May kept GEIS in full conference-prep mode while the group also took its research public at Maryland Day.
Conference Season Ramps Up
Members are heading into a busy stretch of abstract deadlines and presentations.
The group submitted several abstracts to IC2S2: Cody Buntain and a team of students and a postdoc have two accepted abstracts, one on emerging areas of online influence, spanning case studies from Hong Kong, January 6, and Ukraine, alongside a second abstract with Giovanni Ciampaglia and PhD student Do Won Kim on the VIOLETS AI chatbot. Julia Mendelsohn, Yiwei Xu, and Krystal Gong also have a persuasion-focused paper heading to IC2S2.
At POLMETH, Masha Krupenkin is presenting work on automated essay scoring, and Patrick is presenting on using LLMs to analyze narratives in tweets.
At ICWSM in Los Angeles at the end of the month, Cody Buntain served as one of three program co-chairs, presiding over 316 attendees and 186 papers. Proceedings are available here: https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/issue/view/735
GEIS at Maryland Day
GEIS brought its research to the public at Maryland Day on April 25. The VIOLETS chatbot demo — which lets visitors ask questions about Maryland elections — drew strong interest and engagement from attendees, a promising sign for the group’s public-facing civic tech work.
Growing the Research Community
We welcomed guest introductions from Tiziano Piccardi (Johns Hopkins), who is now a regular part of GEIS meetings.
