Wednesday / CS Seminar

October 28 / 11:00 AM

Hybrid / Mudd 3514

Speaker

Aaron Shaw, Northwestern University

Talk Title

Beyond heuristics: A meta-scientific agenda for generative AI-powered social research

Abstract

Applications of LLMs and generative AI for the simulation of social and behavioral evidence are expanding rapidly. During these early days, norms and standards of evidence remain incoherent and grounded in heuristics inherited from earlier paradigms. This talk argues for a meta-scientific agenda to ground the use of LLMs for social research. Such an agenda should advance around three core principles: (1) validation; (2) transparency; and (3) observation. I illustrate each of these with examples from recent and ongoing work.

Biography

Aaron Shaw is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) at

Northwestern University; Co-Founder of the Community Data Science Collective; faculty affiliate of the Northwestern Center for HCI+Design, the Institute for Policy Research, and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs; as well as a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He studies organizing, participation, and governance in online communities, especially ones that create public information resources and digital infrastructure. His most recent work includes projects on online community governance, LLM-based social science, AI impacts on digital public infrastructure, and a new book, Peer Production, published by MIT Press.

Research Area/Interest: human-computer interaction, social science, social computing, human-centered AI