On September 2, the Computational Social Science Institute and the School of Public Policy’s Data Analytics and Computational Social Science (DACSS) program organized the ninth annual Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) conference. This year’s event was held at Boston University as a pre-conference of the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) annual meeting in collaboration with APSA's Political Communication pre-conference. UMass Amherst faculty members Kelsey Shoub (public policy & CSSI) and Justin Gross (public policy & DACSS) co-chaired the event, with additional program committee members Doug Rice (legal studies), Wayne Xu (communication), and Brandon O’Connor (CICS). Several UMass Amherst faculty and students presented research, including new DACSS lecturer Merve Keskin.
The keynote speaker for both conferences, Josh Tucker (NYU), took a birds-eye-view at the role of social media and AI in society today during his keynote. Discussing both the entrenched fractious political environment as well as the "garbage in, garbage out" issue of LLMs, Tucker concluded his address with calls to continue to map the current online political environment and question how AI is both knowingly and unknowingly shaping our information environment.
With 31 projects presented across 7 panels, PaCSS was filled with diverse foci from many researchers. Reflecting on the conference, organizer Kelsey Shoub said, "Throughout the day, two threads emerged, tying together projects on a wide range of particular topics. First, project after project highlighted how the emergence of massive archives of digital data collection, as well as improved computing capabilities, has led to innovations in how we study and in turn understand politics and policy. Many highlighted how leveraging AI has made possible some analyses not previously possible and also that AI has made feasible making data available in more digestible ways to a wider range of people is now possible. Second, human researchers are still critical in the research loop from framing projects to designing them to carrying them out."