It's been confirmed that 53 of our colleagues in📍#Gaza have been killed since October 7 These people dedicated their lives to their communities. One colleague died collecting bread. He leaves behind 6 children. We are beyond devastated, as this unspeakable suffering continues.

All humanitarians and the children and families they serve MUST be protected.

📝Language-Agnostic Bias Detection in Language Models with Bias Probing 👥Abdullatif Köksal, @omerfyalcin, Ahmet Akbiyik, M. Tahir Kilavuz, Anna Korhonen, hinrich schuetze 🔗arxiv.org/abs/2305.13302 📁Findings - Long x.com/akoksal_/statu…

I am recruiting PhD students! If you are interested in working on studying misinformation, hate speech and political polarization with a focus in non WEIRD contexts, please consider applying and mention my name. The deadline for our department Rutgers Football is January 5.

Nearing another milestone in my PhD journey: My research project "Debunking Misinformation to Foster Inclusion of Refugees" has been awarded a J-PAL grant (The Governance Initiative - Fall 2023 RFP)!

Outstanding resources for teaching data science and coding basics in social sciences! I feel fortunate to have had the experience of teaching GOV50 with Matt. Observing students transition from feeling overwhelmed by coding to achieving proficiency was remarkable.

📍Happening now at IFI: Brown Bag session with IFI Affiliated Scholar/Harvard University University PhD candidate Molly Chauncey Hickey sharing her methodology/research tools for her ongoing research with Ahmet Akbiyik "Past violence and refugee reception: the case of Syrians in Lebanon."

Can exposure to opposing perspectives in the media reduce political polarization in nondemocracies? With Ahmet Akbiyik Jeremy Bowles and Shelley Liu we are looking into it with funding from J-PAL’s #GovernanceInitiative povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/imp…

Will Marble and I are looking for an RA to help with data tasks and survey programming for a project. Please retweet and/or apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/1Fk-IZ…

Excited to share this working paper with amazing collaborators at Harvard Department of Government. We conduct a meta-reanalysis of conjoint studies on immigration preferences -- we welcome suggestions for additional analyses to perform with 100,000+ survey responses from 32 countries!

Akshay Dixit studies ethnic divisions and why they persist in diverse developing countries, as well as how #governmentpolicy can reduce them. His #dissertation demonstrates how and when the welfare state enhances inter-caste integration in India. akshaydixit.org

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu is challenging limits on his power, Oded Haklai and I argue in Journal of Democracy. Previously, societal mobilization acted as Israel's last democratic safeguard. Now, the war is inhibiting societal action to constrain Netanyahu. journalofdemocracy.org/online-exclusi…

I wrote a short essay for Journal of Democracy on the remarkable fall of Bashar Al Assad -- journalofdemocracy.org/online-exclusi…

Including data from the 2023 Turkey general election.

Thrilled to share our latest findings on data contamination, from my internship at Google! We trained almost 90 Models on 1B and 8B scales with various contamination types using machine translation as our task and analyze the impact of contamination. arxiv.org/abs/2501.18771

Our article “Social Media Narratives Across Conflict: Evidence from Syria” is now ahead of print at the Journal of Politics! Journal of Politics @[email protected] Kiran Garimella Erin Walk Ahmet Akbiyik

A new study—by Biff Parker-Magyar, Ahmet Akbiyik, and colleagues—analyzes how Syrian actors depict violence across social media platforms X, Telegram, and Facebook. These differences impact how audiences & researchers perceive conflict. loom.ly/N99qvPM

My new article in Journal of Democracy I question the optimism about India's democracy after the 2024 election by providing a perspective on Muslim inclusion and what it means for India's liberal democracy.

How does demand for clientelism vary by socioeconomic status? In our paper just out at Journal of Politics @[email protected], my co-authors Melani Cammett, sami atallah and I use a survey experiment in Lebanon to question some assumptions about who demands clientelism. /1 journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.10…

Delighted to share that I successfully defended my dissertation! Titled “Barriers and Bridges: Essays on Local-Migrant Dynamics and Refugee Integration,” it examines how local communities respond to refugees, drawing on survey experiments to study the roles of aid framing, online