Fellowships

Research Paper Management with Notion and Zotero

January 14, 2026
by Joyce Chen. Managing research across countless tabs, notes, and PDFs can quickly become overwhelming. By integrating Zotero and Notion, you can create a workflow where papers, ideas, and writing come together seamlessly — turning scattered research into a cohesive workspace (or as much as possible).

Filtering, Visualizing, and Interpreting Spatial Time Series Data

December 17, 2025
by Maksymilian Jasiak. Spatial time series (consecutive measurements across space and time) are often difficult to interpret, especially when there are many overlapping signals. However, have no fear! Filtering and visualizing can help better interpret and understand the spatial time series data.

NEW: LRC Latinx AI Fellowship

APPLICATION EXTENDED! New deadline: Sunday, December 14 at 11:59 PM PST. Program Components Fellows will participate in a program that includes: Skills Development. LXAI Fellows will complete a structured introduction to D-Lab workshops, including some custom workshops developed specifically for this cohort. Community Building. LXAI Fellows will be invited to join the D-Lab community and have the opportunity to attend research talks by D-Lab members, fostering intellectual exchange and interdisciplinary collaboration. LXAI Fellows...

Seeing Behavior in Everyday Data

December 10, 2025
by Skyler Chen. This post discusses how my training in data science changed the way I think about behavioral research. I share how simply exploring everyday datasets and noticing small, unexpected patterns can spark new research questions, and how archival data and experiments each offer distinct yet complementary insights into how people make judgments and decisions. I also highlight the growing set of tools that help us understand behavior in richer ways.

Digitization of Historical Maps in the Age of AI

December 3, 2025
by Elena Stacy. Researchers today increasingly have access to a wealth of tools to streamline or automate labor-intensive data processing and generation tasks. When it comes to mapping, progress has been slower. This blog details the author's experience tackling the digitization of a historical map in the age of AI.

A Practical Guide to Shift-Share Instruments (and What I Learned Replicating the China Shock)

November 26, 2025
by Jiayu Lai. Shift-share instruments are among the most widely used tools in applied economics, appearing in labor, trade, immigration, and policy evaluation research. But despite their popularity, many researchers still use them as black boxes — and risk invalid instruments as a result. In this blog post, I unpack how shift-share IVs actually work, why their validity depends on both the “shifts” and the “shares,” and what practical steps researchers should take to check assumptions. I also walk through how I used the Borusyak–Hull–Jaravel (2022, 2025) framework to reproduce the seminal Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013) China shock analysis.

Beyond the Hype: How We Built AI Tools That Actually Support Learning

November 12, 2025
by Weiying Li. What does genuine partnership look like when building AI for education? Working with middle school teachers and computer scientists, we co-designed AI dialogs where teachers are valuable contributors to refine what the AI understands as valuable thinking. Through iterative refinement, teachers identified precursor ideas and observations that predicted future learning, and refined guidance design in the dialog. Our AI dialog sees learning the way teachers do, built through genuine collaboration where both model development, learning sciences theories, and teachers' classroom expertise work together from the start, not just at the end.

Forecasting Social Outcomes with Deep Neural Networks

October 7, 2025
by Paige Park. Our capacity to accurately predict social outcomes is increasing. Deep neural networks and artificial intelligence are crucial technologies pushing this progress along. As these tools reshape how social prediction is done, social scientists should feel comfortable engaging with them and meaningfully contributing to the conversation. But many social scientists are still unfamiliar with and sometimes even skeptical of deep learning. This tutorial is designed to help close that knowledge gap. We’ll walk step-by-step through training a simple neural network for a social prediction task: forecasting population-level mortality rates.

Why I Don’t Call Myself a Data Scientist: A Researcher's Journey

October 1, 2025
by Jose Aguilar. I reflect on my uneasy relationship with being called a data scientist. Despite training in computer science and utilizing computational tools in education policy, I struggle with how data science often strips away human narratives and reinforces existing inequities. My identity as a first-generation, queer, Latinx scholar deepens these tensions, prompting me to explore frameworks such as QuantCrit and critical data science. Ultimately, I utilize research that bridges computation and critique, advocating for more human-centered, politically aware approaches to data that integrate lived experiences alongside data findings.