The Workshop on AI's impact on Society and Advancements in Technology

Siwei Cheng (opens in new tab), New York University

Siwei Cheng is an Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University. Prior to joining the faculty of NYU, Cheng was Assistant Professor of sociology at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Public Policy and M.A. in  Statistics from the University of Michigan. She received her B.A. in Economics and Statistics from Peking University. Dr Cheng’s research encompasses various areas of stratification and inequality, labor market, and quantitative methodology. Her work has been published in leading social science and general science journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her current work studies how economic polarization affects jobs, workers, families, and communities.

James A. Evans (opens in new tab), The University of Chicago

James Evans is Max Palevsky Professor of Sociology, Director of Knowledge Lab, and Faculty Director of Computational Social Science and the Trusted Intelligence in Society Institute at the University of Chicago. His research uses large-scale data, machine learning and generative models to understand how collectives think and what they know. This involves inquiry into the emergence of ideas, shared patterns of reasoning, and processes of attention, communication, agreement, and certainty. Thinking and knowing collectives like science, Wikipedia or the Web involve complex networks of diverse human and machine intelligences, collaborating and competing to achieve overlapping aims. Evans’ work connects the interaction and trust between these agents with the knowledge they produce and its value (and harms) for themselves and the system.

Junming Huang (opens in new tab), Princeton University

Junming Huang is an Associate Research Scientist at the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China, Princeton University. His research interests lie in a range of computational social science topics including social media and networks analysis, science of science, and natural language processing. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University during 2016 – 2018. He received his PhD from Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014, and Bachelor of Science in Physics from Tsinghua University in 2007.

Bernard J. Koch (opens in new tab), University of California

Bernard Koch is a sociologist interested in organizational issues in science and their epistemic/ethical repercussions. His current work uses both qualitative and computational methods to show how benchmarking in machine learning has shaped the research questions that get pursued in the field, with significant consequences for scientific progress, safety, and equity. His work has been published at NeurIPS, WWW, and Science, among other venues. He is a current PhD candidate at UCLA and incoming postdoctoral fellow at the Northwestern Center for Science of Science and Innovation. He will join the Sociology faculty at the University of Chicago in 2024.

Tianguang Meng (opens in new tab), Tsinghua University

Tianguang Meng is a full professor in the Department of Political Science at the School of Social Sciences in Tsinghua University, the director of The Research Center on Data and Governance, and the executive director of Tsinghua Computational Social Science Institute. His research interest includes government responsiveness, politics of information and politics of Digital Governance in China. His articles have been published in Comparative Political Studies, Governance, World development, and Comparative Politics. He earned the B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Peking University. Previously, He was a visiting scholar in Harvard University and University of California, San Diego.

Patrick Park (opens in new tab), Carnegie Mellon University

Dr. Patrick Park is a computational social scientist with research interests in the structure and evolution of large-scale social networks. His research focuses on how people form and maintain social ties and how the broader social, economic and natural environments affect this process. He conduct social network research at a number of thematic intersections, including social contagion, economic sociology, social psychology, the diffusion of innovation, and social movements using empirical data that capture population-scale online social interactions. He welcome interdisciplinary collaboration with researchers from a broad range of backgrounds, from computer scientists, applied mathematicians, social scientists, and management scientists. His research were published in Science, Social Networks, PLoS One, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, and Big Data and Society.

Currently, He is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D) in Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. Before joining CMU, he was postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. He received his doctoral degree in sociology at Cornell University.

Anna Rogers (opens in new tab), IT University of Copenhagen

Dr. Anna Rogers is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the IT University of Copenhagen. Her main research area is Natural Language Processing. She is currently a co-program-chair of ACL 2023.

Before moving to Denmark, she was a postdoctoral research associate in the University of Massachusetts, working with Anna Rumshisky on sentiment analysis, question answering and analysis of Transformer-based language models. Then she was a postdoctoral associate and assistant professor at the Center for Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen, focusing on AI and society. She hold a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Language and Information Sciences at the University of Tokyo (Japan).

Jitao Sang (opens in new tab), Beijing Jiaotong University

Jitao Sang is a Full Professor and the Head of the Computer Science Department at Beijing Jiaotong University. His research interests include multimedia content analysis, network data mining, and trustworthy machine learning. He has published one book and co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed papers. As the first or second author, he has been recognized with paper awards at CCF-recommended conferences for 8 times. He is the recipient of ACM China Rising Star, the Beijing Outstanding Youth Fund, and the National High-Level Young Talents Program.

Beibei Shi, Microsoft Research Asia

Beibei Shi is senior research program manager at Microsoft Research Asia, taking the responsibility of MSR Asia Open Collaborative Research Program and StarTrack Program, as well as university relations between MSR Asia and universities in Central China, South China, China Hongkong and Taiwan. Besides, she takes the responsibility of the strategic cooperation between Microsoft Research Asia and the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China. She focuses on the research theme of Resilience and Trust, has successfully led several open collaborative research sub-themes establishment with related MSR Asia research team, such as AIER Platform, OpenNetLab, Computing for Carbon Negative and Responsible AI.

Before joined MSR Asia, she joined IBM Research China Institute as a researcher in the cross field of environment and computer, after earned master’s degree in environmental science school of China Agricultural University in 2019. Then, she joined the University Partnership Department of IBM China as a program manager. During that period, she participated to design and led to execute industry-academic cooperative research program “green horizon plan”, making very solid contribution to technology innovation of air pollution control.

Fangzhao Wu, Microsoft Research Asia

Fangzhao Wu is now a senior researcher at Social Computing (SC) group, Microsoft Research Asia. He joined MSRA in 2017. His research mainly focuses on responsible AI, privacy protection, natural language processing, and recommender systems.

Fangzhao Wu received the Ph.D. and B.S. degrees both from Electronic Engineering Department of Tsinghua University in 2017 and 2012 respectively.

Xing Xie, Microsoft Research Asia

Dr. Xing Xie is a senior principal research manager of Microsoft Research Asia. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1996 and 2001, respectively. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in July 2001, working on data mining, social computing and ubiquitous computing. During the past years, he has published over 300 papers, won the ACM SIGKDD 2022 test-of-time award, the ACM SIGKDD China 2021 test of time award, the 10-year impact award honorable mention in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020, the 10-year impact award in ACM SIGSPATIAL 2019, the best student paper award in KDD 2016, and the best paper awards in ICDM 2013 and UIC 2010. He is a Fellow of China Computer Federation (CCF) and the IEEE, and a Distinguished Member of ACM.

Yu Xie (opens in new tab), Princeton University

Yu Xie is Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Sociology and has a faculty appointment at the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies, Princeton University. He is also a Visiting Chair Professor of the Center for Social Research, Peking University. His main areas of interest are social stratification, demography, statistical methods, Chinese studies, and sociology of science. His recently published works include: Marriage and Cohabitation (University of Chicago Press 2007) with Arland Thornton and William Axinn, Statistical Methods for Categorical Data Analysis with Daniel Powers (Emerald 2008, second edition), and Is American Science in Decline? (Harvard University Press, 2012) with Alexandra Killewald. Xie joined the faculty Aug. 1, 2015, after 26 years at the University of Michigan, most recently as the Otis Dudley Duncan Distinguished University Professor of Sociology, Statistics and Public Policy and a research professor in the Population Studies Center at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Xie’s main areas of interest are social stratification, demography, statistical methods, Chinese studies and sociology of science. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Sinica and the National Academy of Sciences.  His appointment is part of a University initiative to deepen the regional studies curriculum in the social sciences. The Center on Contemporary China is part of PIIRS, and Xie’s appointment marks the first joint faculty appointment by PIIRS and a department in the social sciences.

Weining Zhang (opens in new tab), Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business

Dr. Zhang Weining joined Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in 2012 as the Academic Director of the MBA program, Academic Director of Executive Education programs, and Associate Professor with tenure. Dr. Zhang graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas with a Ph.D. in Management (Accounting) and has taught at the National University of Singapore Business School. He is dedicated to studying and teaching business models and financial analysis and is highly regarded by students. Dr. Zhang received the IBM Global Faculty Award in 2017. Dr. Zhang has presented at important institutions, universities, and conferences, such as the 10th China-US High-Level Political Party Leaders Dialogue dinner in the United States, the Development Research Center of State Council of China, the National Economic Research Bureau of U.S., Peking University, Tsinghua University, American Accounting Annual Conference, American Finance Annual Conference. Dr. Zhang also has extensive influence in the industry. He has provided consulting services or served as a senior advisor for many companies, including Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com. He has been deeply involved in the strategic, product, operational, and financing planning of dozens of internet startups and transforming enterprises, and written case studies for Ant Financial, Baidu Union, Tencent IP Strategy, IBM Artificial Intelligence, and so on.

Zike Zhang (opens in new tab), Zhejiang University

Prof. Zi-Ke Zhang is the full Professor at Zhejiang University. His main research interests is the interdisciplinary area of digital intellectualization, including: computational social science, complex systems. He has published 100+ peer-reviewed journal papers in the related fields.