The Computational Social Science Lab is an interdisciplinary research group that works at the intersection of AI, data, and society. We are part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

About us Explore our research

Selected Research

SPIN: Sparsifying and Integrating Internal Neurons in Large Language Models for Text Classification
Difan Jiao, Yilun Liu, Zhenwei Tang, Daniel Matter, Jürgen Pfeffer, and Ashton Anderson. ACL Findings 2024.
Designing Skill-Compatible AI: Methodologies and Frameworks in Chess
Karim Hamade, Reid McIlroy-Young, Siddhartha Sen, Jon Kleinberg, and Ashton Anderson. ICLR 2024.
ICL-Markup: Structuring In-Context Learning using Soft-Token Tags
Marc-Etienne Brunet, Ashton Anderson, and Rich Zemel. NeurIPS R0-FoMo Workshop 2023.
People Perceive Algorithmic Assessments as Less Fair and Trustworthy Than Identical Human Assessments
Lillio Mok, Sasha Nanda, and Ashton Anderson. CSCW 2023.
Echo Tunnels: Polarized News Sharing Online Runs Narrow but Deep
Lillio Mok, Michael Inzlicht, and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2023.
Reddit in the Time of COVID
Venia Veselovsky and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2023.
Implications of Model Indeterminacy for Explanations of Automated Decisions
Marc-Etienne Brunet, Ashton Anderson, and Rich Zemel. NeurIPS 2022.
Mimetic Models: Ethical Implications of AI that Acts Like You
Reid McIlroy-Young, Russell Wang, Siddhartha Sen, Jon Kleinberg, and Ashton Anderson. AIES 2022.
Learning Models of Individual Behavior in Chess
Reid McIlroy-Young, Russell Wang, Siddhartha Sen, Jon Kleinberg, and Ashton Anderson. KDD 2022.
Quantifying the Creator Economy: A Large-Scale Analysis of Patreon
Lana El Sanyoura and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2022.
Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms
Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson. Nature 2021.
All publications

Blog

Postdoctoral Fellow: Societal Aspects of AI
Apply to work with Ashton Anderson and Rich Zemel on the societal aspects of AI
Join our group!
We are recruiting graduate students to start Fall 2024. Apply to join us!
Social media's social structure
A new method for quantifying online social structure and applying it to political polarization on Reddit.
Imagine All The People: A Social Map of Music on Reddit
What connects the Foo Fighers, James Blunt, and Eminem?
Introducing Maia: a Human-Like Chess Engine
We develop and introduce Maia, a machine learning model that captures human style in chess.

People

Ashton Anderson
Harsh Kumar
Generative AI for social good
3rd-year PhD
Jessica (Yi Fei) Bo
Human-centered design of intelligent systems
1st-year PhD
Karim Hamadeh
Building better AI partners
2nd-year M.Sc.
Lillio Mok
Measuring and improving digital welfare
5th-year PhD
Marc-Etienne Brunet
Explanations for ML systems
5th-year PhD
Zhenwei (Joseph) Tang
Using LLMs to teach and explain
1st-year PhD