Ph.D. Candidate: Jun Luo Date & Time: Friday, May 16, 2025, from 1:15p – 2:15p PT Location: Rolfe 2303A Advisor(s): Jungseock Joo, Stuart Soroka Dissertation Title: Media Bias and Trust in the Generative AI Era: Examining AI-Generated News, Minority Representation, and the Impact on Public Trust and Radicalization. Abstract: While a growing body of research has examined how algorithmic decision-making reinforces […]
Organized by the Communication and Politics Group... ABSTRACT: The National Internet Observatory (NIO) is an NSF-funded project aimed to help researchers study online behavior. Participants install a browser extension and/or mobile apps to donate their online activity data along with comprehensive survey responses. The infrastructure, housed at Northeastern University, starting in 2025, will offer approved […]
Title: Media Representations and Their Broader Implications for Intergroup Relations Abstract: This talk highlights the role of media as an ecosystem in cultivating societal divisions within multicultural contexts. Utilizing correlational, experimental, and longitudinal research methodologies, I provide a comprehensive analysis of the nuanced effects on both racial majority and minority audiences. The findings reveal […]
Title: The emergence of communication in infancy: Development and evolution Abstract: Do gestures truly precede vocalization in modern human development and in the evolutionary origin of language? Or is vocalization more foundational for communication? Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the evolutionary origins of language. Speculations on the evolution of language have evoked […]
Title: Exploring Political Communication Strategies of Women’s Rights and LGBTQ+ Communities Over Time Abstract: This study uses a mixed methods approach to explore the communication approaches of organizations advocating for greater political power, access, and representation for women and LGBTQ+ Americans over time. First, I identify a diverse sample of organizations and publications advocating for greater […]
Title: Threat in the form of News: Examining the ways that news coverage of immigration constrains systemically marginalized groups Abstract: Although U.S. media portrayals of racial, ethnic, and other historically excluded identities vary based on the group, platform, and genre, generally speaking these groups have tended to be both underrepresented and, at times, unfavorably depicted across the […]
TITLE: AI & Social Manipulation ABSTRACT: In this talk, I will overview my decadelong journey into understanding the implications of online platform manipulation. I'll start from detecting malicious bots and other forms of manipulation including troll accounts, coordinated campaigns, and disinformation operations. The impact of my work will be corroborated with examples of findings enabled by […]
ABSTRACT: Researchers who conduct population surveys face escalating costs and declining response rates, as they aim to collect data that is representative, trustworthy, and publishable. Sample recruitment is often prohibitively expensive to researchers, and cheap convenience samples are fraught with representation and quality issues. NORC at the University of Chicago has built a survey panel […]
Title: Emotional Representation: Identifying the Characteristics and Consequences of Elected Officials Mirroring the Emotions of Their Constituents (with Christopher Stout, Gregory Leslie, and Elizabeth Schroeder) Abstract: In this study, we identify a previously overlooked component of representation, which we label ‘emotional representation.’ Emotional representation occurs when elected officials mirror the dominant emotional state of […]
Title: The brain in the social world: Integrating approaches from psychology, neuroscience, and social network analysis Abstract: This talk will cover work integrating theory and methods from psychology, neuroscience, and social network analysis to examine how people track, encode, and are influenced by the social networks that they inhabit. One set of studies tests if, when, […]
