Data Science Institute

Han Zhang is an assistant professor of sociology and international and public affairs at Brown University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University and his bachelor's in computer science and B.A. from Peking University. His substantive research interests include social movements (particularly in China) and digital surveillance (on a global scale). He also works on developing statistical and machine-learning methods for computational social science. His research has won best paper awards from the American Sociological Association and the International Communication Association.

How does your research, teaching, or other work relate to data or computational science?

My substantive interests lie in political sociology and social movements. Specifically, I am working on projects that examine 1) the impact of digital surveillance on collective action in authoritarian regimes, and 2) how AI (such as facial recognition) enhances or weakens such connection.

Methodologically, I develop machine learning methods for analyzing large-scale datasets in social science research. My focus has been on creating automated tools for analyzing image data from various sources, including social media, mass media, and Google Street View photos, as well as for multimodal data (e.g., the joint analysis of text and visual data). My methodological work has been published in Sociological Methods and Research and Sociological Methodology. I also serve on the editorial board of Sociological Methodology.