Past Events

Synthetic Replication Games Workshop

The IMEBESS 2025 Synthetic Replication Games was a one-day in-person workshop organised by the Talking to Machines team in the context of a large replication project exploring the potential of large language models (LLMs) to augment human samples in experimental social science. This workshop invited researchers of all backgrounds and career stages to collaborate in adapting experimental studies from top-tier journals into a standardised format and replicate them using a variety of LLMs. The results were presented in a dedicated round table at IMEBESS 2025, and contributors were recognised as co-authors on the final publication.

The workshop was held on 21^th May 2025 in the IMEBESS conference venue.

Workshop on the 2024 U.S. Presential Election Polling

Date: Monday, 25^th November 2024
Time: 9.30am – 5pm
Location: Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford (UK)

The post-election workshop is an opportunity to critically assess the various data collection and modeling strategies employed for pre-election estimates of the vote share of the major U.S. presidential candidates over the course of the campaign. Leading pollsters from academia and industry will critically assess the state of pre-election polling in the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential Elections.

9:00am – 9:30am	Coffee
9:30am – 10:00am	Welcome and Introductions
10:00am – 11:00am	National Election Studies & Commercial Polling – Shanto Iyengar, Professor (Stanford) and Principal Investigator of the American National Election Study (ANES) – Jane Green, Professor (Nuffield College), President of the British Polling Council, and Principal Investigator British Election Study – Clifford Young, President Public Affairs (IPSOS U.S.A.)
11:00am – 11:30am	Coffee Break
11:30am – 12:30pm	Advances in Model-Based Election Election-Polling – Lucas Leemann, Professor (University of Zurich) – Kosuke Imai, Professor (Harvard University)
12:30pm – 1:30pm	Lunch
1:30pm – 2:30pm	Polling Aggregation: Resilience to Systematic Bias – Eli McKown-Dawson, LSE and Silver Bulletin – Steve Fisher, Professor (University of Oxford) – Martin Strabe and Oliver Hawkins (The Financial Times)
2:30pm – 2:45pm	Coffee
2:45pm – 3:45pm	Election Forecasting: Mapping the State of the Art – Mary Steigmeier, Professor (University of Missouri) – Philippe Mongrain, Post-doctoral Researcher (University of Antwerp)
3:45pm – 4:00pm	Coffee
4:00pm – 5:00pm	Silicon Sampling for Public Opinion Polling – Roberto Cerina, Assistant Professor (University of Amsterdam) – Ray Duch, Professor (Nuffield College) – Ben Warner, Founder (Electric Twin)