Computational social scientist

I study how people and AI shape one another across networked public life.

My work follows social systems from networked public life, through AI-mediated practice, to emerging agent societies.

Explore the research Read my CV

Research map

One question, across three forms of social interaction

How can we understand social behavior well enough to build more trustworthy online public spaces?

  1. Human ↔ Human

    Networked public life

    How do people organize, influence one another, and form beliefs in networked environments?

    Platforms · influence · beliefs

  2. Human ↔ AI

    AI-mediated practice

    How does AI reshape human interpretation and judgment—and whose outcomes change?

    Mediation · judgment · fairness

  3. AI ↔ AI

    Agent societies

    Which social dynamics emerge when AI agents coordinate, lead, and form norms?

    Coordination · leadership · norms

Selected work

The same three interactions, in practice

Five studies follow the same movement—from human networks, through human–AI practice, to agent societies.

Human ↔ Human

Networked public life

  1. 2010 The Web Conference What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? Characterizes the topology and information dynamics of early Twitter at whole-platform scale.
  2. 2025 Nature Human Behaviour A Semantic Embedding Space for Human Beliefs Uses language models and online debates to map how beliefs cohere and which beliefs people adopt next.

Human ↔ AI

AI-mediated practice

  1. 2026 AIES When AI Becomes Routine Traces how AI became ordinary—and increasingly invisible—infrastructure across a decade of Korean Go commentary.
  2. 2026 Findings of EMNLP Same Symptoms, Different Severity? Tests whether identical symptoms receive different LLM severity judgments under gendered cues, and develops a symptom-grounded mitigation.

AI ↔ AI

Agent societies

  1. 2026 TMLR Leadership as Coordination Control Tests when explicit leadership helps multi-agent LLM teams recover from an initially wrong majority.

About

Large-scale evidence, social questions.

I am an Associate Professor at Indiana University Bloomington. I use large-scale behavioral data, network analysis, natural language processing, and experiments to study how people behave, interact, and organize online, and how those dynamics change when AI enters the system.

For the lab's full publication archive, current news, team, and openings, visit SoDA Lab.