Computational Social Philosophy Seminars (CSPS) is a regular international online seminar series, focusing on research that uses or engages with the use of computational tools to address questions in social philosophy.
All seminars are on Mondays at 8:30am PT / 11:30am ET / 4:30pm London / 5:30pm Berlin.
Date: November 2, 2026
Speaker: Chaoqun Ni
Title: Broader Science, Narrower Roles: Scientific Expertise in the Age of AI
Abstract: Modern science depends on specialization and teamwork, with researchers combining complementary expertise through collaboration. Large language models (LLMs) offer a new way to access knowledge and methods across fields, raising questions about how scientific expertise is now assembled. Drawing on publication histories of over 775,000 scientists and contributor statements from more than 137,000 papers, we examine changes in what scientists work on, whom they work with, and how teams divide their work during the period of widespread LLM diffusion. We find that research portfolios broadened, collaboration networks became more interdisciplinary, and individual responsibilities within teams became more specialized. These patterns were more pronounced among authors with stronger AI-associated writing signals. Our findings point to a shifting relationship between the breadth of scientists' research and the work they perform.
For a complete list of past and upcoming seminar presentations see the Talks page.
The seminars are held on Zoom and last 60 minutes. Our seminars will typically have one of the following formats
Format 1: 30 min presentation + 30 min discussion
Format 2: two flash talks, 15 min presentation + 15 min discussion each
Sina Fazelpour (Northeastern), Sahar Heydari Fard (Ohio State University), Hannah Rubin (University of Missouri), Dunja Šešelja (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Rory Smead (Northeastern), Jingyi Wu (London School of Economics)
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