Advancing Social Science Research: Workshops Series on AI, LLMs, and Computational Methods

UMBC's Center for Social Science Scholarship will hold a workshop series this Fall on generative AI, LLMs, and computational social science methods.  This series will begin with the basics of computing in R and how to use generative AI/LLMs in social science research workflows.  Each session will focus on helping faculty and students become comfortable with deploying AI and LLM models in their research, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the ethical, equity, and environmental implications of these models.  

This series is supported through the Elkins Professorship, features several speakers, and will continue into the spring 2026 semester. The four sessions this Fall are:

• Introduction to R, R Projects, R Markdown, and the Basics of LLMs, Dr. Eric Stokan, 12-1:30 pm, October 3, in PUP 451,
• Inductive Analysis of Texts with Embeddings, Dr. Dustin Stoltz (Lehigh University), 12-1:30 pm, November 5, Commons 329
• Dealing with unstructured data (text, images), APIs, and API calls to LLMs, Dr. Eric Stokan, 12-1:30pm, November 7, PUP 451
• Prompt-engineering and Fine-tuning in R, Dr. Eric Stokan, 12-1:30pm, December 12, PUP 451

Register for the sessions here.

Cosponsored by DoIT, the Center for Scalable Data and Computational Science, and CGC-SCIPE.

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