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Research & Programming

Social Contagions, AI, and Democracy

About Upcoming Events Past Events DTD Lab Members In the News

Overview

The Social Contagions, Artificial Intelligence, and Democracy workshop brings together scholars to explore how social contagions can be used to understand how AI and related digital technologies may challenge or, potentially, fortify democratic institutions and practices.

Whether we like it or not, digital technologies are integral to our modern society and our everyday life. They mediate global connections through multi-scale networks for trade, human mobility, social interactions, and information sharing.

Technology can either contribute to or undermine personal health and well-being; the ability to create, access, and disseminate high-quality information; the free exchange of goods and services; and opportunities to participate in civil society. Contagion science provides a valuable viewpoint for understanding the process of how things-including information, beliefs and attitudes, and goods and services-transmit from one agent to another in these networks.

As such, we seek participation from broad cross-disciplinary perspectives including biological, computational, social, economic, behavioral, and political realms.

Past Events

Tan street squares, clusters of people from above connected together by black lines
  • Social Contagions

Social Contagions, Artificial Intelligence, and Democracy Workshop

Friday, January 9, 2026 • 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM EDT

UVA McIntire School of Commerce

Tan street squares, clusters of people from above connected together by black lines
  • Social Contagions

Social Contagions, Artificial Intelligence, and Democracy

Friday, April 4, 2025 • 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM EDT

Rouss & Robertson Halls, McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia

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DTD Lab Members

Faculty Co-Lead

Steven L. Johnson

Affiliations

  • Professor of Commerce, McIntire School of Commerce
  • Faculty Affiliate, Thriving Youth in a Digital Environment (TYDE)

Bio

Steven L. Johnson‘s award-winning research adopts a sociotechnical systems perspective that considers how the intersection of technology, people, processes, and data impacts individuals, organizations, and society. He explores how digital technology enables the discovery, creation, and sharing of information, including:

  • in online communities and other social media that support open innovation
  • through applications of social network analysis, computational linguistics, and computational social science methods to analyze language use, team dynamics, and large voluntary collectives
  • in content moderation, toxic content, and algorithmic content prioritization
  • the role of race, gender, and diversity in algorithms, outcomes, and online experiences
  • societal impacts of digital technology, such as information-limiting environments (echo chambers and filter bubbles), the climate crisis, and ethical use of technology

His research has appeared in top-tier management journals of MIS Quarterly; Organization Science; Information Systems Research; and Harvard Business Review, as well as at international conferences sponsored by leading academic organizations, including the Academy of Management and the Association of Information Systems. He has taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses, including systems and strategy, business analytics, and information technology management.

Full Profile

Faculty Affiliate

Madhav Marathe

Affiliations

  • Executive Director, Biocomplexity Institute
  • Distinguished Professor of Biocomplexity
  • Professor of Computer Science

Bio

Madhav Marathe is an endowed distinguished professor of biocomplexity, executive director of the Biocomplexity Institute, and a tenured professor of computer science at the University of Virginia. Marathe is a passionate advocate and practitioner of transdisciplinary team science. During his thirty year professional career, he has established and led many large transdisciplinary projects and groups. His areas of expertise include digital twins, network science, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, high-performance computing, computational epidemiology, biological and socially coupled systems, and data analytics.

His prior positions include professor of computer science and director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory within the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech and a team leader of research and computing in the Basic and Applied Simulation Science Group, Computer and Computational Sciences Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Association for Computing Machinery, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Marathe has published more than 500 articles in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and workshops. Mentoring and training next-generation scientists has been his lifelong passion. He has mentored more than a dozen staff scientists, and (co)-advised more than thirty doctoral students, twenty MS students, and fifteen postdoctoral fellows.

Marathe and his team focus on developing the scientific foundations and the associated engineering principles to study large-scale biological, information, social, and technical (BIST) systems. His current interests span five broad themes: (i) methods to construct various BIST networks using partial and noisy data as well as procedural information; (ii) understanding the general form and structure of dynamical processes over BIST networks (e.g., key network/pathway properties and typical pathways that impact dynamics); (iii) algorithmic theory of optimization and control as it pertains to the dynamical processes, including methods to detect, enhance, arrest, and mitigate dynamics; (iv) general conceptual and algorithmic foundations to understand the co-evolution of the networks and dynamics; and (v) high-performance services-based computing solutions that can be delivered seamlessly to end users and policymakers.

Full Profile

2024-26 Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Maria Lungu

Maria Lungu is an assistant professor of Public Administration in the School of Government and International Affairs at Kennesaw State University. She earned her Juris Doctor from the University of Tennessee College of Law and her Ph.D. in public administration from Florida Atlantic University. She is currently a policy group leader at the Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP) and a research affiliate of the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia. Before entering academia, she served as a legal consultant at Stepping Stones International and worked for the Metropolitan Public Defender's Office in Nashville.

Her research examines the intersection of law, public administration, and artificial intelligence, with particular attention to technology in policing and court systems — how AI is used to shape administrative decision-making, where it improves efficiency, and when it undermines accountability. She also studies the socio-technical implications of predictive policing and comparative AI governance in Africa, including consulting work with the Data Science Law Lab at the University of Pretoria. Her work has appeared in Public Money and Management, the Journal of AI Law and Regulation, the Review of Black Political Economy, Administrative Theory and Praxis, and the American Journal of Qualitative Research, among others.

She has been named an Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society (AIES) research fellow and was a member of the World Economic Forum's AI Governance Alliance.

[embed]https://youtu.be/zjdJJAsvEFE[/embed]

Full Profile

In the News

Tan street squares, clusters of people from above connected together by black lines
  • Social Contagions

UVA researchers examine AI’s impact on democracy

University of Virginia researchers examined how artificial intelligence is reshaping democracy during a discussion Friday, January 9, focusing on the technology’s influence on what people see, share and believe online.

www.29news.com

Headshot of Madhav Marathe
  • Social Contagions

Modeling Life Itself: Madhav Marathe and the Science of Biocomplexity

In this episode of Hoos in STEM, host Ken Ono, UVA's STEM Advisor to the Provost, speaks with Madhav Marathe, Distinguished Professor and Executive Director of UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute. Marathe leads one of UVA’s most interdisciplinary research hubs where mathematicians, epidemiologists, social scientists, and AI systems work together to simulate the complex systems that shape our lives and is a faculty affiliate of the DTD Lab.

research.virginia.edu

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