational statistical methods for educational research. In this project, she particularly interests in learning teachers' resource acquisition behaviors in social medias for their students learning.
Daniel Trielli
Daniel Trielli is a PhD student at the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern. He is researching computational journalism and how news reaches the public in our increasingly algorithmically-defined world.2018
Duke University
All Participants
Matthew Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he is affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers: the Office of Population Research, the Center for Information Technology Policy, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of the forthcoming book *Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.*
Chris Bail
Chris Bail is the Douglas and Ellen Lowey Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Program on Data Science, the Duke Network Analysis Center, and the Duke Population Research Institute. His research examines how non-profit organiations and other political actors shape social media discourse using large text-based datasets and apps for social science research. He is the author of *Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream*.
Deen Freelon
Deen Freelon is an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and directs the Computational Communication Research Lab.
Kieran Healy
Kieran Healy is Associate Professor of Sociology at Duke University. He's affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Markets and Management Studies program, and the Duke Network Analysis Center.
David Lazer
David Lazer is Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University & Harvard University.
Monica Lee
Monica Lee is a Data Scientist at Facebook who works on Civic Engagement and Election Integrity. Her research leverages social network analysis and machine learning to combat election related social media abuse and to develop tools for civic empowerment.
Kristian Lum
Kristian Lum is the Lead Statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), where she leads the HRDAG project on criminal justice in the United States.
Sendhil Mullainathan
Sendhil Mullainathan is the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University and the co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
Duncan Watts
Duncan Watts is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. He is also an AD White Professor at Large at Cornell University.
Emily Bello-Pardo
Emily D. Bello-Pardo is a doctoral student at American University. Her work examines the attitudinal impacts of online dis- and mis- information, online discursive incivility, and public policy shifts, and uses experimental and computational social science approaches to explore these topics in the US and Latin America. In 2017, Bello-Pardo was a Google NewsLab Fellow at Pew Research Center. Before her PhD, Bello-Pardo obtained a MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and dual Bachelor degrees in Political Science and International Relations from Florida International University.
Nicolò Cavalli
Nicolò is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He holds a BA in Politics from University of Bologna and a MSc in Economics from Bocconi University, Milan. Before joining Nuffield College, Nicolò worked as journalist, reporting on social issues and political movements from Italy, Greece, Catalunya, California and Peru. His Doctoral Thesis focuses on how intergroup emotional stratification emerged in Europe in times of economic recession.
Lily Fesler
Lily Fesler is a doctoral student in economics of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) fellow. Her research interests include student and teacher bias in higher education and barriers to college access. Methodologically, she is very interested in using text analysis to better understand student's college experiences (and started the Stanford student-led group Computational Text Analysis in the Social Sciences). Before coming to Stanford, Lily worked as an education analyst at Abt Associates and as an analyst at an economic consulting firm in Boston. She received her bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University.
Natalie Gallagher
Natalie Gallagher is currently pursuing a PhD in psychology at Northwestern University. Her work lies at the intersection of social and cognitive research, including network cognition, social categories, and a flexible sense of self. She draws on psychological, sociological, and computational methods to pursue her questions, and is interested in how research can inform social change. Natalie received her BA in psychology and theater from Georgetown University.
Ryan J. Gallagher
Ryan J. Gallagher is a PhD student at Northeastern University. At the Network Science Institute, he researches the dynamics of social networks using tools and theory from natural language processing and communications. He currently studies the affective phenomena of networked counterpublics. Ryan holds an MS in mathematics from the University of Vermont, where he worked with the Computational Story Lab at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, and a BA in math from the University of Connecticut.
Douglas Guilbeault
Douglas Guilbeault is a PhD candidate in the Network Dynamics Group at the University of Pennsylvania. His research uses formal models and online experiments to study political communication and cultural evolution. His recent work focuses on the effects of political polarization on collective intelligence. Doug is funded by a PhD scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as by a dissertation fellowship from the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science. He has a background in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science.
David Hagmann
David is a PhD candidate in Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting scholar at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His interests include information avoidance, behavioral interventions (nudges), and decisions from experience. In his dissertation, David studies persuasion in the presence of motivated reasoning. While we might think that changing someone’s mind is all about exposing them to facts that support our views and challenge theirs, such an approach may be more likely to engender defensive information avoidance rather than receptive information processing.
Katherine Hoffmann Pham
Katherine Hoffmann Pham is a PhD candidate in Information Systems at the NYU Stern School of Business. Her research focuses on applications of big data to international development and policy problems; her current projects study transportation mode choice in New York City and migration patterns in the Central Mediterranean. She is also interested in how machine learning can be applied to causal inference. Previously, she worked on randomized controlled trials with Innovations for Poverty Action and completed a co-terminal degree in International Relations, Economics, and International Policy Studies at Stanford.
David Holtz
David Holtz is a PhD student in the Information Technology group at MIT Sloan. His research interests span online marketplace design, causal inference, applied machine learning, and network science. His work thus far has focused on ratings and reviews, as well as the viability of reputation systems that don’t depend on user generated feedback. He holds an MA in Physics & Astronomy from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Physics from Princeton University. Prior to beginning his PhD, David was a data scientist (most recently at Airbnb).
Eaman Jahani
Eaman Jahani is a graduate research assistant pursuing a PhD degree in Social and Engineering Systems with a minor in Statistics at MIT IDSS. Prior to MIT, he was a software engineer at Google for 4 years. His main training is in statistics and computer science, but recently he has been appreciating econometrics and modeling in applied economics. His past research examined the extent of bubbles vs truth-seeking in cryptocurrency markets and socio-economic prediction in social networks. His current research focuses on structural factors such as networks or institutions that regenerate inequality at a micro scale. Eaman spends too much time reading political commentaries.
Carly Knight
Carly Knight is completing her PhD in Sociology at Harvard University. Her work applies quantitative and computational methods to questions of historical and cultural change. Her primary research interest concerns the evolution of attitudes towards the market and the development of organizational market actors. She is also broadly interested in political sociology, law and regulation, markets and moral classification, and computational analysis. In the Fall, she will begin as an Assistant Professor at New York University.
Elena Labzina
Elena is a graduating Ph.D. student in PolSci at WashU in St Louis. Soon, she is joining the Lab of Law&Economics at ETH Zurich as a postdoc in PolSci, Econ, and Data Analysis. Also, she holds MAs in PolSci, Econ, and Stats. Her BSc is in Applied Math and CompSci from Lomonosov State in Moscow, Russia. Elena’s research concerns the interdisciplinary studies that apply advanced data methods to questions related to information security, media freedom, development, and environmental issues.
Tina Law
Tina Law is a Ph.D. student in sociology at Yale. Her research explores how big data and computational social science can be used to advance the study of racial inequality in U.S. cities and neighborhoods. She is particularly interested in applying and integrating techniques from analyses of social networks, text corpora, and emotions in order to generate new insights into longstanding issues of urban racial inequality. Her ongoing work is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. She will be continuing her studies at Northwestern in fall 2018.
Yan Leng
Yan is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Human Dynamics group at MIT. She received dual masters in Computer Science and Transportation Engineering from MIT in 2016. Yan is interested in using a broad range of computational techniques to understand the network effect of social influence. In particular, she works on the inference, identification, and modeling of social influence and social learning with large-scale behavioral data in a networked environment. Besides, she also works on the combining network structure and personal attributes in maximizing cascading payoff.
Jeff Lockhart
Jeff Lockhart is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan. Before coming to Michigan, he completed a masters in computer science at Fordham University and a masters in gender studies at the University of Cambridge. His research seeks to integrate computational tools with critical insight from feminist and queer theory.
Julien Migozzi
Julien Migozzi is a PhD Candidate in Urban & Economic Geography at the University of Grenoble Alpes and a Lecturer & Research Assistant at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris. His research investigates how the real estate market reshapes patterns of social stratification and neighborhood change in emerging cities of the Global South, with a specific focus on Cape Town, South Africa. He is particularly interested in the intersection of housing market, financialization and inequalities. His methodology combines in-depth, qualitative fieldwork with spatial analysis, multivariate statistics & mapping. He received his B.A and his M.A in Geography from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon.
Sanaz Mobasseri
Sanaz Mobasseri is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. She received her PhD from the Management of Organizations Department at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Her research examines the role of emotion, cognition, and culture in shaping social networks and labor market outcomes. Much of her work is situated in organizational settings, where she examine the microfoundations of workplace inequality. Although grounded in sociology and organizational theory, her work integrates theoretical insights from social psychology and sociolinguistics. Her research methods are similarly diverse, ranging from experimental studies in the lab to audit studies in the field to computational approaches applied to large archival data sets.
Hussein Mohsen
Hussein is a PhD student in Computational Biology & Bioinformatics at Yale University supported by the Nicholas Jabr and Gruber Science Fellowships. His research interests are at the confluence of deep learning, cancer genomics, and computational social science. He received a BS in Computer Science from the Lebanese American University (LAU) and an MS in Bioinformatics at Indiana University.
Zanele Munyikwa
Zanele Munyikwa is a PhD student in Information Technologies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She studies the role of networks, platforms, and people in the rapidly changing digital economy. Zanele's current research focuses on the future of work and the economics of social networks. She holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from Duke University, and spent two years as a Research Fellow at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Trang (Mae) Nguyen
Trang (Mae) Nguyen (Nguyễn Thu Trang) is the John N. Hazard Fellow in Comparative Law at New York University School of Law, U.S.-Asia Law Institute, and visiting scholar at University of California Berkeley School of Law. Her research uses mixed methods analysis to study authoritarian legality. Mae earned a J.D. degree from NYU School of Law, where she was a Mitchell Jacobson Law & Leadership Fellow and executive editor of the New York University Law Review.
Stan Oklobdzija
Stan Oklobdzija is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC San Diego. His dissertation project focuses on how changes to US election law allowed networks of interest groups to take over roles previously held by political parties. His research interests revolve around campaign finance, election law and state politics. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a reporter at the Sacramento Bee.
Anne Helby Petersen
Anne Petersen is a research assistant at the Section of Biostatistics, Copenhagen University, Denmark. She has a MSc in statistics, a BSc in mathematics and a keen interest in sociology. She is the primary developer of two R-packages on CRAN, dataMaid and PCADSC. Her research interests are focused on the methodological challenges related to modeling observational data and in particular how this type of information can be used to understand the interplay between social inequality and health.
Iacopo Pozzana
Iacopo holds a masters in physics from the University of Pisa and is currently pursuing a PhD in computer science at Birkbeck, University of London. In his research, he uses tools from network science, machine learning and natural language processing to study human behaviour on social media, currently focusing on platforms granting an high degree of anonymity to their users. Previously, he has worked on social bot detection and on temporal network modelling.
Francesco Rampazzo
Francesco is pursuing a PhD in Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Southampton, while being a Doctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Demographic Research. He holds a Master’s degree in Demography from Stockholm University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics from the University of Padova. Having moved around Europe for his university education, he understands how important it is to complement traditional data sources on migrants, with digital data sources for capturing the actual movements of individuals. His PhD focuses on the use of digital data for describing demographic events, such as European migration, male fertility, and patterns of transition to adulthood.
Leah Rosenzweig
Leah just completed her PhD in political science at MIT, where she was a member of MIT GOV/LAB and the Political Methodology Lab. Her research focuses on citizens’ political behavior in developing countries. Her current book project investigates the puzzle of why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions. Using survey and experimental methods, she analyzes the role that social norms play in motivating turnout among citizens in semi-authoritarian states. Leah will be joining the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France as a postdoctoral research fellow in the fall.
Martijn Schoonvelde
Martijn Schoonvelde is a postdoctoral fellow in Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam where he uses automated text analysis to study on leader communication in the European Union during times of crisis. Before this, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, and a research fellow at the University of Exeter in the UK. He received his PhD from Stony Brook University. His interests include comparative political behavior, EU politics and research methods. He tweets under @hjms.
Carsten Schwemmer
Carsten Schwemmer is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Bamberg University, Germany. His research focuses on computational methods for the study of ethnic minorities and social media communication. Carsten is particularly interested in natural language processing, data mining and software development. He also teaches computational social science at Bamberg University and Humboldt University of Berlin.
Ieke de Vries
Ieke de Vries is pursuing a PhD in Criminology and Justice Policy at Northeastern University. Her current research aims to address the legitimate contours of crime by building and analyzing novel, digitized data sets utilizing computational methods. She has collaborated with federal, state and local agencies in the U.S. and gained research and policy experience while researching crime in several other countries including the Netherlands where she worked for the Dutch Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings.
Taylor Brown
Taylor Brown is a doctoral student in the Duke Sociology department, and is associated with the Duke Network Analysis Center. She has broad interests in computational methods and social media studies. Her dissertation explores gender inequality in creative professions. Taylor holds an MA in sociology from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MSc in evidence-based social intervention from the University of Oxford. Prior to beginning her PhD, Taylor fulfilled an appointment at the National Science Foundation in the division of Social and Economic Sciences.
Haohan Chen
Haohan Chen is a doctoral student in the Duke Political Science Department. He studies the formation and expression of political preferences in authoritarian regimes in the social media era. His current research uses computational models to simulate how people in authoritarian regimes strategically falsify their political preferences with different parts of their social network and how authoritarian regimes respond. He applies a combination of machine learning and causal inference methods to text data from social media sites of China to test empirical implications of his computational models. Prior to graduate school, Haohan earned a BA from the University of Hong Kong.
Marcus Mann
Marcus Mann is a doctoral student in the Duke Sociology department. He uses computational methods to examine politically partisan news ecologies on social media and maintains a general interest in the cultural differentiation of epistemic authorities and their corresponding audiences, communities, and social movements.
Friedolin Merhout
Friedolin Merhout is a doctoral student in the Duke Sociology department. He enjoys exploring how computational methods provide a new lens to view longstanding social science debates, and pondering the potential inherent in the wealth of digital trace data. Before starting the doctoral program at Duke, he earned a BA from Freie Universitaet in his hometown Berlin.
Janet Xu
Janet Xu is a doctoral student in the Princeton Sociology department, where she is also affiliated with the Office of Population Research. Her current research examines perceptions and portrayals of demographic diversity using experimental and computational methods. She holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago. Prior to graduate school, Janet worked at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) as a survey researcher.Hunter College
All Participants
Maria Y. Rodriguez
Dr. Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work, part of the City University of New York’s Hunter College. Her research interests intersect demography, data science, housing policy and social welfare. Currently, she has three active areas of research: (1) identifying the impacts of the U.S. foreclosure crisis on foreign-born Latinos by examining foreclosure mitigation policy; (2) understanding the impacts of algorithmic decision-making in human services (with particular attention to racially marginalized groups), and (3) using Twitter data to understand the lived experience of marginalized communities in the United States. She can be found on Twitter [@HousingTheCity](https://twitter.com/HousingTheCity).
Glenera Bates
Gleneara E. Bates is currently doctoral student at CUNY Graduate Center. I’m interested in exploring the environmental risk factors for chronic diseases among racially ethnic minorities living in New York.
Katharine Bloeser
Katharine Bloeser is an Assistant Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. Katharine is a licensed independent clinical social worker in the District of Columbia. Katharine's work focuses on underrepresented populations of veterans including those who identify as sexual and gender minorities. Her work examines the intersection of the veteran identity with age, race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
Jagadisa-Devasri Dacus
Dr. Dacus possess an extensive history of working for and with community based organizations, nonprofits, and state and local health departments engaged in the provision of programs and interventions for at-risk racial and ethnic populations, youth and young adults, drug users, and LGBTQ populations. His public health research takes a strengths-based examination of maintained HIV-negativity among Black men who have sex with men (MSM). In addition to his behavioral science research, he currently provides consulting services in the areas of organizational development, capacity building, program development and evaluation, and cultural competency with an emphasis on LGBTQ populations.Nathalie Lebron
Coming soon!
Carmen Morano
Dr. Carmen Morano is a Professor of Social Work and Chair of the Aging Field of Practice. Carmen is a John A. Hartford Faculty Scholar (2003-2005) and Founding Director of Silberman Aging: A Hartford Center of Excellence in Diverse Aging His research includes developing and evaluating psychoeducational interventions for caregivers of persons with dementia, program evaluations for community-based agencies and developing competency-based curriculum. His more resent research is focused on evaluating interprofessional education and practice and the use of social network analysis to evaluate a caregiver support program.Gilbert Nick
Coming soon!
Austin Oswald
Austin Oswald is a PhD Social Welfare student at the City University of New York. He earned his BSc in Therapeutic Recreation at Dalhousie University, MA in Applied Health Sciences at Brock University, and Graduate Certificate in Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies at the University of Georgia. Austin is involved in research that explores the distinct needs of LGBTQ people, and he has disseminated his work though publications, presentations, and community lectures. Currently, Austin is working with Dr. Nancy Giunta on her national program evaluation of LGBTQ cultural competence trainings for aging service providers.
Maurice Vann
Maurice T. Vann is a doctoral candidate, researcher, and lecturer who develops, implements, and evaluates programs that assist returning citizens with reintegrating into their communities. He is a justice system advocate who has worked in advocacy organizations, courts, corrections facilities, and jails throughout the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan region. Currently, he is investigating the role returning citizens played in quelling community unrest in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray Uprising of 2015.
Khudodod Khudododov
Khudodod Khudododov is currently a PhD student in Social Welfare program at Graduate Center, CUNY. He completed his MSW from Washington University in St. Louis. He has worked with various local and international organizations in the capacity of evaluation specialist. His main interest is in the application of contemporary statistical and machine learning models to ever-growing social science data to make better and stronger evidence based decisions. Additionally Khudodod is an instructor at Silberman School of Social Work teaching research and statistics.New York University
All Participants
Adaner Usmani
Adaner Usmani is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University. He received his PhD in Sociology from NYU. His dissertation examined the rise and fall of labor movements over the 20th and early 21st centuries, and considered the effects of these facts for political change. In other work, he has written about American mass incarceration, with an eye on the racial politics of its origins and reproduction.
Siwei Cheng
Siwei Cheng is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University. Her research focuses on stratification and mobility, work and family, social networks, and quantitative methodology.
Jennifer Hill
Jennifer Hill is a Professor of Applied Statistics and Data Science at New York University. She is the Co-Director of the Center for Practice and Research at the Inersection of Information, Society and Methodology, and Co-Director of the Masters of Science Program in Applied Statistics for Social Science Research.
Arthur Spirling
Arthur Spirling is an Associate Professor of Politics and Data Science at New York University. He is the Deputy Director and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Data Science, and Chair of the Education and Training Working Group of the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment. He specializes in political methodology and legislative behavior, with an interest in the application of texts-as-data, Bayesian statistics, item response theory and generalized linear models in political science.
Myeong Lee
Myeong is a Ph.D. candidate studying information science at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is a Junior Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI), a research network in the iSchool; also, he is a Data Science & Technology Fellow at The Center for Open Data Enterprise, a non-profit that advocates for open data movements.His research interests are in understanding the dynamics of cities, local groups, and local information inequality by making use of computational methods and social theories. He also designs and implements systems that demonstrate geographically-embedded structures of information and associated issues.
Anna Skarpelis
Anna Skarpelis is completing her PhD in Sociology at New York University and will be joining Harvard University as postdoctoral fellow in the Fall. Her dissertation, Making the Master Race, investigates racial anxiety and the consequences of ethnoracial classification practices in multi-ethnic empires (specifically 20th century Germany and Japan). She is also working on a project that leverages computational text analysis to better understand how sociologists use theoretical concepts in their own work. When she isn't translating obscure Japanese and German texts into English, she likes to read up on political philosophy, the sociology of morality and the philosophy of science. Equipped with a slightly odd sense of humor after years spent in archives researching fascists, she has performed at UCB New York and is writing her first satirical novel on David Thoreau.
Crystal Moore
Crystal A. Moore is a doctoral student at the Stanford Graduate School of Education in the programs on education policy, organizational theory and the sociology of education. She works with Linda Darling-Hammond, Ben Domingue and Mitchell Stevens at Stanford. Crystal has an undergraduate degree in public policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a master’s degree in elementary education from the University of Pennsylvania.
Claire Cullen
Claire Cullen is a PhD student at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and a consultant at the World Bank Gender Innovation Lab. Her current research in development economics focuses on understanding the role of social norms and networks in women’s economic empowerment and intimate partner violence. She uses a range of methods including randomized control trials, lab-in-the-field experiments and machine learning techniques to better understand gender discrimination and challenges in international development. Claire has a Bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Sydney and a Master’s degree in International Development Policy from Georgetown University.
Andrew Wolf
Andrew Wolf is a PhD Student in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests center around issues of globalization in relation to its impact on labor markets and labor movements. In particular, he studies how labor movements and governments are responding to emerging labor market forms such as the gig economy.
Elliot Stoller
Elliot Stoller is PhD student in Organizational Behavior at Harvard. He researches government bureaucracies and socioeconomic interest groups, focusing on questions about legitimacy, power, and organizational change. He currently studies organizational dynamics involved in the regulatory rule-making process. He holds a BA from Stanford, and previously worked in energy policy for New York State and as research assistant focusing on institutional change.
Fangqi Wen
Fangqi Wen is a PhD candidate of sociology at New York University. In her dissertation, she uses natural experiments and survey experiments to study 1) the social consequences of China's One-Child Policy, and 2) Americans' perceptions and misperceptions of intergenerational mobility. Her research has been supported by a doctoral dissertation improvement award from the National Science Foundation and the Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) Short Studies.
Jake Carlson
Jake is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He is currently a Dissertation Fellow with the Institute for Research on Poverty. He was previously a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab, and a Research Fellow at Participatory Budgeting Project. Jake is an urban and political sociologist, focused on democracy, housing, and changing cities. His dissertation examines the various causes and consequences of gentrification and displacement - and the relationships between the two.
Joanna Pepin
Joanna Pepin is a graduating PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She will be joining the Population Research Center at the University of Texas - Austin as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the fall. Broadly, she is interested in understanding the ways families reproduce and protect against inequality. Her primary research interests concerns the intersection of couples' relationship processes and gender inequality linked to cultural norms. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences.
Hamid Ikram
Hamid Ikram is an Assistant Professor of Education at the Government College University Faisalabad, Pakistan. He has a Doctorate in Education from the United States specializing in Educational Administration, Leadership and Technology. His doctoral research examined the integration of learning media technologies in teaching math and literacy. His research interest includes teachers’ professional development in advanced learning technologies, and education of low-SES communities. He intends to be a developer and practice computational social science. He is a US Exchange Scholar, Microsoft Certified Educator, and also the recipient of 2018 Digital Inclusion Award. He has published his research in peer-reviewed journals, and presented at renowned international conferences such as AERA, ISTE, AACE, CICE, and LICE. He has also won a best research paper award in ICMEI, France.
Danya Lagos
Danya is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on population-level trends related to transgender health, as well as on survey and computational methodology for demographic research on hard-to-identify populations. She has worked as a research assistant at the Computation Institute's Knowledge Lab.
Gerard Torrats-Espinosa
Gerard Torrats-Espinosa is a doctoral student in Sociology at New York University and a doctoral fellow at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. His research interests include inequality and stratification, crime, urban policy, and quantitative methods.
Martina Balestra
Martina Balestra is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Technology Management & Innovation at New York University advised by Oded Nov. She is broadly interested in decentralized online platforms and how many diverse, anonymous, non-communicating people can come together to produce complex and high-quality information, artifacts, and communities. Her dissertation work tackles questions related to (1) the emergence and characterization of complex, dynamic user roles in decentralized and networked systems, (2) the structural and motivational determinants of who falls into what role, and (3) how individual, localized patterns of engagement give way to global system behavior.
Venetia Pliastika
Venetia currently is a research assistant in Computational Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University where she works with RNA mainly on cancer biomarkers and tool development. She is interested in learning how Computer Science methods are applied in other areas and specifically how they can facilitate social research. She studied Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Bhumika Chauhan
Bhumika Chauhan is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at New York University. Her research interests include political sociology, inequality, and work. She is currently working on a project on wage inequality and workforce composition in India. She is also working on a collaborative project that concerns the relationship between the rise of programming and the gender wage gap in the US.
Offer Egozy
Offer Egozy is a doctoral student in Sociology at New York University. His research has focused on the criminal justice system and, more recently, the contemporary art world.
Oscar Mendez
Oscar earned his B. A. in economics at Universidad de Monterrey, Mexico on 2008. He then went on to study at the University of California, Davis where he obtained his Ph. D. degree in economics on June 2015. His fields of specialization are Labor Economics, International Trade, and Public Economics. Currently, Oscar is a Program Associate in the Economics program at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In August 2018 he will start as Assistant Professor of Economics at Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Mexico.
Anahita Davouudi
Anahita is a researcher at Complex Adaptive Systems Lab. She received her PhD in Computer Science from University of Central Florid (MS in Electrical Engineering (UTA, 2012), MS in Computer Science (NCSU, 2011), and BS in Computer Engineering (Tehran Polytechnic, Iran, 2009)). Her primary research interest are social recommender systems and social data science with focus on user modeling and personalization.
Ned Crowley
Ned Crowley is a PhD student at NYU, where he studies political and economic sociology.
Barum Park
Barum Park is a PhD student in the department of sociology at New York University. His research interests span fields of political sociology, social networks, and social mobility. His current research focuses political polarization and the diffusion of new ideas, formalizing the notion of social space, and detecting class boundaries by conceptualizing occupational mobility patterns as networks carrying flows of workers.University of Boulder
All Participants
Brian Keegan
Brian C. Keegan is a computational social scientist whose research is at the intersection of human-computer interaction, network science and data science. His research explores the structure and dynamics of large-scale online communication and collaboration using socio-technical system log data. Brian is developing new methods, theories and tools to help people make better sense of bursts of information and design better responses to them. Before joining CU-Boulder as an Assistant Professor, Keegan was a research associate at the Harvard Business School’s HBX online learning platform and a postdoctoral researcher in computational social science at Northeastern University. He received his PhD in media, technology and society from Northwestern University’s School of Communication. He also earned SB degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Science, Technology and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Allison Morgan
Allison Morgan is pursuing her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is interested in using data mining, machine learning, and social network analysis to develop and test hypotheses about the origins and effects of gender imbalance within academia. She attended last year's SICSS and is excited to build a computational social science community at CU Boulder via this satellite. She was recently awarded the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship. Prior to graduate school, Allison worked as a data scientist for two years at a small tech start-up in Portland, OR. She earned her B.A. in physics from Reed College.
Aaron Clauset
Aaron Clauset is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He received a PhD in Computer Science, with distinction, from the University of New Mexico, a BS in Physics, with honors, from Haverford College, and was an Omidyar Fellow at the prestigious Santa Fe Institute. In 2016, he was awarded the Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science. Clauset is an internationally recognized expert on network science, computational social science, and machine learning for complex systems. His work has appeared in many prestigious scientific venues, including Nature, Science, PNAS, JACM, WWW, ICWSM, STOC, SIAM Review, and Physical Review Letters. His work has also been covered in the popular press by the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Discover Magazine, New Scientist, Wired, Miller-McCune, the Boston Globe and The Guardian.
Casey Fiesler
Assistant Professor Casey Fiesler is a social computing researcher who primarily studies governance in online communities, technology ethics, and fandom. She is a Senior Fellow in the Silicon Flatirons Institute for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, an ATLAS fellow, and holds a courtesy appointment in Computer Science. Also a public scholar, she is a frequent commentator and speaker on topics of technology ethics and policy, as well as women in STEM (including consulting with Mattel on their computing-related Barbies). Her work is supported in part by a $3 million collaborative National Science Foundation grant focused on empirical studies of research ethics. Fiesler holds a PhD from Georgia Tech in Human-Centered Computing and a JD from Vanderbilt University Law School.
Jake Hofman
Jake Hofman is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City, where he works in the field of computational social science. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was a Research Scientist in the Microeconomics and Social Systems group at Yahoo! Research. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Boston University and a Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Columbia University and runs Microsoft's Data Science Summer School to promote diversity in computer science. His work has been published in journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Management Science, and has been featured in popular outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and The Economist.
Daniel Larremore
Daniel Larremore is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research develops statistical and inferential methods for analyzing large-scale network data, and uses those methods to solve applied problems in diverse domains, including public health and academic labor markets. In particular, his work focuses on generative models for networks, the ongoing evolution of the malaria parasite and the origins of social inequalities in academic hiring and careers. Prior to joining the University of Colorado faculty, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute 2015-2017 and a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 2012-2015. He obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012, and holds an undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis.
Yotam Shmargad
Yotam Shmargad is a computational social scientist with an interest in political networks and privacy. In his research, he runs experiments, links and analyzes large datasets, and uses natural experiments to study how digital media augment the patterns of connectivity between people – the size, density, and diversity of our social networks - and the implications that these bigger networks have for our social and political lives. Shmargad’s recent projects look at how political candidates can overcome financial shortcomings with Twitter, and how the partisan composition of one’s social network influences the information they choose to share online. Before joining the University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor, Shmargad received his PhD in Marketing from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He holds an MS in Operations Management from Columbia University and a BS in Mathematics from UCLA.
Amanda Stevenson
Amanda Jean Stevenson is a sociologist trained in demographic and computer science methods. She studies the impacts of and responses to abortion and family planning policy. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. In her current research, she uses demographic methods to study the impacts of reproductive health policies, and computational and qualitative methods to study social responses to these policies. At Boulder she leads a team using massive administrative data at the Census Bureau to evaluate the life course consequences of access to (as opposed to use of) highly effective contraception. And she contributes to a variety of ongoing evaluations of reproductive health policies and develops new strategies for measuring fertility with administrative data. Another line of research examines the social responses to reproductive health policies. In a current project, she uses Twitter responses, website content, media coverage, and in-depth interviews to examine the social movement response to Texas' 2013 abortion restrictions. The case provides an opportunity to investigate how social movements negotiate intersectional critiques from within their ranks.
Chenhao Tan
Chenhao Tan is an assistant professor of computer science at University of Colorado Boulder. He obtained his PhD degree in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and bachelor's degrees in computer science and in economics from Tsinghua University. Prior to joining CU Boulder, he spent a year at University of Washington as a postdoc. His research interests include natural language processing and computational social science. He has published papers primarily at ACL and WWW, and also at KDD, WSDM, ICWSM, etc. His work has been covered by many news media outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He also won a Facebook fellowship and a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges award.
Zachary Cooper
I am a first year PhD student in Anthropology specializing in Archaeology here at the University of Colorado, Boulder. My advisor is Dr. Scott Ortman and my research interests include ancient migrations, diachronic linguistics, complex systems, and urban scaling.Angela Cunningham
I am a PhD candidate, expecting to graduate in the winter of 2018. My dissertation focuses on critical military geographies of rural Americans during and after the Great War. Drawing on newly accessible comprehensive individual-level civilian and military data, my research employs the techniques of historical demography and spatial analysis within a theoretical framework of space-time as relative, relational and constitutive to argue that the life courses and relationships of individual soldiers bind home and front and necessitate a more nuanced appreciation of the far-reaching and persistent effects of militaristic ideologies and practices. I have presented portions of my work at the annual meetings of the Social Sciences History Association, American Association of Geographers, and the Population Association of America. My first sole-authored paper, forthcoming in Historical Methods, explores automated record linkage methodologies.
Ashlynn Daughton
Ashlynn Daughton is an information science PhD student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is interested in leveraging internet data to better inform public health decision makers. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley (BS in molecular biology) and Boston University (MA in public health concentrating in maternal and child health and epidemiology). She works with Michael Paul at CU Boulder, and holds a position at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Analytics, Intelligence, and Technology Division. Her current research focuses on using machine learning techniques to better understand human behavior, development of decision support tools for public health professionals, and methods to better incorporate Internet and social media data into traditional epidemiological models.
Emirhan Demirhan
Emirhan Demirhan is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of North Texas. His research interests include democratization, the obstacles to the functioning of democracies, and manipulation of public opinion using computational and quantitative methods. In his dissertation, Emirhan focuses on how Turkish democratization failed as a result of unrestrained defiance to the status quo, which led to the destruction of institutions.
Alia Gant
Alia Gant is currently a Diversity Resident Librarian at Penn State University. Prior to joining the university, Ms. Gant studied information science at the University of Texas at Austin where she focused her studies on academic librarianship. Ms. Gant also studied international studies in her graduate and undergraduate programs at the University of Iowa and American University respectively with an emphasis on Western Hemisphere studies and the European Union, focusing on Portuguese speaking countries, Brazil and Portugal. Alia is looking forward to the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder! She hopes to learn more about CSS and also avenues to intersect her librarianship skills with computational social science methods to enrich her professional and academic research goals.Pavel Goldstein
no bio.
Jordan Hale
Jordan Hale is a Ph.D. candidate in the political science department at CU Boulder. Her research generally focuses on the impact of political institutions on norms of behavior, especially norms related to identity and globalization. Her dissertation asks specifically how different electoral systems impact the incentives for elites to politicize identity.
Xiaowen Hu
Xiaowen Hu is currently a 2nd year PhD student in Finance at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Juhi Huda
Juhi is a doctoral candidate in the Environmental Studies Program (policy core) at CU Boulder. She studies environmental policy and governance in the United States and India focusing on policy change in areas of food systems governance (agricultural biotechnology), disaster and hazards (wildfire), and climate change; and factors influencing policy change such as communication, advocacy, and stakeholders. Her dissertation research investigates the controversial issue of agricultural biotechnology policy in India.
Eaman Jahani
Eaman Jahani is a graduate research assistant pursuing a PhD degree in Social and Engineering Systems with a minor in Statistics at MIT IDSS. Prior to MIT, he was a software engineer at Google for 4 years. His main training is in statistics and computer science, but recently he has been appreciating econometrics and modeling in applied economics. His past research examined the extent of bubbles vs truth-seeking in cryptocurrency markets and socio-economic prediction in social networks. His current research focuses on structural factors such as networks or institutions that contribute to persistence of inequality.
Vivian Lai
I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder advised by Chenhao Tan. I study how to empower humans to make better decisions with machine's assistance. More broadly, I am interested in computational social science, natural language processing, and machine learning.Anais Landry
no bio.
Stefani Langehennig
Stefani Langehennig is a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder studying American politics and political methodology. Her research focuses on institutions, policy making, and congressional organization. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Government at the University of Texas at Austin and her Masters of Science in Political Science at the University of Nebraska Omaha.
Eun Lee
I've just finished my Ph.D. in South Korea about the structural inequality and its effects on the dynamics. I am a huge fan of Complex system group in Colorado, so I applied the summer school to meet and learn from the group. My passion is to understand the effect of heterogeneous characteristics of social network and people's attribute on human behavior and perception.
Huyen Le
I am a Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) fellow and a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Iowa since Fall 2013. Since Fall 2015 I have worked under the supervision of professor Zubair Shafiq. My research interests are Social Media Analysis, Text Mining, and Applied Machine Learning. I received my M.S. in Computer Science, Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea in 2012 and my B.S. in Computer Science, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam in 2010.
Ningzi Li
My research interests include organizational theory, economic sociology and non-market strategy. I particularly focus on integrated market and non-market strategies and online community management. I received doctoral degree in sociology from Cornell University.
Nicholas Light
Nick is a PhD Student in the Marketing division at the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business. Broadly his research focuses on consumer judgement and decision making. Specifically, Nick studies consumer perceptions of understanding, simplicity/complexity, and anti-science beliefs.
Jeremiah Osborne-Gowey
I am a PhD student in the Environmental Studies (ENVS) and Environmental Design (ENVD) programs at CU Boulder. I work at the nexus of science, policy and natural resource management. I am particularly interested in collaborative governance approaches to managing interactions between humans and the rest of the natural world. My dissertation research focuses on understanding the role and evolution of network approaches to collaborative governance. My graduate research examines whether and how social learning networks build and foster adaptive capacity and resilience during transitions in complex social-environmental systems. I am currently working with the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network (FAC Net). I have diverse skillset with a background that include statistics, ecology, behavioral interactions, community structure, impacts of introduced species, science communication, and policy and planning. At CU Boulder, I teach methods and planning courses in the ENVD program and have research appointments in the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (CSTPR) and the Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS). Before joining the Goldstein lab at CU Boulder, I worked for >15 years as an aquatic/landscape ecologist with Federal and State agencies, universities and private and non-profit consulting firms throughout the Western United States. I earned an Honors Bachelor of Science degree in Fisheries and Wildlife (2003), a Master of Science in Quantitative Fish Ecology (2005), and a Master of Public Policy (2016) from Oregon State University. I enjoy spending time in the great outdoors with my partner and kids, friends and animals. My favorite activities include camping, backpacking, fishing, hunting, forest foraging, SCUBA diving, fly tying, traveling, photography, reading, gardening, geocaching, and homebrewing/distilling.Marie Ouellet
no bio.
Anthony Pinter
Anthony T. Pinter is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He works with Dr. Jed R. Brubaker and the Identity Lab at CU, investigating online audiences' role in identity disclosure and trans experiences in social media. Prior to CU, he completed his B.S. and M.S. in Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, where he worked with Dr. Lynette Kvasny Yarger on research related to discrimination in STEM fields. In his free time, he is a prolific music consumer, avid mountain biker, and a high school track coach.
Katherine Runge
Katherine L. Runge is a PhD student of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her first field of study is American politics, and her second field of study is research methodology. Her specific areas of research focus on gender and politics in the American context, along with political psychology and voter behavior.
Qiaoni Shi
Qiaoni Shi is a PhD student in Marketing at University of Pittsburgh. She is broadly interested in applying computational social science method to understand consumer behavior and provide insights for firms. She is currently working on a project about platform strategy design.
Sarah Shugars
A doctoral candidate in Northeastern's Network Science program, Sarah uses network analysis and natural language processing to study political dialogue and deliberation. Her research focuses on developing a network methodology for deliberation; modeling the way an individual reasons as a network of interconnected ideas and studying deliberation as process in which groups exchange ideas and collectively create new solutions. She received a BA cum laude in Physics from Clark University and an MA in Integrated Marketing Communications from Emerson College. She currently serves as senior editor for the Good Society: The Journal of Civic Studies and previously worked at Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life.
Tara Streng Schroeter
I am a second year graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder working towards my Ph.D. in Sociology. After completing my Bachelor's degree at the University of Utah I became interested in programming and data science, and curious to explore the ways that these fields can enhance my skills as a social researcher. I am currently working on research related to health, mortality, campus sexual assault, and relevant policies.
Becca Wang
Becca Wang is a doctoral student in Sociology at Brown University, where she is also affiliated with the Population Studies and Training Center. Her research utilizes longitudinal analysis techniques to examine how population mobility is related to gender inequality, health, and urbanization. She also explores how computational methods and textual data can improve our understanding of social change over time. Prior to graduate school, she worked at Mathematica Policy Research and Mercy Corps.
Sari Widman
Sari Widman explores alternative models for STEM and digital literacy education for learners of all ages. Her research centers the development of equitable and humanizing practices in informal learning spaces, and how families and communities engage with educational opportunities and resources. Her current work focuses on multi and intergenerational learning in community settings, with a particular focus on libraries. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, in Learning Sciences and Human Development.Rumei Yang
Rumei (May) Yang, an international nursing Ph.D. student from China. My early research interest mainly focused on the patient safety, including fall prevention, medication errors and risk management using evidence-based practice models. My current interest of research is focusing on the quality of care for the elderly. Skiing, hiking, and swimming are my favorite activities.
Matthew Yarbrough
Matthew Yarbrough is a doctoral student at the University of Colorado-Boulder. His primary field of research is American Politics and minor field of Political Methodology. Previously graduating with Bachelors in Political Science, History, and International Affairs from the University of Georgia, Matthew's research focuses on gender differences in legislative behavior in the US Congress. Additional research focuses include congressional committee politics, LGBTQ politics, and political ambition within minority communities. In addition to his role as a student, Matthew serves as a Tri-Chair of the Chancellor's Advisory on Gender and Sexuality at CU-Boulder.
Tzu-Chi Yen
Tzu-Chi is pursuing his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is interested in problems that have some statistics flavor; for example, clustering of a network and error estimation of a novel survey method. Prior to graduate school, Tzu-Chi has lived in Beijing for three years as a software engineer (Python/JavaScript) at a tech startup, as a visiting student in the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and most recently as a data analyst at an environmental NGO. He has founded the [Network Science Education Initiative in Taiwan](https://netscied.tw), whose goal is to make network science accessible and _fun_ for all abilities. He holds a BS in Biology from National Taiwan University.
Joseph Zamadics
Hello, I am Joe Zamadics. I am a political science PhD candidate at the University of Colorado with a focus in American politics and political methodology. Specifically, my dissertation focuses on issue salience in lawmaking. By analyzing state newspaper content, I am able to link trends in issue salience to lawmaker actions and policy outcomes. I am originally from West Chester, PA which is 30 minutes outside the city of Philadelphia, home of the Super Bowl LII Champion Philadelphia Eagles. I graduated from Susquehanna University in 2012 with a B.S. in Economics. I obtained an M.A. in political science from the University of Colorado in 2014.
Kai Zhu
I am currently a PhD student in Information Systems at Boston University. I am broadly interested in applying computational method to understand and solve social science problems, with a special focus on bias, inequality and polarization in digital systems. I am currently working on a project in which I try to identify and understand partisan slant and political polarization in local TV news using large-scale unstructured text data, i.e. the complete transcript of televised news from around 800 TV stations across all US Designated Market Areas for a period of approximately six years (2012~2018). In a previous study, I investigated the co-evolution of attention and content production in online collaborative systems such as Wikipedia. Specifically, we leverage a large-scale natural experiment to study how exogenous content contributions to a Wikipedia article causally affect the attention it attracts and how that attention spills over to other articles in the network.University of Capetown
All Participants
Vissého Adjiwanou
Vissého Adjiwanou is a Senior Lecturer in Demography and Quantitative Methods at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), and adjunct professor at the Department of Demography at the Université de Montréal (Canada). His research interests include maternal and reproductive health, family dynamics, and female employment in sub-Saharan Africa. Vissého is the chair of the Panel on Computational Social Science at the Union for African Population Studies (UAPS).
Tom Moultrie
Tom Moultrie is professor of demography, and Director of the Centre for Actuarial Research (CARe) at the University of Cape Town. His interests lie in the technical measurement and sociology of fertility in sub-Saharan Africa, and the sociology of demographic measurement. He holds a BBusSc (Actuarial Science) from UCT, a MSc (Development Studies) from the LSE, and a PhD from LSHTM.
Marshini Chetty
Marshini Chetty is a research scholar in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University where she directs the Princeton Human Computer Interaction laboratory. She specializes in human computer interaction, usable security, and ubiquitous computing. She has a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA and a Masters and Bachelors in Computer Science from University of Cape Town, South Africa. Marshini regularly publishes at top tier venues including CHI, CSCW, and SOUPS.
Nick Feamster
Nick Feamster is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University and the Deputy Director of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). Before joining the faculty at Princeton, he was a professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Computer science from MIT in 2005, and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, with a focus on network operations, network security, and censorship-resistant communication systems.
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is associate professor of social demography at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Nuffield College. Ridhi’s interests span a number of substantive areas in demography and sociology, including gender, marriage and family, health and mortality, and ethnicity and migration. She is interested in how digital and computational innovations, both in terms of new data sources (e.g web data) and methods (e.g agent-based modeling and microsimulation) can be used in social and demographic research.
Vukosi Marivate
Vukosi Marivate holds a PhD in Computer Science (Rutgers University, as a Fulbright Scholar). He is a senior Data Scientist and acting research group leader for Data Science at the CSIR, focusing on creating/using Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence to extract insights from data to tackle societal challenges. Vukosi is an organiser of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning. He supervises postgraduate students and leads the CSIR’s Data Science student development program.
Chukwuedozie K. Ajaero
Chukwuedozie K. Ajaero holds a PhD in Population Geography, which was funded with a grant from the International Foundation for Science (IFS) Stockholm, Sweden. He is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Demography and Population Studies Programme of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and also a Lecturer in the Department of Geography, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His areas of research interests include migration, environment and livelihoods linkages as well as health and quality of life studies. He has to his credit journal articles, book chapters, and is a co-author of a book titled “Climate Change and the Nigerian Environment
Mustafa Ali
Mustafa Ali is doing Masters in Computer Science Department at university of Cape Town. He completed his Honors’ degree in Statistics and Computer Science at the university of Khartoum. In his MSc project he is developing subscription service for large astronomical data sets.
Donatus Yaw Atiglo
D. Yaw Atiglo is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ghana where he had his masters and doctoral training. With expertise in Demography and Social Statistics, his main research interests include population-environment nexus, women's reproductive health behaviour, gender and migration.
Lamègou François Badjadouna
Lamègou François Badjadouna works at the National Statistics Agency of Togo. He holds a Master degree in Economics and Statistical Engineering from the sub-Regional Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics of Yaoundé (Cameroon). His research focuses on how to leverage data analytics to foster better development policies.
Aristide Romaric Bado
Aristide Romaric Bado (PhD) is a senior research scientist in Demography. He is currently the Demography and Research Officer for the Regional Programme of Demography, Sexual and Reproductive Health (DEMSAN) at the West African Health Organization (WAHO). Prior to joining WAHO, he was researcher at the Research Institute and Health Science (IRSS) of the National Center for Scientific and Technological Research (CNRST)/Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso and lecturer in demography and quantitative methods. He was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Scholarship for his post-doctoral research at the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal in Canada. He holds a PhD in Population studies from the University of Western Cape (Cape Town, South Africa), a Master’s degree in Demography from the Demographic Training and Research Institute (IFORD) at the University of Yaoundé II (Cameroon) and a B.Sc. in Economics from the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso).
Richard Barnett
Richard Barnett is a lecturer in the Department of Information Science at Stellenbosch University and a co-founder of the Computational Social Science group in the Department. He is also a member of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research. He comes from a computing sciences background with a strong technical focus. With this in mind, his current research focuses on a machine learning approach to the identification of sybils on online social network platforms. This approach is specifically focused on the use of social network analysis metrics, and specifically network structure in the construction of feature vectors.
Flint Chenjera
Flint Chenjera is a graduate student at UCT. During the two years of MPhil demographic studies, Flint mastered aspects to do with dealing with demographic incomplete data, handling survey, textual, network, spatial and longitudinal data; using statistical tools such as excel, STATA and R. Flint holds an BSc degree in Statics from University of Zimbabwe and yet to complete an master’s degree in demography at University of Cape Town. His area of study is in family dynamics and child health.
Aldu Cornelissen
Aldu Cornelissen is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the Department of Information Science at Stellenbosch University. He co-found the Computational Social Science group at Stellenbosch University, and is a member of the Centre of Artificial Intelligence (CAIR). The group’s research focuses on the impact of social media in society by investigating bot interference during political elections in Sub-Sahara Africa. Aldu specialises in Social Network Analysis, specifically individual and group social cognition.Hailu Debere
no bio.
Robert Y. Djogbenou
Robert Y. Djogbenou is a Research Assistant at the Center for Training and Research in Population (CEFORP), University of Abomey-Calavi (Benin). He has a Master in Demography and a Bachelor in Statistics. His research interests span maternal and child health, gender, education and migration.Judith Donang
no bio.
Ahmed Eldud
Ahmed Eldud studied at University of Juba (Sudan) and obtained B.Sc general in Statistis and Population Studies in 2005. He later obtained a B.Sc honours in Statistical Science in 2011 at the University of Western Cape (South Africa) and a M.Sc in Mathematical Statistics in 2016 at Rhodes University (South Africa). Ahmed pursues a Ph.D at the University of the Western Cape since 2016. He works at the devision of the postgraduate studies at the University of the Western Cape as data analysis.
Arlette Simo Fotso
Arlette Simo Fotso got a PhD in Applied Economics. She is currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ICAP at Columbia University and at the University of the Witwatersrand. Arlette is involved in the Population-Based HIV Impact Assessments (PHIA) project. The PHIA project is running national surveys in 14 Sub-Saharan African countries plus Haiti to measure the reach and impact of HIV programs. Her research interests are Health, Education and Labour Economic, inequalities, disability, HIV, family and use of big data to assess health issues and migration and their impact in developing countries.Mbongeni Hlabano
no bio.
Bunakiye Japheth
Bunakiye Japheth is a lecturer of Computer Science at Edo University Iyamho, Department of Computer Science and Mathematics. He received his PhD from the Computer Science Department at University of Port Harcourt Nigeria. His research focused on the application of domain specific modelling approach to modelling engineering designs in the oil and gas transmission pipeline systems. Much of his work is directed at requirements within a particular domain, where the structure and behaviour of the prototype system capturing stakeholders design intents that depict various design scenarios were examined. His research methodology was hinged on Domain Specific modelling of Model Driven Engineering Technologies that tackles complexities in domains through language formalisms that could be beyond the utilization of stakeholders. This language formalism is simply a reusable software layer that can be tailored to any specific domain through requirements engineering for greater stakeholder output.Benson John
no bio.
Takwanisa Machemedze
Takwanisa Machemedze is a researcher at DataFirst at the University of Cape Town. He holds a PhD in Sociology and an MPhil in Demography both from the University of Cape Town, and a BSc Hon in Statistics from the University of Zimbabwe. His research interests include demography, remote sensing and small area estimation.
Rornald Kananura Muhumuza
Kananura Rornald Muhumuza is a population health researcher with a background in economics and statistics. He is pursuing his PhD in Demography and Population Studies at London School of Economics and Political Science. He is applying systems thinking analysis approach to understand Child Health and Survival in Uganda. Rornald has experience in designing and implementing Monitoring and Evaluation systems, which he has gained through leading numerous interventions. His research interests are pathway analysis, spatial and small area estimation, forecasting and machine learning, longitudinal and panel data analysis. He is also interested in generating research products that inform appropriate decision-making.
Abdualaziz Mukhtar
Abdualaziz Mukhtar holds a Bachelor Honours and a Master Degree in Mathematical Sciences from the University of the Western Cape (UWC) South Africa. He is currently enrolled for a doctoral research degree (Ph.D.) in Mathematical Epidemiology under the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at UWC. His research approach intended to makes use of statistic inference and covered practical applications of modelling, including predicting the impact of control, interpreting outbreak data and modelling in real-time, fitting models to data.
Alecia Ndlovu
Xichavo Alecia Ndlovu is a lecturer in the Political Studies department at the University of Cape Town. She is also completing her PhD in International Relations at Wits University. She holds a BA in International Relations and Applied Economics, as well as an MA (with distinction) in International Relations. Her main research and teaching interests are in political economy of development, politics and governance in Africa, comparative politics and quantitative research methods. Her thesis is entitled “Sustaining the unsustainable? Political institutions and development in sub-Saharan Africa’s resource economies.” It combines cross-national statistical research and fieldwork in four African countries—Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.
Nelly Ruth Nkhoma
Nelly Ruth Nkhoma holds an Honours Degree in Population Studies and is currently studying towards an MPhil in Demography at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests lie in the field of public health specifically in child health and mortality. She has done work in policy research and monitoring and evaluation.
Emmanuel Olamijuwon
Emmanuel Olamijuwon is a lecturer at the University of Swaziland. He is also a PhD candidate in demography and population studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His research adapts computational approaches in assessing the effectiveness of social media-based sexuality education in improving the sexual and reproductive health, knowledge and rights of young adults in Africa. By combining innovative and youth-friendly approaches, he hopes to drive new discussions on the role of digital media in demographic studies. Beside his high-level academic activities, Emmanuel also plays an active role in various interdisciplinary research projects many of which revolve around the social determinants of health, sexual and reproductive health, digital demography as well as the demography of African families. He is the coordinator of the Sexually Healthy and Young [SHY] Adults network (https://shyadult.org/)
Vundli Ramokolo
Dr Vundli Ramokolo is Specialist Scientist at the South African Medical Research Council Health Systems Research Unit. She holds a Master of Public Health (Epidemiology) degree from the University of Cape Town and a doctorate from the University of Bergen, Norway. She is an Epidemiologist with a keen interest in (1) the interactions between nutrition and disease, (2) developmental origins of health and disease and (3) the relation between inequalities and health outcomes. She is a co-investigator in the South African prevention of mother-to-child-transmission evaluation (SAPMTCTE) and a Co-PI in a birth cohort assessing the utilisation of the CSG and its link to dietary diversity and child growth. Her current research addresses both the clinical and social determinants of child health outcomes. More specifically, the work assesses the effect of factors at the individual, household and small area level deprivation on birth outcomes in HIV exposed and unexposed infants.
Motlatso Rampedi
Motlatso Rampedi is a qualified demographer with an Honours and Master’s degree in Demography & Population Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She is now pursuing a PhD in Demography at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her interests lie in Health research, with specific focus on Noncommunicable diseases, HIV and sexual and reproductive health. Her PhD thesis is on comorbidities of chronic diseases among the adult population in South Africa. Some of her career highlights include forming part of a team of researchers that conducted research on an HIV prevention vaginal ring for women in four African countries (Malawi, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe) and working on a project to generate demand for voluntary male medical circumcision (VMMC) in South Africa.
Bontle Segobe
Bontle Segobe obtained her Masters in Population studies this year in April and will pursue her PhD in Population studies at University of KwaZulu-Natal from second semester of the year 2018. Her research interests are in drug use amongst youth. In 2014, she obtained her Degree in psychology from University of Johannesburg and later in 2015, obtained her honours in Psychology from University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is currently a research assistant at SARCHI: Economic Development, KwaZulu-Natal.
Stephen Ojiambo Wandera
Stephen Ojiambo Wandera is a Lecturer at the Department of Population Studies, Makerere University. He holds a PhD in Population Studies. He is a graduate of the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA). His PhD research focused on “Disparities in access to healthcare among older persons in Uganda”. He holds an MSc. in Population and Reproductive Health and a BSc. in Population Studies. His research focuses on: sexual and gender-based violence, reproductive health; inequalities in health; and inequalities in access to health(care) in Uganda.
Gerald Nathan Balekaki
Gerald Nathan Balekaki is a doctoral student in the UCT Department of Computer Science.
Chido Chinogurei
Chido Chinogurei is a Data Analyst at the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) and a Research Assistant at the Centre for Actuarial Research (CARe) at the University of Cape Town.University of Chicago
All Participants
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on investigating how the structure of data shapes research conclusions and broader sociological theory. Using machine learning methods, quantitative causal inference, and mapping techniques she primarily builds and analyzes large criminal justice datasets. She is especially concerned with the economics of fear, the working definition of homicide, and the general state of crime data. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota where she first began exploring the junction of computational methods and the social sciences.
Joshua Becker
Joshua Becker defended his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and will be starting as a postdoctoral fellow with the Kellogg School of Management and the Northwestern Institute of Complex Systems. His research on collective intelligence uses formal models and experimental tests to examine how social network structure shapes group decisions. His current research focuses on how communication networks can be harnessed to tap the wisdom of crowds and improve estimation accuracy on tasks such as financial forecasting, political beliefs, and medical diagnoses.
Jeremy Foote
Jeremy Foote is a PhD candidate in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern. He is a member of the [Community Data Science Collective](https://communitydata.cc). Using computational social science tools like social network analysis and simulation, he researches how people cooperate to create online collective goods, focusing particularly on how new projects get started and which ones grow.Live Stream
Matt Salganik, Chris Bail, Deen Freelon, David Lazer, Kristian Lum, Sendhil Mullainathan, Cynthia Rudin, and Duncan Watts.
Ned Smith
Ned Smith is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Sociology, core faculty member of the Northwestern Institute for Complexity (NICO), and faculty associate at the Northwestern Institute for Policy Research.
Sheena Erete
Sheena is an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. Sheena co-directs the Technology for Social Good | Research and Design Lab with Dr. Denise Nacu.
Agnes Horvat
Ágnes Horvát is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, an affiliated faculty of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), and the Department of Management and Organizations of the Kellogg School of Management (by courtesy).
Alex Engler
Alex is the Program Director and a Lecturer for the M.S. in Computational Analysis and Public Policy degree at the University of Chicago. In addition to teaching courses on Data Visualization and Large Scale Data Methods for policy research, he is a contributing Data Scientist at the Urban Institute.
Rayid Ghani
Rayid Ghani is the Director of the Center for Data Science & Public Policy and a Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Computation Institute.
Anna McKean
Anna McKean is a joint PhD student in Management & Organizations and Sociology. Her research interests include social movements, organizational change and influence, and non-market strategy. Currently, her research focuses on how corporations respond to, participate in, and influence social and political activism and policy change.
Basak Taraktas
Basak is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Her research centers on collective action and conflict. Much of her work is set in the context of regimes, contentious politics, and international economy, where she combines computational methods, network analysis, and qualitative methods. Basak’s co-authored chapter, When Does Repression Trigger Mass Protest?, was acknowledged by Cornell University with the 2015 Sidney Tarrow Best Article Prize for a paper written by a graduate student in the field of contentious politics or in European politics, sociology or history.
Daniel Trielli
Daniel Trielli is a PhD student at the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern. He is researching computational journalism and how news reaches the public in our increasingly algorithmically-defined world.
Dustin Stoltz
Dustin Stoltz is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Notre Dame and a Doctoral Affiliate with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He researches the production, distribution, consumption, and consequences of ideas, specifically ideas about the economy. As part of his dissertation, he applies network analysis and text analysis to a unique dataset of management consultants working in North America and Southeast Asia and the numerous articles they write.
Elizabeth Trudeau
Libby Trudeau earned her MA from the University of Chicago and is currently working on a PhD in sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focusses on cultural meaning-making particularly around the social construction of gender and sexuality. Her current projects focus on discourses regarding sex work and human trafficking in the U.S. She is excited about using mixed- methods techniques to gain creative insights.
Hanlin Li
Hanlin Li is a Ph.D. student in the Technology and Social Behavior program at Northwestern University. She is a member of the People, Space, and Algorithms Research Group. She studies how individuals and organizations use technology to support social causes. Taking mixed methods approaches, she designs, builds, and tests civic technologies that empower collective action online.
Hee Youn Kwon
Hee Youn Kwon received her PhD in Systems and Entrepreneurial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2018. At the University of Illinois, she had worked as a research and teaching assistant in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (ISE), the Computational Science and Engineering Program (CSE), and the Department of Computer Science (CS). She wrote her PhD dissertation on new developments in causal inference using Balance Optimization Subset Selection under supervision of Professor Sheldon H. Jacobson. Prior to Illinois, she received a B.S. in Mathematical Sciences from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and an M.Phil. in Economics from University of Oxford.
Igor Zakhlebin
Igor Zakhlebin is pursuing a PhD in Technology and Social Behavior, a joint program in Computer Science and Communications at Northwestern University. His current projects study how crowds of people come together to produce new cultural works and how they collectively pay attention to them. To answer these questions, Igor performs large-scale data analyses and builds computational tools to support them. His methods of choice are network analysis, machine learning, and computational modeling.
Iva Terwilliger
Iva Terwilliger is a PhD student in the Health Sciences Integrated PhD Program (HSIP) with a concentration in Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety. She studies teamwork in healthcare and is part of Nick Soulakis' lab. Iva is interested in using mixed methods to better understand how teamwork can be better utilized to improve the quality of patient care. Before coming to Northwestern, Iva worked as an RN at the VA and NYU Langone.
Jeremiah Bohr
Jeremiah Bohr is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on climate change denial (both in terms of organization and individual attitudes), household energy use and energy insecurity, and text analysis. He is currently using computational methods to study the communication of climate change by politicians on social media.
Josey VanOrsdale
Josey VanOrsdale is currently a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the sociology department. Her research interests are in biosociology, minority health disparities, and quantitative and computational methods. Her most recent research has encapsulated these interests by looking at the subbaccalaureate education level within the education-health gradient. For the past year, she has also worked as part of the LifeHD lab at the University of Nebraska. She has recently joined and looks forward to contributing to the Research, Evaluation, & Analysis for Community Health (REACH) lab.
Kyosuke Tanaka
Kyosuke Tanaka is a Ph.D. student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University. He is interested in network perception and cognition. His recent research explores how people decode, recall and learn the social networks around them.
Roland Adorjani
Roland Adorjani is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Sociology at University College Dublin. My dissertation focuses on large-scale discourse analysis of e-therapy conversations. His project is also linked to collaborations with enterprise partners in the mental e-health domain. Other research interests include large-scale social media discourse analysis of Twitter hashtag campaigns and science of science. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a data scientist at opening.io.
Sarah Otner
Sarah Otner is a Research Fellow in the Strategy & Organizational Behavior group at Imperial College Business School (London, UK). Her research uses economic sociology and social psychology in order to understand the mechanisms and the consequences of social status. Sarah's research focuses on prestige and expertise, and especially award competitions; her current research projects examine prize scarcity, prize sharing, establishing new prizes, and prize refusals.
Seyed Mohamad Hosseinioun
Mohamad Hosseinioun is pursuing a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has received his bachelor's and master's degrees in Industrial and Systems Engineering and his research focuses on Causal Inference and Prediction in Complex and Dynamic Systems. Using Statistical and Fuzzy Machine Learning methods, Network Analysis, and Econometrics he investigates the behavior of social and economic entities. He is especially interested in collective realities and collective decision making, where the outcome of the "whole" is significantly altered by the interconnected behavior of the "individual"s.
Shu Fu
Shu Fu is a third-year PhD at the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He studies American politics and political methodology. His research interests include American presidency, election, and public opinion. He is also interested in machine learning and causal inference in methods. He is currently working on multiple research projects. One project is related to the presidential partisan particularism, explaining how and why American presidents impact distributive politics and allocate disproportionately more federal funds toward their core states. Another project is to use advanced textual analysis to understand how first ladies communicate with the public. His dissertation is on American presidential public appeals and party building.
Yian Yin
Yian Yin is currently a PhD candidate of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences (IEMS) at McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Northwestern University. He is also affiliated to Social Complexity group at Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). His current research lies in the boundary of data mining, complex systems and computational social science, with a focus on understanding successes and failures in individual career from large-scale datasets. He received his bachelor's degrees in Statistics and Economics from Peking University in 2016.
Yini Zhang
Yini Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She studies how emergent communication technologies impact the dynamics and outcomes of political communication. Her research mainly concerns agency, algorithms, and attention in the hybrid media system. She is also interested in media psychology such as hostile media and fact-check effects in the new media environment. She does mixed method research by applying both traditional communication research methods, such as survey and experiment, and computational methods, such as social network clustering and topic modeling, to mining insights about individual communication and media system in an ever evolving media landscape.
Yixue Wang
Yixue Wang is a Ph.D. student in Technology and Social Behavior program at Northwestern University, a joint program between the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Communication Studies. Her research interests are in computational social science, computational journalism, and data science for social good. She is particularly interested in how social networks, media exposure, and geospatial environment influence propagation, reinforcement, or polarization of ideas and attitudes using network analysis, machine learning and geospatial analysis. She is a member of Data Science fellow at Northwestern Data Science Initiative.
Diego Gómez-Zará
Diego Gómez-Zará is a Ph.D. Student in the Technology and Social Behavior program at Northwestern University. He is a graduate research assistant of the SONIC Lab. He researches how team assembly is supported by technologies, diffusion of information through social media, and social network analysis.University of Helsinki
All Participants
Matti Nelimarkka
Matti Nelimarkka is a postdoc at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University and instructor at the Faculty of Social Science, University of Helsinki. His research examines the intersections of political science and data science as well as political science and human-computer interaction. His current work focuses on racism in hybrid media systems, circulation of news, political polarization, agendas in political communication, power of algorithmic systems and politics in human-computer interaction.
Momo the Robot
We visit Futurice, a software company in Helsinki. They tell when Momo the Robot met children.
Minna Ruckenstein
Minna Ruckenstein is an associate professor at the Consumer Society Research Centre and the Helsinki Center for Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki. She is the principal investigator of various research projects that explore and develop data-related practices and study aspects of digitalization. Ongoing research projects utilize digital methods in exploring topical and emotional rhythms and patterns in social media discussions, study children's cell phone uses, practices of content moderation and data activism.
Veikko Eranti
Veikko Eranti is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tampere. His work has focused on the intersection of societies and technological development, mainly democracy and participation. His ongoing research is focused on citizenship and political culture using methodological triangulation – combining ethnography and survey data with computational analysis. He holds a PhD in sociology and MA in Literature, both from the University of Helsinki.
Marta Kołczyńska
Marta Kołczyńska received her Ph.D. in sociology from The Ohio State University in 2017 and now is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research examines the causes and consequences of political attitudes and behavior, in particular the effects of educational stratification of these attitudes and behaviors on democracy, in cross-national perspective. She is also exploring the opportunities of ex-post harmonization of cross-national survey data.
Seraphine F. Maerz
Seraphine Maerz is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her research concentrates on the survival strategies of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and beyond. She is particularly interested in how autocratic leaders use the Internet to justify and stabilize their rule. Her current research project compares the language of leaders from authoritarian regimes and democracies by using quantitative text analysis. Seraphine received her PhD from Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary.
Arpita Biswas
Arpita Biswas is a Google PhD Fellow at the Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science. Her broad areas of interests include Algorithmic Game Theory, Machine Learning and Optimization. She is presently looking at problems in Computational Social Choice Theory and Fairness in Machine Learning. In Computational Social Choice Theory, she is working on the existence and hardness of various fairness notions while partitioning indivisible goods among agents. She has prior experience in multi-agent learning (multi-armed bandit), incentive mechanisms, facility location, planning and scheduling etc. and thus far she has worked on problems arising from real-world scenarios like online crowd-sourcing, resource allocation, dynamic pricing in transportation etc.
Anders Grundtvig
Anders Grundtvig is a Master student at Aalborg University where he study Techno-Anthropology. His field of interest is STS (Science and Technology Studies) where he uses digital methods to map and understand human behaviour and social interactions. His educational backbone builds on physical fieldworking and theories about interdisciplinarity and user-driven research. This backbone has reseantly been combined with digital methods that opens new forms of investigation where the quali-quanti is mixed together with digital-analouge research oppunities. He has reseantly been working on the project 'A Field Guide to fake news' that investigated how we can understand the ecosystems of fake news rather than just debunking them when found. And is now working on a project about personal digital data and trust
Ilse Pit
Ilse Pit is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, at the department of Communication Science. She is broadly interested in how behaviour online might be (or might not be) different from offline behaviour. In her PhD project, she focuses on how people use visual means to express themselves with brands online. Specifically, she uses computer vision and manual methods to investigate brand representation in user-generated content on Instagram. She is further interested in statistics and (increasing) open science practices.
Erjon Skenderi
Erjon Skenderi was awarded a Master's degree by Queens College CUNY. He is pursuing a doctoral degree at the Tampere University of Technology. Currently he is working as a researcher for the Big Match Project, facilitated by the Tampere University of Technology and University of Tampere. His research is focused on developing new approaches to model individuals based on data they generated online, i.e Big Social Data.
Hannes Rosenbusch
Hannes Rosenbusch is a PhD candidate in the Social Psychology department at Tilburg University. His research interests include the application of data science methods such as machine learning to psychological research.
Yunus Emre Tapan
Yunus Emre Tapan is a master student in Middle East Studies at Middle East Technical University. His main area of interests are social network analysis and digital anthropology. In his MA thesis, he focuses on the extremists groups in online sphere. As an area studies student, He choses online sphere, specifically Twitter, as a fieldwork. He worked as a research assistant in a couple of funded projects inquiring on online radicalization and employing computational social science methods.
Saana Rantanen
Saana Rantanen is a student in Sociology at the University of Turku, Finland. Currently she is studying lifestyle values of European parents in the different family structures and legal contexts. She is a social scientist with an interdisciplinary approach with curiosity of how machine learning can be applied to causal inference. Her research interests includes social inequality, social structures and mechanisms, sustainable development and futures studies.
Florian Wanders
Florian Wanders is a doctoral student in Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His research focuses on the social dynamics surrounding norm violations and intersects with psychology, behavioral economics, and political science. Next to his research he teaches statistics to bachelor and master students, and helps analyze data for his lab. Prior to his PhD candidacy, he received a B.A. in cognitive neuroscience and an M.Sc. in organizational psychology.
Polina Rozenshtein
Polina Rozenshtein is a last-year PhD student in Data Mining group of Aalto University. She received her MSc in Machine Learning and Data Mining from Aalto University in 2014. Her research interests include dynamic graph mining and social-networks analysis.
Jayesh Prakash Gupta
Jayesh Prakash Gupta, B.Eng., M.Sc. (Tech.) is a PhD Fellow at DARE Business Data Research Group & Novi Research Center, Laboratory of Industrial and Information Management at Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland. He is working in the field of computational social science. His research currently focuses on enhancing collaboration in different contexts by identifying weak tie from Big Social Data using analytics method like social network analysis, social set analysis. He is the recipient of a four year full-time fellowship from Tampere University of Technology Foundation for his Doctoral work.
Olli Kupiainen
Olli is a PhD candidate in Aalto University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management. He has studied organizational mergers. Currently he is studying a large-scale strategic change and how organizational members experience the change and make sense of the change through their discussion on enterprise social media platform. His research interests include applying text mining methods to his research. His background is in social and organizational psychology (BSc in psychology and MSc in social and organizational psychology). He is also a trained psychology teacher.
Kelsey LaMere
Kelsey LaMere is a second year PhD student with the Doctoral Program in Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences (DENVI) at the University of Helsinki. Her interests include stakeholder participation in decision-making, the intersection between science and policy, and environmental risk assessment, particularly in the context of aquatic natural resources. Kelsey’s current work involves the use of problem framing with fishery stakeholders to determine the potential effects of climate change on salmon and the salmon fishery. Additionally, she is currently working on a project exploring the differences in the perception of risk and risk assessment between scientific disciplines.
Sami Kotiranta
Sami Kotiranta is a political science doctoral student at the University of Helsinki with a research focus on data-informed decision-making and public sector leadership. He’s working as a research assistant at the United Nations University Word Institute of Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER) contributing mainly to the maintenance of a large government revenue dataset.
Robin Lybeck
Robin Lybeck is a PhD Candidate at the sociology department of Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. The theme of his thesis is digital participation in urban planning. Currently, he is finishing a project involving the use of machine learning for the analysis of sentiment and themes in citizen feedback. Previously he has worked on a research project involving mobile participation applications in Turku University and Örebro University.
Magnus Hanstén
Magnus Hanstén is a MSc student at the University of Helsinki where he study environmental sciences. His research interests include the field of marine resource management and marine spatial planning, fields which combine both the management of human behaviour and the environmental aspects. He is a firm believer in interdisciplinarity when it comes to developing systems where humans and nature can coexist in a sustainable manner. He is currently working on a study regarding the social dimensions of a fisheries management system called individual transferable quotas (ITQ). His study will consist of a comparison between Finland, Sweden and Denmark, which all are using ITQs for managing their fisheries.
Emilia Luoma
Emilia Luoma is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences (DENVI) in the University of Helsinki. In her PhD, she studies, how the sustainability of maritime traffic and the related activities in the Gulf of Finland can be improved. Graphical causal networks are used as the tool for formulating and visualizing the systemic thinking of stakeholders. The thesis consists of two case studies related to (1) the mitigation of the probability and consequences of an oil accident and (2) defining and gaining the objectives for sustainable leisure boating in the Gulf of Finland.
Juho Pääkkönen
Juho Pääkkönen is a doctoral student in Science and Technology studies and a computer science major student at the University of Helsinki. His work focuses understanding epistemologies of big data and objectivity claims in computational data analysis. He has also been involved in the analysis of racism discourse in Finnish media and social media.
Pihla Toivanen
Pihla Toivanen is a student in Master's programme in Data Science, University of Helsinki. Her work currently focuses on understanding media ecologies in Finland and internationally. She has also been employed as software developer at Futurice and Nokia Corporation.University of Washington
All Participants
Connor Gilroy
Connor Gilroy is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Washington. His research focuses on processes of community formation and change, and social visibility and acceptance of marginalized groups. In his research projects on gay neighborhoods and LGBTQ populations, he combines web and social media data with established data sources such as the US Census to investigate trajectories of neighborhood change, variations in prevalence of LGBTQ identity, and the micro-processes underlying changes in public opinion.
Bernease Herman
Bernease Herman is a data scientist and researcher at the University of Washington eScience Institute. Her research focuses on interpretable machine learning with work in fairness, accountability, and transparency. In her work, she collaborates with academic researchers, startups, and non-profits with applications of machine learning across domains. Bernease earned her BS in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Michigan. She spends her time Olympic weightlifting, rowing, as well as hunting down simplified explanations and analogies for new concepts.
Anna Lauren Hoffmann
Anna Lauren Hoffmann is an Assistant Professor with The Information School at the University of Washington. Her research is situated at the intersections of data, technology, culture, and ethics, with particular attention to the ways in which the design and use of information technology can promote or hinder the pursuit of important human values like respect and justice. Her work has appeared in various scholarly journals like New Media & Society, The Library Quarterly, First Monday, and JASIST. Her writing has also appeared in popular outlets, including The Guardian, Slate, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. You can find out more at annaeveryday.com or follow her on Twitter at @anneveryday.
Nina Cesare
Nina Cesare holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Washington. She is currently a digital data researcher at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Her work specializes in using statistical and machine learning approaches to leverage digital trace data as a means of answering social science questions. She has used digital data to explore a variety of topics, including health behaviors, inequality and mourning.
Didier Alia
Didier Alia is a postdoctoral research associate at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. Didier is an agricultural economist with broad interests in rural and agricultural development. His research focus on technology adoption and household welfare, and the linkages between the non-farm economy and the transformation of rural spaces in developing countries. He holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Kentucky in 2017, a MSc in Statistics and Economics from ISSEA (Cameroon) and a MSc in Mathematics from the University of Abomey-Calavi (Benin). He is aspiring to use innovative computational social science tools in analyzing economic development questions.
Daniel Anderson
Daniel Anderson is a Research Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. His research generally focuses on educational measurement and psychometrics, as well as evaluating differences in educational outcomes between schools (and sometimes classrooms within schools). He is particularly interested in how to best measure and evaluate the impact of features of the local community on these educational outcomes, specifically achievement gaps for marginalized groups.
Alina Arseniev-Koehler
Alina is currently a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles pursuing a PhD in Sociology. Substantively, her research interests include culture, cognitive sociology, language, and health and illness. Methodologically, she is interested in computational social science and machine-learning, with a focus on the computational analysis of language. Her Master’s research aimed to provide a cognitively plausible, computational account of the schemata activated by news reporting on obesity. Alina also enjoys learning and teaching new computational techniques and helps coordinate the Computational Sociology Working Group at UCLA.
Mike Babb
Mike Babb is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. He is interested in the spatio-demographic variation in population processes such as mortality, segregation, and political representation with a particular focus on internal migration. Mr. Babb has over a decade of experience in working with GIS, large databases, and the statistical modeling and visualization of data. Mr. Babb has previously worked for the United States Census Bureau and several Seattle-based companies such as Zillow, Community Attributes, and Integral GIS. Most recently, he held research positions with the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and the e-Science Institute. Currently, he is an instructor in Cartography and GIS at the University of Washington.
Kaylea Champion
Kaylea Champion is a PhD student in Communication at the University of Washington, where she is affiliated with the Community Data Science Collective. Her current research concerns underproduction in online public goods (knowledge and software that people want and need, but which is not being created) and the engagement of marginalized and minoritized people in peer production. Her methods are primarily quantitative and tend to focus on digital trace data. She has a professional background in IT and education, a degree in Critical and Creative Thinking from UMass Boston, in Computer Science from the University of Chicago, and in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.
Roxana Chiappa
Roxana is a PhD candidate in Higher Education at the University of Washington - Seattle. She is interested in unmasking how social and economic inequality gets reproduced at emerging economies, looking specifically at the career of doctorate holders, to whom she treats as the most meritocratic "intellectual elite" in the supposed "knowledge society". To complete this task, Roxana's dissertation has combined multiple sources of national surveys, qualitative interview, and CV data of university professors to identify how meritocratic criteria and social network ascription inform the career outcomes of university professors in Chile. In the near future, Roxana will apply similar methodology using data from Mexico and South Africa.
Gregg Colburn
Gregg is an assistant professor in the Department of Real Estate at the University of Washington. Gregg's scholarship focuses on housing policy, affordable housing, and homelessness. In his previous career, he worked as an investment banker and private equity professional. Gregg has a Ph.D. in public affairs from the University of Minnesota, an M.S.W. from the University of Minnesota, and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University.
Jacob Deppen
Jacob is a PhD candidate in Anthropology/Archaeology at UW. His current work is centered on contextual analyses of consumption and entanglement during the Iron Age in Mallorca, Spain. As a member of the Digital Archaeology Research (DigAR) Lab, he is interested in advancing the use of digital technologies and information in archaeology. This includes things like writing code to speed up or automate data analysis, creating novel data visualizations, designing mobile apps, and exploring ways that digital technologies can help archaeologists ask new questions, develop new methods, and generally do better research.
Francisca Gomez Baeza
Francisca is a PhD student in Sociology at University of Washington. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Her work has focused mostly on criminology and social control, from an interdisciplinary perspective. Currently, she is studying support for mob violence in Chile using survey data and digital data. She is also broadly interested in critical data science, critical theory, deviance, punishment, feminism, and political economy. Geographically, her main interest is in Latin America in particular, and in the Global South in general.
Kristi Govella
Kristi Govella is an Assistant Professor in the Asian Studies Program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. As a political scientist, she uses mixed methods approaches to examine the intersection of comparative politics and international relations in Asia, with a particular focus on Japanese politics, corporate lobbying, regional institutions, and the relationship between economics and security. Her publications include Linking Trade and Security: Evolving Institutions and Strategies in Asia, Europe, and the United States (2012). She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Vincent Hopkins
Vince is a PhD student in Political Science at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in legislative studies, research methods, and interest group lobbying. His dissertation uses data science to generate new knowledge about how interest groups interact with and influence politicians.
Holly Hummer
Holly is a PhD student in sociology at Harvard. She studies career and family decisions-making processes using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. She is particularly interested in investigating the use of computational text analysis techniques on interview data.
Parastoo Jabbari
Parastoo is a PhD student in Transportation Engineering at University of Washington. She works as graduate research assistant in Sustainable Transportation Lab. Her topics of interest are energy, environmental and equity aspects of transportation systems with secondary interest in data science. Her research has focused on data collection and behavioral modeling activities of the connected & automated vehicles and understanding how increasing levels of vehicle automation could affect residential location choices and travel demand.
Ekaterina (Katya) Jardim
Ekaterina (Katya) Jardim is a Post-Doc at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington, where she is working on Seattle Minimum Wage Study. Katya is a labor economist with research focus on local labor markets, labor demand and job search, and expertise on employer-employee matched data. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Duke University and a M.A. in Economics from the New Economic School. In August 2018, Katya Jardim will be joining Amazon.com as an Economist.
Ian Kennedy
Ian Kennedy is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Washington, where he studies race and gender using new data and experimental methods. His current work uses Craigslist rental housing listings to examine processes of racial segregation in Seattle. He received his BA from Earlham college in History in 2008, and an MA in experimental humanities from NYU in 2017. He is a recipient of the Clarence and Elissa M. Schrag Graduate Fellowship from the University of Washington.
Charles Kiene
Charles Kiene is a social computing researcher and MA / PhD student in the University of Washington's Department of Communication. His work investigates organizational behavior and communication of online communities and gaming teams. He is aspiring to become a mixed methods researcher, combining interview and ethnographic data with computational data to answer social scientific questions from all possible angles.
Savannah Larimore
Savannah is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, place, and health in the United States with an emphasis on race. Her current research projects investigate how alternative measures of race, including observed race, correspond to health disparities within conventional, self-identified racial and ethnic groups. She is also working on various independent and collaborative research projects on the social determinants of racial and ethnic health disparities. Savannah enjoys traveling, camping, yoga, tennis, and taking advantage of the many restaurants in Seattle.
Sara Blalock Ng
Sara Blalock Ng is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington. Prior to coming to UW, she was an undergraduate in Applied Mathematics and Linguistics at the University of Utah. Her research interests are varied issues in Natural Language Processing, especially computational phonology. She is focused on text-free language processing and processing in low-resource languages. Her current research concerns semantic representations of kinship in spoken dialogue.
Katy Pearce
Dr. Katy E. Pearce is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and holds an affiliation with the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies. Her research focuses on social and political uses of technologies and digital content in the transitioning democracies and semi-authoritarian states of the South Caucasus and Central Asia, but primarily Armenia and Azerbaijan.Nandana Rao
no bio.Suzanne Spencer
no bio.
Sondra Stegenga
Sondra Stegenga MS, OTR/L, M.Ed. is a Ph.D. Candidate and Graduate Research Assistant for the University of Oregon Special Education – Early Intervention program. She holds a Bachelor of Science in behavioral science, Master of Science in occupational therapy, and a Master of Education in educational leadership – special education administration. Her research focuses on early assessment and intervention, research to practice - implementation science in early intervention systems, and early social emotional development and mental health related to school readiness and long-term outcomes. She has been studying the use of big data and non-traditional data sources related to early childhood and early intervention systems with particular attention to ethical use of large scale data in underrepresented and vulnerable populations.
Huatong Sun
Associate Professor of Digital Media and Global Design at the University of Washington Tacoma. She researches how to design and innovate for usable, meaningful, and empowering technology in this increasingly globalized world to bridge cultural differences, informed by theories and methodologies from rhetoric and technical communication, human-computer interaction, informatics, intercultural communication, global media studies, British cultural studies, and science and technology studies. She is the author of “Cross-Cultural Technology Design” (Oxford University Press, 2012), and working with Oxford on a new book on global social media design.
Chuck Lanfear
Chuck is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology whose interests lie in the application of novel statistical and computational methods to questions at the intersection of criminology, sociology, and demography. His research agenda focuses on exploring the emergent properties of human social behaviors embedded in dynamic environments. For example, his current projects broadly examine how demographic and built environment characteristics of places influence social control and situational opportunity to determine the distribution of crime in time and place.2017
Princeton University
All Participants
Matthew Salganik
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he is affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers: the Office of Population Research, the Center for Information Technology Policy, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. He is the author of the forthcoming book *Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age.*
Chris Bail
Chris Bail is the Douglas and Ellen Lowey Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University and a member of the Interdisciplinary Program on Data Science, the Duke Network Analysis Center, and the Duke Population Research Institute. His research examines how non-profit organiations and other political actors shape social media discourse using large text-based datasets and apps for social science research. He is the author of *Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream*.
Sandra Gonzalez-Baillon
Sandra González-Bailón is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Prior to joining Penn, she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, where she is now a Research Associate. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, data mining, computational tools, and political communication. She leads the research group DiMeNet (Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication).
Deborah Estrin
Deborah Estrin is Associate Dean and Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech in New York City and a Professor of Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is founder of the Health Tech Hub and directs the Small Data Lab at Cornell Tech, which develops new personal data APIs and applications for individuals to harvest the small data traces they generate daily. Estrin is also co-founder of the non-profit startup, Open mHealth.
Gary King
Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University, based in the Department of Government (in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences). He also serves as Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. King and his research group develop and apply empirical methods in many areas of social science research, focusing on innovations that span the range from statistical theory to practical application.
Michael Macy
Michael Macy is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology and Director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory at Cornell. With support from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and Google, his research team has used computational models, online laboratory experiments, and digital traces of device-mediated interaction to explore a variety of familiar but enigmatic social patterns such as critical mass and mobilization, network-based contagion, and political polarization.
Winter Mason
Winter Mason is a Data Scientist at Facebook. He studies social networks, social media, crowdsourcing, and group dynamics. His research combines traditional psychological methods such as lab experiments with new methods such as online data collection with crowdsourcing and machine learning. His research has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, among other leading journals. He received his PhD in Social Psychology and Cognitive Science from Indiana University in 2007.
Markus Mobius
Markus Mobius is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research who studies the economics of social networks. He builds models of learning, coordination, and cooperation within social networks, with a particular focus on trust. His research employs lab and field experiments to study social networks in real settings. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, and published in leading journals such as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He completed his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000.
Brandon Stewart
Brandon Stewart is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University where he is also affiliated with the Politics Department, the Office of Population Research, the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering, and the Center for the Digital Humanities. His work develops new quantitative statistical methods for applications across computational social science. He completed his PhD in Government at Harvard in 2015. His work develops new tools for automated text analysis.
Vissého Adjiwanou
Vissého Adjiwanou is a Senior Lecturer in Demography and Quantitative Methods at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), and adjunct professor at the Université de Montréal (Canada). His research interests include maternal and reproductive health, family dynamics, and female employment in sub-Saharan Africa. He will chair a session on Family transformation in SSA at the 28th International Population Conference (IPC) in Cape Town. Vissého is also interested in computational science where he tries to document discussions on gender and family formation of African immigrants in the West (Europe and North America) on social media, and their effects on their peers in Africa.
Kathryn Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on investigating how the structure of data shapes research conclusions and broader sociological theory. Using machine learning methods, quantitative causal inference, and mapping techniques she primarily builds and analyzes large criminal justice datasets. She is especially concerned with the economics of fear, the working definition of homicide, and the general state of crime data. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota where she first began exploring the junction of computational methods and the social sciences.
Abdullah Almaatouq
Abdullah Almaatouq is currently a Research Assistant at the Human Dynamics group and pursuing a PhD in Computational Science at MIT. He received dual masters’ in Computational Engineering and Media Arts & Sciences from MIT, and a bachelor degree from the School of Electronics & Computer Science at Southampton University in the UK. Abdullah’s work includes conducting theoretical and empirical research on human behavior using innovative approaches and tools ranging from complex systems theory and agent-based modeling, to network analysis, econometric techniques, and behavioral and experimental methods. Abdullah is passionate about people, their stories, and how they can be understood computationally.
Lisa Argyle
Lisa Argyle is a postdoctoral researcher in the Politics Department at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2016. Her research is in political psychology and political behavior, where she uses a combination of survey data, experiments, and computational methods to examine how people form their political opinions and express those opinions to others. She is particularly interested in understanding the role of interpersonal persuasion in democratic participation.
Elliott Ash
Elliott Ash is Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Warwick and Visiting Scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Study of Democratic Politics. Elliott earned a PhD in economics from Columbia University. Elliott's research combines techniques from applied microeconometrics and machine learning for empirical analysis of law and politics, with a focus on text as data. Before obtaining his PhD, Elliott received a BA (Plan II) from University of Texas at Austin, a JD from Columbia Law School, and an LLM (international criminal law) from University of Amsterdam. He also provided consulting work for the Department of Justice investigation of discriminatory practices at Ferguson Police Department.
Joshua Becker
Joshua Becker is a PhD candidate with the Network Dynamics Group at the University of Pennsylvania with a professional background in facilitation and decision-making. His research on collective intelligence uses formal models and experimental tests to examine how social network structure shapes the quality of group decisions. His current research focuses on how communication networks can be harnessed to tap the wisdom of crowds and improve estimation accuracy on tasks such as financial forecasting and medical diagnoses.
Anjali Bhatt
Anjali Bhatt is a PhD student in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to graduate school, she received her bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard and spent several years consulting with organizations on their social impact strategy. Anjali's research focuses on using computational techniques (such as agent-based modeling and text analysis) to understand organizational culture and how it emerges, evolves, and diffuses, as well as ways in which it affects and is affected by diversity and inequality in organizations.
Moritz Büchi
Moritz Büchi is a Senior Research and Teaching Associate in the Media Change & Innovation Division, Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research (IPMZ), University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research examines new media use, digital inclusion and inequality, online privacy, digital well-being and overuse, and comparative and computational research methods.
Bo Cowgill
Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School. He received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and won the Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship and Robert Beyster Fellowship. His research interests are in applied microeconomics and strategy, particularly productivity, technological innovation, organizational economics and platforms.
Anna Filippova
Anna Filippova is a postdoctoral researcher with the Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University, where she works towards supporting sustainable open collaborative community development, particularly in the context of Free/Open Source Software and Wikipedia communities. She has received her Ph.D from the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include social norms and conflict in virtual environments, inclusive group processes in diverse teams, and the role of face-to-face events in supporting the development of online peer-production communities. She has also been involved in organizing Free/Open Source community events, such as the Abstractions conference and Ruby monthly meet-ups.
Connor Gilroy
Connor Gilroy is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Washington. He studies LGBTQ communities and populations to understand social processes of visibility, acceptance, and assimilation. His current research investigates patterns of sociodemographic change in gay neighborhoods. Additionally, he has projects on improving demographic estimates of queer populations with social media data and on using agent-based models to explore the macro-level impacts of the interpersonal process of coming out as LGBTQ.
Ian Gray
Ian Gray is pursuing a PhD in the Department of Sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. He was previously a Research Fellow at the Medialab of Sciences Po, in Paris, and received a Master in City Planning from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is interested in how environmental problems become economic problems and his current research is focused on the politics of calculating and preparing for the risks and impacts from climate change.
Jeffrey Jacobs
Jeffrey Jacobs is a PhD student in Political Science at Columbia University. His research aims to utilize natural language processing, network analysis, and machine learning techniques to gain new insights into the history of political thought, labor and community organizing, economic inequality, and online labor markets. Before coming to Columbia he received an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University and Bachelor's degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Economics from the University of Maryland.
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is a postdoctoral research fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. Her educational career has spanned four countries – after an undergraduate at Harvard, she did a master’s degree between Germany and Spain, and recently finished her DPhil (PhD) in demography and sociology jointly affiliated with the University of Oxford, UK and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany. Her research projects span a number of substantive areas in demography, including gender and other social inequalities in demographic processes, marriage and fertility change, mortality and health, and ethnicity and migration. She is also interested in methodological innovations in population studies including agent-based, microsimulation and ‘big data’ approaches.
Antje Kirchner
Antje Kirchner is a Research Survey Methodologist at RTI International and an Adjunct Research Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln. Her research addresses challenges in survey methodology, including ways to examine nonresponse bias using machine learning techniques, adaptive/responsive design, assessing the quality of survey and administrative data, eliciting and analyzing answers to sensitive questions,detecting problems in the respondent-interviewer interaction, and how to improve response quality in web surveys using paradata. Her research has been published in journals such as Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association.
Peter Krafft
Peter Krafft is a graduating PhD student at MIT co-advised by Sandy Pentland and Josh Tenenbaum, soon to be living the bohemian life of an itinerant postdoc. His main formal training is in statistics, machine learning, and computer science, but he now studies computational social science and collective intelligence, often from the perspective of cognitive science. His current research focuses on understanding how people form beliefs about the world through their own exploration and through interaction with each other.
Molly Lewis
Molly Lewis is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on understanding how linguistic meaning varies across development and across speakers of different languages. She is also interested in issues related to scientific replicability and reproducibility. She received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from Stanford University and her BA in Linguistics from Reed College.
Charlotte Lloyd
Charlotte Lloyd is a PhD candidate in Sociology with a secondary field certificate in Computational Science and Engineering. Her mixed methods research, including new computational methods for social science, focuses on how symbolic and cultural boundaries are related to structural inequality within organizations and communities. Charlotte received her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011.
Allison Morgan
Allison Morgan is pursuing her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is interested in using data mining, machine learning, social network analysis and causal inference to develop and test hypotheses about the origins and effects of gender imbalance within academia. Prior to graduate school, Allison worked as a data scientist for two years at a small tech start-up in Portland, OR. She earned her B.A. in physics from Reed College.
Matti Nelimarkka
Matti Nelimarkka is a PhD Candidate at University of Helsinki and Aalto University with background both in political science and computer science. His research interests include supporting participation in various contexts (e.g., classroom, political participation) and studying online political communication. His work spans from human-computer interaction to political science and has often interdisciplinary nature. He's also the cofounder of computational social science study program at University of Helsinki.
Kivan Polimis
Kivan Polimis is an incoming postdoctoral research fellow at Bocconi University’s Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington (UW) in 2017. Recently, Kivan has enjoyed facilitating public-private partnerships as the program coordinator for UW’s Data Science for Social Good, a Civic Technology and Engagement Fellow with Microsoft, and a Big Data-Scientist Training Enhancement Program (BD-STEP) Predoctoral Fellow with the Department of Veteran Affairs. His research focuses on health development and applying statistical techniques to investigate disparities in health care, transportation, and the legal system.
Ethan Porter
Ethan Porter is an assistant professor at George Washington University in the School of Media and Public Affairs. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2016. His dissertation, The Consumer Citizen, investigates the ways in which everyday consumer decision-making affects political attitudes and behavior. His research interests include public opinion, political communication, political psychology, and experimental design. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Omidyar Network. His research has appeared in Political Communication, and he has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications.
Maria Y. Rodriguez
Maria Y. Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. She received her Ph.D from the University of Washington (Seattle). Her research interests intersect demography, data science, housing policy and social welfare. Currently, she has three active areas of research - (1) identifying the impacts of the U.S. foreclosure crisis on Latinos; (2) exploring how supervised machine learning can be used to scale up theoretically driven qualitative coding, and (3) using Twitter to understand the lived experience of marginalized communities in the United States.
Hirokazu Shirado
Hirokazu Shirado is a researcher in the field of social networks and human-machine interactions. he is taking courses to complete his doctorate in Department of Sociology at Yale University where he has also studied at Human Nature Lab at Yale Institute for Network Science. His current research focuses on the experimental analysis of the emergence of cooperative action in social networks. His goal is to engineer social systems with more affordable participation. His study was published by Nature, Nature Communications, and other journals.
Rochelle Terman
Rochelle Terman is a post-doc at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science with a designated emphasis in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines international norms, gender and advocacy, with a focus on the Muslim world, using a mix of quantitative, qualitative and computational methods. She also teaches computational social science in a variety of capacities.
Adaner Usmani
Adaner Usmani is a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. His dissertation examines the rise and fall of labor movements over the 20th and early 21st centuries, and considers the effects of these facts on politics and public opinion. In other work, he has written about American mass incarceration, with an eye on the racial politics of its origins and reproduction.
Tong Wang
Tong Wang is an Assistant Professor of Management Sciences at the Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016. Her general research interests include interpretable machine learning and applied data mining, with its application in computational criminology, healthcare, social marketing, etc. Her research on crime data mining is the second place winner in 'Doing Good with Good OR' at INFORMS 2015. Her work on crime data mining has been reported in multiple media including Wikipedia.
Michael Yeomans
Michael Yeomans is a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. He studies the Behavioral Science of Big Data - how new datasets and algorithms are changing our daily life, and expanding the researcher toolbox in social science. Michael completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Toronto and in 2014, and completed a PhD and an MBA in Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Taylor Brown
Taylor Brown is a doctoral student in the Duke Sociology department, and is associated with the Duke Network Analysis Center. She has a general fascination with computational methods and the issues that arise with social media and other found data. She holds an MA in sociology from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MSc in evidence-based social intervention from the University of Oxford. Prior to beginning her PhD, Taylor worked on issues of intercountry adoption abuse and for a non-profit in Ghana. She also fulfilled an appointment at the National Science Foundation in the division of Social and Economic Sciences.