I’m an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University College Dublin and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I head the SIMS lab, the EQUATE initiative, and the website socialpolls.org. Occasionally I write for the Uncommon Good blog.

My research contributes statistical methods to understand and augment public opinion formation within our digital information society’s systems. My endeavors are geared towards ensuring that tomorrow’s AI and social media are representative, fair, explainable, and ready to interact with our open world for public good.

• To deepen our understanding of public opinion, I innovate statistical methods for extracting representative signals about the public from social media and news media.
• To augment public opinion formation, I pioneer representative social media designs facilitating political discourse and machine learning methods adhering to legal provisions, e.g., by preventing discrimination, while providing AI explanations.

Research areas: fair and explainable machine learning, data science, computational social science, social media, network science, causality, open-world learning.

News

2026

• Our opinion article “Research Opportunities and Challenges of the EU’s Digital Services Act” has been accepted for publication in The Communications of the ACM!

2025

• Our paper “Election Polls on Social Media: Prevalence, Biases, and Voter Fraud Beliefs” received Best Paper Honorable Mention 🏆 at ICWSM’25! Congratulations to our team!

• Our study “Political Biases on X before the 2025 German Federal Election” has been broadcast by ZDF (German public TV channel). I attach our Uncommon Good blog post and a research report. Later this year we produced a more comprehensive report for the 2025 presidential election in Poland, subsuming our research for Germany and Poland.

2024

• Our eLetter in Science received wide media coverage from The Wall Street Journal, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Haaretz, ScienceInsider, and other media outlets!

• Science published our eLetter, along with an editorial and article discussing its implications. In it, we call into question a widely reported Science paper, funded by Meta, which suggested that Facebook’s news feed algorithm is effective at preventing misinformation.

• Our research on election polls on social media (socialpolls.org) has been covered by various media outlets, including Tech Policy Press, El País, Fox network, Phys.org, and reached the front page of Reddit Science!

2023

• I’ve been quoted in the BusinessWest article “AI Promises To Impact The Workforce In Unexpected Ways”
• I was honored to give a talk about a path towards fair and explainable automated decision-making and to participate in a panel at a Responsible AI workshop at Carnegie Mellon University. I outline our vision in these two slides.
• UMass Amherst released an article quoting me and my graduate course on Responsible AI. In today’s globalized world, we need to design techno-social systems with social responsibility in mind.

2022

• I instructed for the first time my Responsible AI course.
• We successfully organized the NLP competition SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual news article similarity that attracted over 30 research teams and released the largest labeled multilingual dataset of news articles published across 124 countries.

Press coverage before 2022

• El Mundo, El ‘oráculo’ de los bytes, pdf
• El Mundo, Los entresijos de Twitter
• Extensive coverage by outlets such as WSJ and NYT of the research for the Observatory on Social Media, which used my fast dynamic network visualization algorithm, osome.iu.edu

My novel course: Responsible AI. Image generously contributed by Mohamed Hassan.