Weekly Media Update

Week of November 7, 2025

How Has Talking About Politics Changed in the Last Quarter-Century?

Using a pair of pre-election surveys conducted 24 years apart, in 1996 and 2020, political communication expert Diana Mutz found that Americans are not avoiding political conversations across party lines any more than they were 25 years ago. Instead, they are talking with more people more frequently about politics, primarily those people they agree with politically.

Mapping the Links Between Brain Development and Mental Health

A collaborative team led by Ted Satterthwaite and postdoctoral fellow Golia Shafiei has developed Reproducible Brain Charts, a large-scale, open data resource to help researchers link brain development with mental health disorders. “To create this big data resource, we did all the painful, unsexy stuff—data organization, image processing, and quality assurance,” says Satterthwaite. “We basically teed it up for everyone, so they just do science and run faster.”

Ravit Dotan: Rethinking AI Ethics
11/6: The Road to Accountable AI | Kevin Werbach

Brain Activity Reveals What Makes Persuasive Messages Stick
11/5: Annenberg School for Communication | Emily Falk

2025 AI2050 Early Career Fellows
11/5: Schmidt Sciences | Surbhi Goel

Early NBA Trends With Dean Oliver
11/5: Wharton Moneyball | Shane Jensen

Brain Activity Explains Message Effectiveness: A Mega-Analysis of 16 Neuroimaging Studies
11/4: PNAS Nexus | Emily Falk

Penn Professor Finds Increase in Political Conversations Between Like-Minded People, Intolerance
11/4: The Daily Pennsylvanian | Diana Mutz

Cloud Crash and Factory Fire: Twin Crises Expose Fragile Supply Chains
11/3: Gad's Newsletter | Gad Allon

Precision-Graded Cohomology and Arithmetic Persistence for Network Sheaves
11/1: arXiv | Robert Ghrist

Isotropic Curvature Model for Understanding Deep Learning Optimization: Is Gradient Orthogonalization Optimal?
11/1: arXiv | Weijie Su

Differential Associations of Passively Sensed Behaviors With In-Vivo Depression Symptoms
11/1: Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science | Lyle Ungar

Understanding Gender and Age Differences in Language Use: Cross-Cultural Insights From Weibo and Facebook
10/31: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications | Lyle Ungar

University of Pennsylvania and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Sign a Cooperative AI Advising Agreement
10/30: Penn Today | Vijay Kumar

Unlocking AI for Public Good
10/30: Penn AI | Vijay Kumar, Kevin Werbach, Cary Coglianese, Michael Kearns, Richard Berk, and Sandy Mayson

Trey Causey: Is Responsble AI Failing?
10/30: The Road to Accountable AI | Kevin Werbach

How Analytics and Chaos Define Today’s College Football Landscape
10/29: Wharton Moneyball | Eric Bradlow and Shane Jensen

New EPA Rule Could Allow More Use of Toxic Chemicals
10/29: Newsweek | Cary Coglianese

Why Annenberg Matters: Making Sense of the World With Data
10/29: Annenberg School for Communication | Sandra González-Bailón

Agreement and Alignment for Human-AI Collaboration
10/29: UC Berkeley Neyman Seminar | Aaron Roth

When Is a Conformal Set, a Conformal Set?
10/29: ASSET Center Seminar Series | Rakesh Vohra

Forecasting Melting Points in Svalbard, Norway Using Quantile Gradient Boosting and Adaptive Conformal Prediction Region
10/28: arXiv | Richard Berk

The Geometry of Contraction-Induced Flows
10/28: arXiv | Eleni Katifori

Does Object Binding Naturally Emerge in Large Pretrained Vision Transformers?
10/28: arXiv | Lyle Ungar and Konrad Kording

Luxury’s Law of Constraint: Ferrari’s Strategy in the EV Era
10/27: Gad's Newsletter | Gad Allon

Learning from Frustration: Torsor CNNs on Graphs
10/27: arXiv | Robert Ghrist

Human-AI Collaborative Uncertainty Quantification
10/27: arXiv | Hamed Hassani

Robust Decision Making with Partially Calibrated Forecasts
10/27: arXiv | Hamed Hassani and Aaron Roth

Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Clustering-redshifts and importance sampling of Self-Organised-Maps 𝑛(𝑧) realizations for 3 × 2pt samples
10/27: arXiv | Bhuvnesh Jain

Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Redshift Calibration of the Weak Lensing Source Galaxies
10/27: arXiv | Bhuvnesh Jain

Learning With Constraints
10/26: Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers | Alejandro Ribeiro

Albarracín Receives Career Award From Society for Personality and Social Psychology
10/24: Annenberg Public Policy Center | Dolores Albarracín

What’s Next for Carbon Removal?
10/24: MIT Technology Review | Cary Coglianese

Optimal Detection for Language Watermarks With Pseudorandom Collision
10/24: arXiv | Weijie Su

Neural Collapse Under Gradient Flow on Shallow ReLU Networks for Orthogonally Separable Data
10/24: arXiv | René Vidal

The World Has Its First AI Government Official
10/23: On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti | Cary Coglianese

Correction: Effect of Public Transit on Crime: Evidence From SEPTA Strikes in Philadelphia
10/23: Journal of Experimental Criminology | Greg Ridgeway

A Scalable, Causal, and Energy Efficient Framework for Neural Decoding With Spiking Neural Networks
10/23: arXiv | Konrad Kording

AL-CoLe: Augmented Lagrangian for Constrained Learning
10/23: arXiv | Alejandro Ribeiro

Learning Optimal Power Flow With Pointwise Constraints
10/23: arXiv | Alejandro Ribeiro

Caroline Louveaux: Trust Is Mission Critical
10/23: The Road to Accountable AI | Kevin Werbach

Avoiding the Oversimplification of Network Effects
10/23: Competition Policy International | Christopher Yoo

Wharton’s Dr. Ron Berman Explains the Next Frontier in Marketing Analytics
10/22: Business Talk Podcast | Ron Berman

How Analytics Changed the Soul of Baseball
10/22: Wharton Moneyball | Eric Bradlow and Shane Jensen

Machine Text Detectors Are Membership Inference Attacks
10/22: arXiv | Chris Callison-Burch

The Game Theory of How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices
10/22: Quanta Magazine | Aaron Roth

Annenberg Researchers Find Exposure to Tobacco Retail Increases Cigarette Cravings in Smokers
10/20: The Daily Pennsylvanian | Emily Falk

Convergence Rates for Gradient Descent on the Edge of Stability in Overparametrised Least Squares
10/20: arXiv | René Vidal

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Exploring the Landscape of Single Cell Biology
10/18: The American Association of Immunologists | Junhyong Kim

Congratulations to the Co-Winners of the 2025 ICS Prize
10/17: INFORMS Computing Society | Jason Altschuler

The Persistence of Cross-Cutting Discussion in a Politicized Public Sphere
10/17: PNAS | Diana Mutz

An Ecological Theory of Democracy
10/8: SocArXiv | Erol Akçay

Forget Chips: The Next Battleground in the U.S.-China AI Race Is Nuclear Power
9/20: MarketWatch | Benjamin C. Lee

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