Honglin (虹霖) Bao
Innovation, Complex Systems, and AI for Social Science
Contact: hbao at hbs dot edu or baohlcs at gmail dot com
Digital, Data, and Design Institute -- my official D^3@Harvard page
I'm active on Twitter (X) @HonglinB
#I stand for open science
Hi there! I am Honglin (he/him), a computational social science research associate in D^3/Harvard Business School working with Drs. Anjali Bhatt and Amit Goldenberg. I also collaborate on papers with Dr. Misha Teplitskiy (UMichigan School of Information) and NC State Network Analysis Group.
I study the social processes of innovation — how new ideas and practices are born and spread, how social, scientific, and technological institutions influence collective thinking and discovery, and how innovation impacts broader societal issues like inequality and policy.
I use and develop computational methods: network analysis, NLP, machine/deep learning, causal inference/econometrics, and agent-based modeling, complemented by some experimentation.
Broadly, I am interested in the general theory behind the emergent information within complex systems from social organizations, to human understanding, to large language models, to cities, and how the social methodological paradigms learn from complex systems and AI.
My papers across computer science, statistical physics/network science, and social sciences appear in top peer-reviewed journals and proceedings including Nature Communications.
I have training in mathematics, computer science, social science, and evolutionary biology and I draw multidisciplinary theories to enrich my research. Before coming to HBS I graduated from Michigan State where I researched multi-agent learning in games. I also volunteered for LGBTQ health in China. I am a big fan of sports, sometimes competitively. This is the link to my CV.