New Horizons for AI Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities Conference

The Hong Kong Jockey Club University of Chicago Academic Complex | The University of Chicago Francis and Rose Yuen Campus in Hong Kong
168 Victoria Road
Mount Davis, Hong Kong Island
Hong Kong SAR

The rise of artificial intelligence has led to a wealth of new technologies and methods for humanistic and social scientific research. At the same time, AI is rapidly transforming the very societies and cultures we study—reshaping how people communicate, create, learn, and organize. We are delighted to bring together leading scholars from the University of Chicago and the greater Hong Kong area for this inaugural conference exploring both dimensions of this transformation.

The conference will examine how AI can serve as a powerful tool for research—analyzing texts, images, and social patterns at unprecedented scale, generating hypotheses, and revealing structures invisible to traditional methods. We will also consider how researchers can understand and interpret these systems: what they learn, how they reason, and where they fail.

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UChicago Speakers:

• James Evans, Department of Sociology
• Jeffrey Tharsen, Forum for Digital Culture
• Anjali Adukia, Harris School of Public Policy
• Yuan Chang Leong, Department of Psychology
• Hoyt Long, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
• Isaac Mehlhaff, Department of Political Science
• Robert Vargas, Department of Sociology

Call for Posters

We invite poster submissions for the inaugural conference on New Horizons for AI Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, bringing together scholars from the University of Chicago and the greater Hong Kong area.

Topics of Interest

We welcome submissions addressing any aspect of AI and the social sciences or humanities, including but not limited to:

• AI as a research tool: computational text analysis, image and video analysis, social simulation, automated discovery, and other novel methods
• Interpretability and evaluation: understanding how AI systems learn, reason, and fail
• AI agents in social life: autonomous systems in markets, organizations, communication, and everyday interaction
• AI and culture: generative models, machine-produced art and text, and the changing landscape of cultural production
• Human-AI collaboration: complementarity, augmentation, and the future of knowledge work
• Governance, safety, and ethics: designing AI systems for fairness, accountability, and human flourishing
• Theoretical perspectives: what AI reveals about cognition, creativity, language, and social order

Submission Guidelines

Please submit a one-page abstract (maximum 500 words) describing your research question, methods, and key findings or arguments. You may include one optional figure, table, or diagram if it aids comprehension. The figure should fit within the one-page limit.

Submissions should be in PDF format.

Deadline: January 5, 2026

Submit to HERE

Accepted presenters will be notified by [TBC date] and will display their posters during a dedicated session at the conference.

We look forward to your contributions.