2026 AI in Social Science Conference
How is artificial intelligence (AI) going to change social science and how is social science going to change how AI is used? This cross-disciplinary conference will facilitate dialogue and generate insights into innovative methodologies, novel datasets, and emerging technologies that can reshape our understanding of the world and push the boundaries of knowledge across disciplines and fields. Attendees include experts from economics, sociology, law, behavioral sciences, artificial intelligence, and more.
Jens Ludwig, the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy will deliver the keynote address.
If you have any questions, please contact bfi-events@uchicago.edu.
View the 2025 conference here.
Agenda
Registration and Breakfast
6th Floor Lounge
Opening Remarks
Anjali Adukia, University of Chicago
Worker Rights in Collective Bargaining
Benjamin Arold, University of Cambridge (Presenter)
Elliott Ash, ETH Zurich
W. Bentley MacLeod, Yale University
Suresh Naidu, Columbia University
(How) Do We Teach Emotions?
Jake Nicoll, University of Chicago (Presenter)
Anjali Adukia, University of Chicago
Matthew Bonci, ETH Zurich
Paula Dastres, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Emileigh Harrison, University of Texas at Austin
Teodora Szasz, University of Chicago
Break
Perceptions of Race in the Labor Market
Sulin Sardoschau, Humboldt University Berlin (Presenter)
Pedro C. Sant’Anna, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Aiko Schmeißer, Columbia University
Skin Tone Penalties: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Colorism in Football
Donia Kamel, Brown University (Presenter)
Guillermo Woo-Mora, Paris School of Economics
Lunch
1st Floor Dining Room
General Social Agents
Benjamin Manning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Presenter)
John Horton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Causal Effect Estimation with Latent Textual Treatments
Omri Feldman, Hebrew University (Presenter)
Amir Feder, Hebrew University
Jann Spiess, Stanford University
Amar Venugopal, Stanford University
Break
The Anatomy of a High-Return Question: Text, Skills, and the Economics of Achievement Measurement
Jonathan Moreno-Medina, University of Texas at San Antonio (Presenter)
Eric Nielsen, Federal Reserve Board
Viviana Rodriguez, University of Texas, San Antonio
Effective Personalized AI Tutors via LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning
Angel Tsai-Hsuan Chung, University of Pennsylvania (Presenter)
Hamsa Bastani, University of Pennsylvania
Osbert Bastani, University of Pennsylvania
Ling-Chieh Kung, National Taiwan University
Botong Zhang, University of Pennsylvania
Break
Gender Disparities in Judicial Attention: Audiovisual Evidence from Appellate Oral Arguments
Aniket Kesari, Fordham University (Presenter)
Elliott Ash, ETH Zurich
Shuttle departs from David Rubenstein Forum to Conference Dinner
Conference Dinner and Keynote
7:00 p.m. | Jens Ludwig, University of Chicago (Keynote Speaker)
Breakfast
6th Floor Lounge
Narrative Entanglement
Adam Brzezinski, London School of Economics (Presenter)
Luis Garicano, London School of Economics
Surveying the Past: Historical Language Models as Synthetic Survey Participants
Guohui Jiang, University of Cologne (Presenter)
Daniel Göttlich, University of Zurich
Hans-Joachim Voth, University of Zurich
Dominik Loibner, University of Zurich
Break
Who Talks to Whom? Using Images and Vision Language Models to Study Informal Interactions at Academic Conferences
Siwei Cheng, New York University (Presenter)
Wenhao Jiang, Duke University
In Your Own Words: Computationally Identifying Interpretable Themes from Free-Text Survey Data
Jenny Wang, Harvard Business School (Presenter)
Aliya Saperstein, Stanford University
Emma Pierson, University of California, Berkeley
Lunch
1st Floor Dining Room
12:15 p.m. | Group photo before heading downstairs for lunch
Courts of Tomorrow: Evidence from a Nationwide Rollout of Generative AI
Sultan Mehmood, New Economic School (Presenter)
Elliott Ash, ETH Zurich
Christoph Goessmann, Imperial College
Human Decisions and Machine Predictions in Multistage Systems
Ashesh Rambachan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Presenter)
Jason Baron, Duke University
Will Dobbie, Princeton University
Richard Lombardo, Harvard University
Joseph Ryan, University of Michigan
Closing Remarks
Anjali Adukia, University of Chicago