Kaiping Chen

🌟 Exciting career update: I am honored to be selected for The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's New Voices cohort (2026–2028).

Look forward to collaborating with an outstanding group of emerging STEM leaders to tackle national and global challenges together!

🚨We were very excited to present our work on "Seeing Risk Before It Happens: How Vision Language Models Understand Real World Dangers" to American Family Insurance yesterday! We look forward to releasing our VLM benchmark soon!

Brain Activity Reveals What Makes Persuasive Messages Stick

A new study by the @falklab.bsky.social and colleagues reveals that activity in brain regions associated with reward and social processing can predict the effectiveness of messages:

🚨I had a fantastic visit to UCLA this week. I shared my team’s work on gender representation in science and technology communication, from digital platforms to Large Vision Language Models. Thank you for the invitation!

Our studies are here:

lnkd.in/d7cvXmDW

lnkd.in/dVHqJiez

Currently in FirstView: “Constructing Vec-tionaries to Extract Message Features from Texts: A Case Study of Moral Content.” @kaipingchen.bsky.social and and colleagues introduce “vec-tionaries” which are embedding-based tools for measuring latent features of messages.

Our #AEJMC25 panel “Visualize Science Communication for Impactful Journalism” is happening now at Pacific C [4FL]! We have panelists from academia, foundation and journalism joining us to share perspective on visual credibility in the age of Generative AI. @aejmc.bsky.social

💫Super excited to give a talk at my alma mater Fudan University June 13 on “AI and Social Change”. Welcome to join me online or on site. The talk will be delivered in English. 👇

Diversity Science Podcast: Kaiping Chen and Corey Jackson on Trust in Science In this episode, Kaiping Chen and Corey Jackson talk about trust in science—and how we can think about it from the perspective of diversity science. They argue that the research community should aim t...

In our latest podcast episode, hear from @kaipingchen.bsky.social and Corey Jackson about trust in science and how researchers can create the kinds of environments where non-scientists can better engage with scientific work.

ids.wisc.edu/2025/05/21/d...

Voice and Value: How Elected Officials Evaluate Online and Offline Constituent Feedback Abstract. Social media has made it easier than ever for citizens to voice their opinion to their elected representatives. However, officials may infer that

✨Excited to share our new publication @aapor.bsky.social in Public Opinion Quarterly👇:

Voice and Value: How Elected Officials Evaluate Online and Offline Constituent Feedback

academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

Thanks for the support from DSI!!!

✨Check our new paper👇

✨Sharing our new publication in @polanalysis.bsky.social @cambridgeup.bsky.social "Constructing Vec-tionaries to Extract Message Features from Texts: A Case Study of Moral Content" #OpenAccess

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Our @uw-lsc.bsky.social PhD student Isabel Villanueva is sharing her research on using #LLMs for content analysis in the Social Media Analytics class now! #lsc460 #AI

New name, same great program.

The Department of Life Sciences Communication has answered the growing demand for experts in science communication with the newly renamed Science Communication PhD program.

Learn more at: lsc.wisc.edu/2025/03/06/d...

Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and launch interdisciplinary research projects? We are so excited to announce there will be *26* Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science this year! Apply to one of them here: sicss.io/locations

This week, LSC's @kaipingchen.bsky.social will be presenting on "Auditing Equity in Large Language Models: Insights from dialogue and image classification tasks" at our Spring #scicomm Colloquium. Join us in person or follow along on X at #UWLSC700

Learn more at: lsc.wisc.edu/2025/01/17/l...

Maybe a hot take, but what about the following advice to the next gen:
Don't get an AI degree; the curriculum will be outdated before you graduate. Instead, study math, stats, or physics as your foundation, and stay current with AI through code-focused books, blogs, and papers.

“Our phenomenal faculty are top experts in the field, constantly engaging in innovative research and teaching."

Excited to see our 1950s Mass Communications program transition into @uwmadison.bsky.social's brand new Science Communication Ph.D. ...

✨Excited to get the best article award with my amazing coauthors. This is our article link: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

LSC’s exciting lineup of renowned speakers for the 2025 science communication colloquium Mark your calendars for LSC’s 2025 science communication colloquium series. The series brings distinguished speakers from all over the U.S. and the world to the UW-Madison campus, either in-person or ...

Next week, University of MIchigan Professor Maria Carmen Lemos will be presenting on "Scaling Up Actionable Knowledge for Sustainability" at LSC's #scicomm Colloquium. Join us in person or follow along on X at #UWLSC700

Learn more at: lsc.wisc.edu/2025/01/17/l...

Submit your abstracts until January 15 🔆 Would be great to see you at #COMPTEXT2025 in Vienna 🤩

Fear in Media Headlines Increases Public Risk Perceptions but Decreases Preventive Behaviors: A Multi-Country Study During the COVID-19 Pandemic The perception of reality could matter more than reality itself when it comes to disease outbreaks. News media are important sources of information during global disease outbreaks, such as the COVI...

🚨New paper out. Combining a large-scale survey with an extensive #COVID media archive in five countries, we show that fear in headlines boosts our sense of risk, but can actually reduce how often we follow preventive measures. 👇

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

APSR will start inviting replications for a random subset of accepted papers. I really like this as well as the constructive tone around it 👏 (from the latest Notes from the Editors)

🥰Feel super humbled and grateful for this new milestone in my career. Thanks to my students and colleagues @UW_LSC and beyond that inspire my work all the time! Look forward to continue bringing social impact to science & society!

🥰Feel super humbled and grateful for this new milestone in my career. Thanks to my students and colleagues @UW_LSC and beyond that inspire my work all the time! Look forward to continue bringing social impact to science & society!

@liweishen.bsky.social @Yiming_Wang

🚨Excited to share our new publication @jmcquarterly.bsky.social. In our experiment, we showed promising evidence of how to design intergroup framing in news coverage to reduce conspiracy beliefs in the context of Sino-U.S. relationship👇 #journalism #scicomm
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Thank you! Inspired by lots of work and the support from the DSI!

Thanks for supporting my work! Great to be part of the IDS community!

✨Feel honored to receive the Vilas Early-Career Award. Very grateful to my students, colleagues and communities that inspire my work all the time! Excited for the next journey! 🥰