Abigail Jacobs

Assistant Professor, Information, School of InformationComplex Systems, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

Computational social science, empirical design, governance, observational data, social networks, statistical inference

I am interested in how governance, communities, and inequality emerge in sociotechnical systems, and how the structure of sociotechnical systems encodes and reinforces these processes. To those ends, I develop empirical data and computational methods, focusing on latent variable models; statistical inference in networks; empirical design to study governance in organizations, platforms, and computational social systems; and causal inference and measurement in observational data.

Several sample projects:
> developing empirical populations of networks to infer social and ecological processes encoded in networks
> using probabilistic methods to infer the structure and dynamics of the illicit wildlife trade
> building from theory from political science, statistics, and education to disentangle issues of “bias” in computational systems


Accomplishments and Awards