*Update*
Due to the FIFA World Cup, please plan ahead to reserve a hotel or find short term rentals. Details on logistics are forthcoming.
About the Academy
Thank you for your interest in the 1st Annual Summer Academy on Large Language Models for Social Science (LLM4SS).
The academy brings together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early career faculty with limited coding experience who are interested in developing and applying large language models in social science research. Our program features cutting edge talks and hands on training, with the core mission of fostering a collaborative learning environment with ample opportunities for discussion, networking, and community building. About 15 to 20 participants will be invited. The academy is free to participants; however, participants are responsible for travel, lodging, and other expenses.
Program
5/26 - Sandra Matz (Columbia Business School) - TBD
5/27 - Marcelo Mattar (NYU) - Discovering Cognitive Strategies with Tiny Recurrent Neural Networks
5/28 - Sharad Goel (Harvard Kennedy School) - The Use and Misuse of AI in Education
5/2 - Yamil R. Velez (Columbia University) - Generative AI and Respondent-Centered Social Science
6/2 - Kathy Zhou (NYU) - Task-Agnostic World Models for Generalizable Robot Control
6/4 - Ying Jin (Wharton) - An Agentic AI Framework for Automated Hypothesis Testing with Sequential Falsification
When
May 26 to June 5, 2026
Where
The academy will be held in Knox Hall on Columbia’s campus in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.
Knox Hall
606 W. 122nd St.
New York, NY 10027
Applying to the Academy
The application will remain open until Friday, March 20, 2026.
Organizers
The 1stAnnual Summer Academy on Large Language Models for Social Science is organized by Professor of Sociology Xi Song, with assistance from PhD students Anzhi Chen and Yuhan Li; and partnered with Convergence Design Studio in Columbia's Department of Statistics.
Sponsors
