iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

👩‍💻🧑‍💻👨‍💻 Want to apply LLMs to text analysis in your research? Join Timothy Dörr and Baird Howland tomorrow for a hands-on workshop! 💻 No prior computational experience needed. Food will be served! 📅 Sept. 9, 2–5 PM 📍 ASC 300 @asc.upenn.edu 💻 Bring a laptop & Google account! No installation needed!

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

That result points to a challenge for science communication. Prompts intended to make research easier to understand or more useful can inadvertently make its conclusions sound stronger than the evidence warrants

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

But does causal wording actually change what readers think the evidence shows? The researchers conducted experiments with 1,105 participants. They found that readers exposed to causal wording were more likely to believe that a study provided causal evidence.

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

How common is it? The researchers examined 194,631 cross-sectional studies, which generally provide evidence of association rather than causation. They found causal claims in about 46% of titles or abstracts, with causal overclaiming increasing roughly threefold from 2000 to 2024

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Congratulations, Dr. Samar Haider! 🎓🖥️ @samarhaider.bsky.social Samar successfully defended his dissertation, "A Computational Approach to News Production", studying how computational methods can help us systematically understand what news organizations choose to cover and how they cover it.

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

This work is part of the broader NOMAD effort to expand access to human mobility data and develop methods, tools, and guidance for analyzing it reliably!! 🛰️Learn more about NOMAD nomad.seas.upenn.edu

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Measures like "stops🛑" are building blocks for studying human mobility. But how reliably can we identify them in sparse GPS data?🛰️📍 At the CSS Showcase, Paco Barreras, Andrés Mondragón, and Caroline Chen shared work on the robustness of stop detection in sparse location data

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

What have we been working on at the CSS Lab? 👀 A quick look inside our Spring Showcase, with lightning talks, posters, new tools, and works in progress across computational social science. A few highlights from the day 🎥 And of course, more to come!

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Using nearly 19,000 human survey responses collected across 40 waves during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Elliot Pickens(@elliot-p.bsky.social), David Rothschild, Jenny Wang, and Jonas Mikhaeil compared LLM-generated and human survey responses. #IC2S2

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Samar Haider @samarhaider.bsky.social presented Whose Voice Matters? Measuring Political Representation in News Quotations, with Chris Callison-Burch and Duncan Watts @duncanjwatts.bsky.social! #IC2S2

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Amir Tohidi @atohidi.bsky.social presented at #IC2S2 Measuring "Copaganda": An Analysis of How U.S. National News Covers Crime, with Baird Howland, Billy Pierce, Duncan Watts @duncanjwatts.bsky.social, and David Rothschild @davmicrot.bsky.social.

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

At #AOM2026, Bethany Hsiao presented Fairness Preferences in Algorithmic Decision-Making as part of the symposium AI in Organizations: Challenges to Face and Opportunities to Embrace. @aomconnect.bsky.social

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Homa @homahm.bsky.social presented work with Pavel Savgira, Elisa Kreiss, and Amir Ghasemian @amir-ghasemian.bsky.social, on how LLM-generated summaries change the political lean of news articles by examining when summarization moderates political lean and when it preserves more partisan content.

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Josh Nguyen@joshnguyen.bsky.social presented work with Upasana, Samar, Bryan, Neil, and Duncan on using LLM-based agent simulations to study the consequences of unbalanced online news consumption. It examines how political attitudes vary with the partisan content agents are systematically exposed to

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Timothy Dörr and Baird Howland presented their work on US and UK news media coverage of Gaza, leveraging GPT-5 to extract structured descriptions of violence. The study examines volume of coverage, emotional weight of violence descriptions, and naming of perpetrators.

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

At today's #IC2S2 Methods and Measurement session, Linnea Gandhi @linneagandhi.bsky.social presented her study with Elizabeth Tipton and Duncan Watts, which tests whether research syntheses can predict the results of new studies and highlights the challenges of producing generalizable knowledge.

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Do falsehoods persuade more than selective facts? Jenny Allen presented Falsehoods Offer No Persuasive Advantage Over Selective Facts: Evidence from Real-World Political Misinformation at today's #IC2S2 Plenary Lightning Talks with David Rothschild, Duncan Watts, Amir Tohidi, and Samar Haider!

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Gayoung (@gayoung-jeon.bsky.social) led a hands-on tutorial on comprehensive TikTok data collection for computational social science at #IC2S2'26 Participants learned practical methods for collecting and analyzing TikTok data. Great work on a successful tutorial!

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

#CSSLab at Penn attended #NetSci2026 in Boston! A highlight was the keynote by Dr. Watts and Dr. Strogatz, who shared the stories and questions behind their work on small-world networks and its lasting impact on network science. We also enjoyed catching up with Dr. Barabási and Dr. Albert!

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CSSLab at Penn @csspenn.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

Last week, a powerful coalition—Meta’s #AIforGood, #DirectRelief, #CrisisReady & the #CSSLab at Penn—gathered to explore how AI, open data & mobility insights can support emergency preparedness ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. 🧵 #DisasterResponse #FIFA #WorldCup2026

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