Christopher A. Bail
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Education
Ph.D., sociology, Harvard University
Summary of Experience
Professor Bail is widely recognized for his work in computational social science, which uses tools from data science to predict human behavior. His work leverages AI and machine learning to examine substantive issues ranging from social media to consumer protection, bot detection, and digital forensics. Professor Bail’s research has led to new social media products and informed government legislation on the regulation of the technology sector in the US and internationally. He has served as an expert witness in litigation concerning a major social media company. Professor Bail’s work has been published in Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as profiled in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, NBC Nightly News, and the BBC. He is the editor of the Oxford University Press series in Computational Social Science. Professor Bail is the director of the Society-Centered AI Initiative at Duke, co-founder and director of Duke’s Polarization Lab, and founder of the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science. He also helped launch Duke University’s interdisciplinary data science master’s program. Professor Bail has been a Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellow, and the Falling Walls Foundation awarded him the Science Breakthrough of the Year Award for his book Breaking the Social Media Prism. Prior to joining Duke’s faculty, Professor Bail was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar at the University of Michigan, as well as a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the National Foundation of Political Science at Sciences Po.