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

When:

Monday, January 26, 2026 9:00 am - Tuesday, January 27, 2026 5:30 pm

Where:

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

Description:

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.

REGISTER FOR THIS IN-PERSON EVENT

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

Conference Schedule

Monday, January 26, 2026

Time	Program
8:30 am	Light breakfast
8:30-8:45 am	Welcome Elizabeth O’Neill, Interim Leader of the UChicago HK Campus
8:45-9:00 am	Welcome and Introduction James Evans & Jeffrey Tharsen, The University of Chicago
9:00-9:30 am	James Evans, The University of Chicago Information Laundering: How Information is Dirtied and Cleaned Across Digital, Policy, and AI Ecosystems
9:30-10:00 am	Robert Vargas & David Hackett, The University of Chicago Approaches to Evaluating Public Sector Use of AI
10:00-10:30 am	Bruce Yue Yu, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Small & Precise: Fine-Tuning Small Language Models for Computational Social Science Research
10:30-11:00 am	Refreshment Break
11:00-11:30 am	Anjali Adukia, The University of Chicago (How) Do We Teach Emotions?
11:30 am-12:00 nn	Thorben Pelzer, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology The Japanese Governance of Asia: AI-Assisted Approaches to Mining, Cleaning, and Structuring Historical Prosopographical Data
12:00 nn-12:30 pm	Yan Liu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Harnessing GeoAI and Social Media Data for Mental Health Surveillance
12:30–1:30 pm	Lunch buffet
1:30-2:00 pm	Isaac Mehlhaff, The University of Chicago Interpersonal Discussion and Persuasion in Political Settings
2:00-2:30 pm	King-wa Fu, The University of Hong Kong Hong Kong News Media’s Decade Shift in Role Performance: a LLM-based analytical approach
2:30–3:00 pm	Tony Tam, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Focusing Attention: Computational Translation of Abstract Sociological Concepts for AI Tools
3:00–3:30 pm	Bin Chen, The University of Hong Kong “Mysterious Power from the East”: Nationalism and Enchanted Determinism in Chinese AI Discourse
3:30-4:00 pm	Gleb Papyshev, Lingnan University AI Regulation and Consumer Protection
4:00-4:30 pm	Jaemin Lee, The Chinese University of Hong Kong AI as an Interpretive Partner: Recovering Social Hierarchies and Cultural Narratives at Scale
4:30-5:30 pm	Poster Presentations
5:30-7:00 pm	Dinner Buffet on Campus

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Time	Program
9:00 am	Light breakfast
9:00-9:30 am	Hoyt Long, The University of Chicago LLMs as Cultural Agents: Writer, Teacher, Critic
9:30-10:00 am	Michael Yan Hon Chung, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology AI for the Humanities: A Case of Manchu OCR
10:00-10:30 am	Sammy Li Kin Sum, Hong Kong Baptist University Ancient Chinese Bronze Bells, 3D Visualization, and AI
10:30-11:00 am	Refreshment Break
11:00–11:30 am	Javier Cha, The University of Hong Kong The Transformer Paradigm and the Next Frontiers of Digital History
11:30 am-12:00 nn	Jeroen van Ameijde, The Chinese University of Hong Kong AI-Based Workflows for Measuring Urban Liveability
12:00 nn-12:30 pm	Grant Hamilton, The Chinese University of Hong Kong An Introduction to Literary Consensus Communities
12:30–1:30 pm	Lunch buffet
1:30-2:00 pm	Yuan Chang Leong, The University of Chicago Decoding the partisan brain using ideologically aligned language models
2:00-2:30 pm	Janet H. Hsiao, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Comparability between AI and human cognition and its role in psychological research and ethical AI
2:30–3:00 pm	Maciej Kurzynski, Lingnan University Perplexity Arcs in Chinese Literature: Cognitive Stylometry between Formalism and Predictive Modeling
3:00–3:30 pm	Linus Huang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Hegemonic Machines
3:30-4:00 pm	Lin Qiu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Using Large Language Models to Predict Public Opinion: Accuracy and Biases
4:00-4:30 pm	Chi Man Kwong, Hong Kong Baptist University Dark Heritage Under a Football Field: How Digitizing Historical Data Helps Find and Interpret a Forgotten Part of WWII Hong Kong History
4:30-5:00 pm	Jeffrey Tharsen, The University of Chicago The Future of Academic Research: Multidisciplinary Modeling and AI Infrastructures
5:00-6:00 pm	Reception on Campus Campus Tour (5:00-5:30 pm, optional)

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 10, 2026

Accepted presenters will be notified by January 15, 2026, and will display their posters during a dedicated session at the conference.

We look forward to your contributions.