COMAP LAB

The Computational Media and Politics (COMAP) Lab is an interdisciplinary research group led by Dr. Yingdan Lu in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. 

Our mission is to advance interdisciplinary scholarship on how digital technologies are transforming political communication globally. We aim to inform public policy, guide platform design, and enrich scholarly debates on the social, political, and global implications of digital media and artificial intelligence, contributing to democratic and more resilient information ecosystems worldwide.

August, 2025 

COMAP PhD students Xinyi Liu and Fatima Gaw presented our work on algorithmic curation in China and TikTok political influencers at PolNet-PACSS 2025

August, 2025 

COMAP PI Yingdan Lu gave an invited talk, "Understanding Authoritarian Propaganda through Computational Video Analysis" in Computational Visual Media Research (CVMR) Workshop at the University of Zurich.

July, 2025 

Our paper "Algorithmic Amplification in China: How Platforms Boost State Visibility" received the Best Lightning Talk Award in 11th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) 2025!

July, 2025 

COMAP PI Yingdan Lu delivered a guest lecture, "Computer Vision in Social Science", in Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) at NYU-Shanghai.

June, 2025 

COMAP PI Yingdan Lu delivered a guest lecture, "Computational Multimodal Analysis in Social Science Research", in Summer Workshop on Computational Social Science at University of Minnesota.