Henry George Xu

Henry George Xu

I am an incoming PhD student at the MIT Sloan School of Management, advised by Professors David Rand, Gordan Pennycook, and Thomas Costello.

My research focuses on two main areas: developing AI and NLP methods for social science research, and using these methods alongside experimental approaches to understand mechanisms of persuasion. My broad interests lie in Computational Social Science and Machine Learning.

Before MIT, I completed my master's at Carnegie Mellon University and my undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.

Preprints

HPV Effects

Personalized Dialogues with AI Effectively Address Parents’ Concerns about HPV Vaccination

Henry George Xu, Thomas H. Costello, Jason L. Schwartz, Linda M. Niccolai, Gordon Pennycook, and David Rand (2025)

Preprint

[paper]

Climate Change Effects

Addressing climate change skepticism and inaction using human-AI dialogues

Gabriela Czarnek, Reed Orchinik, Hause Lin, Henry George Xu, Thomas H. Costello, Gordon Pennycook, and David Rand (2025)

Preprint

[paper]

Selected Publications

vaccination stance distance by mentions

The Life of a Tie: Social Origins of Network Diversity

Patrick S. Park, Henry George Xu, and Kathleen M. Carley (2024)

Published in 2024 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation

[paper]

PhysarumSM Architecture

PhysarumSM: P2P Service Discovery and Allocation in Dynamic Edge Networks

Thomas Lin, Weiyu Zhao, Ivan Co, Andrew Chen, Henry Xu, and Alberto Leon-Garcia (2021)

Published in 2021 IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM)

[paper]