Propose the BEST Computational Scientists (in the World)

[jamesallenevans]

Propose one or more computational social scientists (as an Issue Comment below) we can invite for our seminar series this year, including a 1-2 sentence defense of why others might want to hear from them. Post by Wednesday, 10/2 @ 11:59pm.

Then Uprank ("thumbs up") 5 other proposals by Thursday, 10/3 @ 5pm.

Professor Evans will invite the top-most upranked people for the seminar over the course of the year.

[dario-marino]

Ben Golub (Near)

Matt Elliot (Far away)

You would like to hear both for the same reason, they do computational network economics, you can look up their research here:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Qozc9X0AAAAJ&hl=en

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DkiStE0AAAAJ&hl=en

I discovered them for the supply network formation paper

[muhua-h]

I hope to recommend some researchers who are actively producing work in the domain of LLM and social science.

Steve Rathje: a Post-doc at NYU Psychology, a raising star in computational psychology. His recent PNAS paper GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis investigates GPT's understanding of latent social science constructs.

Johannes C. Eichstaedt: a computational social scientist at Stanford Psychology. He has some recent work in Machine Psychology, studying the cognitive and behavioral differences between LLMs and human.

Tom Griffiths: computer scientist and cognitive scientist at Princeton. He is famous for his work in cognitive modeling. Recently, he had many papers published on modeling cognition using LLMs.

Jindong Wang: he is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. He has multiple papers at interesting interactions of LLM and social science. For example, one work discovered that emotional prompting can enhance the performance of LLM and located the hidden layers responsible for emotional stimuli.

Shunyu Yao: researcher at OpenAI, the author of influential papers on LLM such as Tree of thoughts(similar ideas are implemented in openai's O1) and Embers of Autoregression (suggesting that the paradigms established to study human may not be applicable to AIs). His research borrows insights from cognitive science.

Michal Kosinski: he is a computational behavioral scientist at Stanford Business School. His work centers on examining the psychological processes in Large Language Models, and leveraging AI, ML, Big Data, and computational techniques to model and predict human behavior. I personally find it interesting that Dr. Michal Kosinski tends to study ethically controversial topics in computational social science, and their implications are often thought-provoking.

[gabereichman]

Jay McClellan from Stanford: Dr. McClelland is a cognitive psychologist who is best known for his work in parallel distribution processing in cognition, notably this. His research has ranged from decision making to learning to semantic cognition to mathematical cognition.

[gtriberti9]

Omar A Guerrero: Head of Computational Social Science Research at The Alan Turing Institute Mastodon. Omar researches on different aspects of CSS, including methodology, large-scale data analysis, and different modelling techniques. He also enjoys translating this research into useful tools to help solve problems of public interest, leading him to work with various governments and international organizations around the world.

[yunfeiavawang]

Julia Ticona: Assistant Professor of Communication at Upenn. Ticona’s research investigates digital inequalities in the world of work. She uses the methods of qualitative social science to examine the role of gender, race, and class in technologies of low-wage work, including phones, platforms, and management systems.

[Mengyang-Cao]

Leonardo Bursztyn is the Saieh Family Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. His research studies the interplay between individuals and their social environments.
https://home.uchicago.edu/~bursztyn/index.html

[AnqiW02]

John Horton has a really great paper about Automated Social Science: Language Models as Scientist and Subjects, which showed that the LLM’s predictions are dramatically improved if the model can condition on the fitted structural causal model (SCM) and that LLM knows more than it can (immediately) tell. I would like to know and build on more about this study.

[ymuhannah]

Dr. Filippo Menczer is the Luddy Distinguished Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at Indiana University, where he directs the Observatory on Social Media and conducts research at the intersection of computational social science, network science, and data science. His work, particularly on analyzing and modeling the spread of information and misinformation in social networks, is crucial for understanding the dynamics of media manipulation and offers valuable insights for developing strategies to combat these challenges. Inviting Dr. Menczer would provide us with a comprehensive view of how computational techniques can be applied to solving real-world problems in social media.

[yangyuwang]

Dr. Sameer Srivastava is Ewald T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy and chair in Management of Organizations at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. He is also the co-director of Computational Culture Lab. His works unpack the interrelationships between the culture of social groups, the cognition of individuals in these groups, and the social networks that people form 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 relate to career outcomes.

Dr. Amir Goldberg is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Amir Goldberg’s research lies at the intersection of cultural sociology, data science and organization studies. He is interested in understanding how social meanings emerge and solidify through social interaction, and what role network structures play in this process. As the co-director of the computational culture lab, Amir uses and develops computationally intensive network- and language-based methods to study how new cultural categories take form as people and organizational actors interact.

[tyeddie]

Dr. Traci Hong is a communication scholar whose work utilizes computational methods, particularly social media analytics and machine learning, to drive attitudinal and behavioral changes that contributes to positive health outcomes.

Her research projects cover areas such as vaping, tabacco use, and vaccine hesitancy, demonstrating how computational communication research can effectively inform health promotion and policy change.

[wfitz-bb]

Michael Jankowski -- works on political issues like populism which are very currently relevant

"Michael Jankowski currently works as interim professor for comparative political economy at the University of Bremen. He is also a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oldenburg. His research interests include the analysis of electoral systems, parties, gender representation and social science research methods."

[natashacarpcast]

Dr. Caitlin Iverson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's doing data science work for health promotion and I think that's a perspective we haven't seen much at UChicago and would be nice to get to know.

[ubaidjamal0]

Dr. Dan Jurafsky is a professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University. One of his most interesting works is on how linguistic biases manifest in LLMs, specifically in the responses they provide. I think his work on the intersection of LLMs and NLP systems, and how they have a tendency to perpetuate biases might be useful to get to know.

[fabrice401]

Daniel Spulber, Professor of International Business at Northwestern University. His work on intellectual property, patents, and innovation is highly relevant to computational social science. His expertise in platform markets and major patent cases make his insights invaluable for understanding the complex dynamics of innovation in today’s digital economy.

[ZW-PaulWang]

Eleanor Power is a social anthropologist at the London School of Economics (LSE). Her research focuses on how religious practices and beliefs influence social networks and cooperation. Her work often intersects with topics like altruism, cooperation, and the role of religion in society, providing insights into how individuals’ religious actions affect their social standing and relationships within communities. The combination of ethnographic methods and network analysis in her research is highly relevant to computational social science.