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Chair of Political Science, Social Data Science

Prof. Marc Ratkovic, Ph.D.

Professor Marc Ratkovic, Ph.D.

Welcome to our website!  Here at the Chair of Social Data Science, we are working to integrate machine learning and deep learning methods into practical social science methodology.  The research and teaching at the chair focuses on utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for statistical inference and causal inference.  Our work has appeared in top journals across political science, statistics, and computer science.

We are building a team of top researchers, an integrated server system, a Masters level curriculum, and a series of events all focused on pushing quantitative and computational social science forwards. 

You can find more information throughout this site.
Thank you for your interest!

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News

Group of sudents attending a lecture
Interview with Prof. Ratkovic on the results of last fall's hackathon event and the role of AI in science
Last fall Prof. Ratkovic, his colleague Thomas Gschwend and Springer Nature  organized a hackathon with 22 international participants to explore how AI can support or facilitate scientific writing. A new article by Jan-Martin Wiarda discusses some of the results as well as perspectives by Prof. ...
Thumbnail of the YouTube video of Prof. Ratkovic's talk
Talk at University:Future Festival
Prof. Ratkovic was a speaker at the University:Future Festival 2025, which took place on May 13 to 15, 2025 in Berlin, Braunschweig, Nürnberg, Graz / Austria, Zurich / Switzerland and online. His talk was titled „Academic Writing: A Field Experiment Testing GPT's Ability to Foster Clarity and ...
Portrait of Jacob Chen
Jacob Chen joins the group
We welcome Jacob Chen to the group!  Jacob Chen joined the group as a research assistant in the beginning of May. Currently enrolled in the Mannheim Master in Data Science program, his research focuses on leveraging Large Language Models to enhance the quality of scientific writing. Working ...
Talk at COMPTEXT 2025
Prof. Ratkovic was a speaker at the 7th ANNUAL COMPTEXT Conference 2025, The Seventh International Interdisciplinary Conference on the Quantitative and Computational Analysis of Text-, Image- and Video-as-Data, which took place on April 24 to 26 in Vienna / Austria. His talk was titled “Using LLMs ...

Contact

Dr. Birgitta Schirmer

Dr. Birgitta Schirmer

Secretary / Foreign Language Assistant
The secretariat is best contacted by e-mail or via MS Teams.
University of Mannheim
School for Social Sciences
Political Science, Social Data Science
A 5, 6
Building B – Room B129
68159 Mannheim