
Asst. Prof @NorthwesternU Comm Studies | Applying #computational methods to study #digitalmedia, #polcomm, #multimodal, #LLM | @Stanford @Tsinghua_Uni alum
Evanston, IL
Joined October 2015
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I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining
@NorthwesternU @NU_SoC as an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies this Fall🎉🎉I am grateful to join this amazing community of fascinating colleagues and bright students! Huge thanks to everyone who helped me get here! 1/5
Open sourcing my regression lectures 🍻
AI is changing how we teach. Here’s one way I’m adapting: I’ve open-sourced my regression course, POLI 450A, built on Jens Hainmueller’s original class.
The course is suitable for first-year political science PhDs, as well as advanced undergraduate students in economics, political science, and other social sciences.
The materials include slides, R code, data, worksheets, and a short video for every lecture.
github.com/xuyiqing/regressi…
How do social media algorithms shape the reach of authoritarian regime? In our new @Journal_Of_Comm paper with @xinyi_liu_ and @CarlChou1111, we show how recommendation algorithms systematically amplify state-created content in China: academic.oup.com/joc/advance…
Together, these findings demonstrate how recommendation systems may subtly and actively serve authoritarian goals, advance a multilateral understanding of algorithmic curation, and extend authoritarian information control frameworks beyond censorship and propaganda.
Huge thanks to the editorial team, anonymous reviewers, colleagues at NU and beyond, and our COMAP lab members for providing feedback. Special thanks to our brilliant research assistants! For more work in COMAP, check out our website: comaplab.org/
**Personal Finance Notes for New Faculty** I intentionally chose a red day to post this, to avoid giving the impression that I am encouraging people to buy stocks.
yiqingxu.org/guide/personal-…
In 2020, I wrote a short note on personal finance for a Chinese-speaking young faculty audience and have updated the numbers since then. Ye said this is my most-read piece of writing. 🤣
This is the English version.
Over the years, I have also given many of our international students a 30-minute tutorial on this topic when they start academic jobs in the US.
They are excellent at what they do, but knowledge about US financial markets is often lacking. I hope this helps.
Yingdan_Lu retweeted
Call for Papers - Human Communication Research
We're now accepting submissions for a special issue: "Who Are We Studying in Communication Research? Revisiting Audience in a Transforming Media Environment"
Extended abstract deadline: August 31, 2026
academic.oup.com/hcr/pages/s…
Yingdan_Lu retweeted
New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.
Yingdan_Lu retweeted
New Faces in Chinese Politics Conference
MIT, September 1-2, 2026
Application materials due by May 22, 2026
We invite advanced PhD students and post-doctoral fellows who study Chinese domestic and international politics to apply for the sixth New Faces in Chinese Politics Conference at MIT on September 1-2, 2026, just before the APSA annual meeting in Boston. The New Faces in Chinese Politics Conference is an opportunity to get feedback on job market papers and job talks with peers, conference co-organizers, and invited senior scholars.
The papers should be based on original, rigorous research, employing quantitative or qualitative methods. The in-person conference is open exclusively to job market candidates for the 2026 job market. Successful applicants are fully funded for travel, lodging, and food.
Applicants must submit a curriculum vitae, a full job market paper or dissertation chapter (for chapters, we would prefer an empirical chapter with a short summary of the theory), and a letter of support from the dissertation committee chair. Application materials are due by May 22 via email attachment to [email protected]. Applicants should put their full name in the subject heading of the email.
The letter of support should be emailed separately to that address and should endorse the applicant’s decision to be on the job market in 2026, with the subject heading including the full name of the applicant.
Fiona Cunningham, University of Pennsylvania
Iza Ding, Northwestern University
Taylor Fravel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Melanie Manion, Duke University
Yuhua Wang, Harvard University
Yingdan_Lu retweeted
🚨Bipartisan-cited science is rare, unevenly distributed, and disproportionately influential. 🚨
Check out our latest paper in PNAS, led by @zfurnas
🧵1/n
New CMMC Lab research out, led by my student Xinyi Liu! We develop an LLM-based analytical framework to unpack complex visual concepts like surrealism. Also thanks to @CCR_OpenJournal @ica_cm SI editors @alvinyxz @wrahool and Ewa Maslowska, more articles: journal.computationalcommuni…
How does surrealism manifest in photorealistic AI-generated images? In our new @CompCommRes paper with @YingdanL_kk, @kiyaoqp, @sijia_qian, @pengyilang & @cuihua, we develop an LLM-assisted framework to map surrealism across 28K+ AIGIs from Instagram: doi.org/10.5117/CCR2026.2.6.…🧵
Yingdan_Lu retweeted
Please help spread the word: if you’re studying computational social science or interested in learning more, please consider applying to this summer’s SICSS–Singapore at @NUSingapore @CNMnus !#ComputationalSocialScience
Applications are open for the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) – Singapore 2026 🇸🇬
📅 July 13–20, 2026
📌 Application Deadline: April 17, 2026 (AoE)
🔗 sicss.io/2026/singapore/
#SICSS #OpenScience #AcademicTwitter
🚨 New in @NatMachIntell 🚨 We collected 9000+ annotations of empathic communication in convos from experts, crowds & LLMs across 4 NLP/comms/psych frameworks
LLM judgment exceeds crowds' reliability & nearly matches experts
Soft skills can now be reliably measured by LLMs 🧵
Deadline extended! We will begin reviewing applications on January 30. Please consider applying, or feel free to forward this opportunity to anyone you think would be a good fit!
Postdoc Opportunity at @NorthwesternU @NU_SoC @BuffettInst! Our Global LLM Values Benchmarking Working Group is seeking a postdoc starting Summer 2026. If you are working on LLMs and computational social science, this may be for you. Apply by Jan 16, 2026👉[email protected]
New pub! My first solo-authored paper is online at @polcommjournal . This paper identifies a novel phenomenon, performative propaganda engagement, to understand the impact of digital propaganda on celebrity fans and broader authoritarian publics. More in🧵tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…
Full paper available here: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.….
A heartfelt thank you to guest editors Hossein Kermani, @TaberezNeyazi and @solecheler, the editorial team, the anonymous reviewers, my dissertation committee @jenjpan @jeffhancock @angelechristin @xuyiqing, and many colleagues at @NU_SoC @Stanford for their constructive feedback















