Kai Zhu

My research broadly seeks to understand how digital technologies change market, media, politics, and society. I am particular interested in the impact of digital transformation in cultural markets, e.g. news, books, movies, music. In my research, I leverage various computational tools, such as machine learning, natural language processing, causal inference, and network analysis, to analyze large-scale structured and unstructured data in real-world to learn about human behavior and system dynamics.
Research interests
Computational Social Science, Text as Data, Social Networks, Digital Platforms
Working papers
Bridge the Digital Language Divide: Can Machine Translation Narrow Knowledge Gap across Languages?
Measuring Diversity and Novelty from Digital Trace Data: A Representation Learning Approach
Unintended Consequences of Platform Monetization on Digital Cultural Markets: Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Goodreads
Selected Publications