Talking to Machines

Past Events

Talking to Machines Seminar Series

Friday, 21st November 2025

15.00 – 16.00, hybrid format
Lecture Room, Nuffield College & Zoom

Mohsen Mosleh

Mohsen is an Associate Professor at Oxford Internet Institute, a Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College, and a research affiliate at MIT Sloan School of Management. His lies at the intersection of computational (data science) and cognitive psychology. He studies how information spreads on social media and how ties are formed on social networks.

Title: Echo Platforms & Conversational Corrections

Abstract

In this talk, I will talk about two recent projects.

First, I will talk about a cross‑platform study where we collected 10 million news‑link posts across seven social media platforms and examined engagement by outlets’ political slant and quality. We find that platforms with more conservative user bases share lower‑quality news on average; the partisan engagement advantage flips by platform (aligned content wins); and within users, lower‑quality links get higher average engagement — even on non‑ranked feeds — implicating user preferences rather than algorithms.

Next, I will talk about an experimental project that combines lab and field to debunk false claims using LLMs. We tune conversational corrections in a simulated feed, then deploy the best strategies on Bluesky and X to test external validity with native engagement metrics.

Wednesday, 25th June
Carlos III University – Madrid, Spain

Livia Schubiger (D-GESS, ETH Zurich) & Raymond Duch (University of Oxford) organized an EPSA Madrid 2025 pre-conference that assembled researchers working with Large Language Models (LLMs). The focus were on the application of LLMs to research being conducted in the social sciences.

More info

Delivering Health Innovation in Resource-Constrained Settings: Medical Breakthroughs into Development Outcomes

From cutting-edge vaccine trials to behavioural insights for public health and global policy debates — featuring leading researchers from the Department of Economics, University of Oxford, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, King’s College London, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

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 21th May 2025 in the IMEBESS conference venue.

Workshop on the 2024 U.S. Presential Election Polling

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

The post-election workshop was 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 critically assessed the state of pre-election polling in the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential Elections.

9:00am – 9:30amCoffee
9:30am – 10:00amWelcome and Introductions
10:00am – 11:00amNational 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 – 11:30amCoffee Break
11:30am – 12:30pmAdvances in Model-Based Election Election-Polling
– Lucas Leemann, Professor (University of Zurich)
– Kosuke Imai, Professor (Harvard University)
12:30pm – 1:30pmLunch
1:30pm – 2:30pmPolling 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 – 2:45pmCoffee
2:45pm – 3:45pmElection Forecasting: Mapping the State of the Art
– Mary Steigmeier, Professor (University of Missouri)
– Philippe Mongrain, Post-doctoral Researcher (University of
Antwerp)
3:45pm – 4:00pmCoffee
4:00pm – 5:00pmSilicon Sampling for Public Opinion Polling
– Roberto Cerina, Assistant Professor (University of Amsterdam)
– Ray Duch, Professor (Nuffield College)
– Ben Warner, Founder (Electric Twin)