This event is at capacity. If you have any questions, please email bfi-events@uchicago.edu.


The 2025 AI in Social Science Conference was hosted on September 25-26, 2025.

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 facilitated dialogue and generated 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 included experts from economics, sociology, law, behavioral sciences, artificial intelligence, and more.

View the 2024 conference here.


PHOTOS 

2025 AI in Social Science Conference

Agenda

Thursday, September 25, 2025
8:30 am–9:00 am

Registration and Breakfast

6th Floor Lounge

9:00 am–9:10 am

Opening Remarks

Anjali Adukia, University of Chicago

Jens Ludwig, University of Chicago

9:10 am–9:55 am

The Political Impact of Ideas: Evidence from 17th Century England

Leander Heldring, Northwestern University (Presenter)

Daron Acemoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Steven Pincus, University of Chicago

James Robinson, University of Chicago

Santiago Torres, University of Chicago

9:55 am–10:40 am

Designing Human-AI Collaboration: A Sufficient-Statistic Approach

Alex Moehring, Purdue University (Presenter)

Nikhil Agarwal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alexander Wolitzky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

10:40 am–10:55 am

Break

10:55 am–11:40 am

Calibrated Coarsening in Human-AI Interaction, Theory and Experiments

Ruru Hoong, Harvard University (Presenter)

Bnaya Dreyfuss, Harvard University

11:40 am–12:25 pm

Sparse Autoencoders for Hypothesis Generation

Kenny Peng, Cornell University (Presenter)

Nikhil Garg, Cornell University

Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University

Rajiv Movva, University of California, Berkeley

Emma Pierson, University of California, Berkeley

12:25 pm–1:20 pm

Lunch

1st Floor Dining Room

1:20 pm–2:05 pm

The Cost of Ending Extreme Poverty

Roshni Sahoo, Stanford University (Presenter)

Joshua Blumenstock, University of California, Berkeley

Paul Niehaus, University of California, San Diego

Leo Selker, University of California, Berkeley

Stefan Wager, Stanford University

2:05 pm–2:50 pm

Causal Inference on Outcomes Learned from Text

Jann Spiess, Stanford University (Presenter)

Iman Modarressi, Stanford University

Amar Venugopal, Stanford University

2:50 pm–3:05 pm

Break

3:05 pm–3:50 pm

Interviews

Jason Sockin, Cornell University (Presenter)

Elliott Ash, ETH Zurich

Soumitra Shukla, Harvard Business School

3:50 pm–4:35 pm

Poverty Targeting at Scale: Algorithmic vs. Traditional Approaches

Raymond Guiteras, North Carolina State University (Presenter)

Emily Aiken, Carnegie Mellon University, Africa

Anik Ashraf,  Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Joshua Blumenstock, University of California, Berkeley

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Yale University

4:35 pm–5:20 pm

Policymaking in the American States, 1787-2020

Nicolas Longuet-Marx, Stanford University (Presenter)

Charles Angelucci, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Elliott Ash, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich

5:45 pm

Shuttle departs from David Rubenstein Forum to Conference Dinner

6:15 pm

Conference Dinner and Keynote

By Invitation Only

7:00 p.m. | Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University (Keynote Speaker)

Friday, September 26, 2025
8:30 am–9:00 am

Breakfast

6th Floor Lounge

9:00 am–9:45 am

Program Evaluation with Remotely Sensed Outcomes

Ashesh Rambachan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Presenter)

Rahul Singh, Harvard University,

Davide Viviano, Harvard University

9:45 am–10:30 am

AI-Generated Content Meets AI Moderation: Toward Trustworthy Governance of Online Speech

Anna Lorimer, University of Chicago (Presenter)

Nick Feamster,University of Chicago

Molly Offer-Westort, University of Chicago

10:30 am–10:45 am

Break

10:45 am–11:30 am

Legacy on Deck: Skill Transmission and Occupational Dynasties in the Royal Navy

Guo Xu, University of California, Berkeley (Presenter)

Joachim Voth, University of Zurich

11:30 am–12:15 pm

Personalized Recommendations in EdTech: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Emil Palikot, Stanford University (Presenter)

Keshav Agrawal, Stanford University

Susan Athey, Stanford University

Ayush Kanodia, Stanford University

12:15 pm–1:15 pm

Lunch

1st Floor Dining Room

1:00 p.m. | Group photo before heading back upstairs

1:15 pm–2:00 pm

Judge AI: Assessing Large Language Models in Judicial Decision-Making

Shivam Saran, University of Chicago (Presenter)

Eric Posner, University of Chicago

2:00 pm–2:45 pm

Revealing Deep Human Preferences Through LLMs

Erzo Luttmer, Dartmouth College (Presenter)

Omar Abdel Haq, Harvard University

Amitabh Chandra, Harvard University

Tomáš Jagelka, University of Bonn

Joshua Schwartzstein, Harvard University

2:45 pm–3:00 pm

Closing Remarks

Anjali Adukia, University of Chicago

Jens Ludwig, University of Chicago

3:00 pm

Conference Concludes