SODA Members Receive Three Awards @ GOR 2026

SODA Lab members receive three different awards at the GOR 2026 conference in Cologne

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We are excited to announce that three members and one former member of the SODA Lab have won three different awards at the GOR 2026 conference in Cologne, Germany!

Jan Simson, Fiona Draxler (University of Mannheim), Samuel Mehr (University of Auckland), and Christoph Kern won the Best Paper Award for their paper „Preventing Harmful Data Practices by using Participatory Input to Navigate the Machine Learning Multiverse“. The award-winning paper demonstrates the importance of making key decisions across the ML pipeline transparent and accessible for the general public. The paper introduces a participatory approach to help navigate the multiverse of design choices and argues that central decisions should be democratized rather than purely optimized.

Leah von der Heyde won the PhD Thesis Award for her dissertation, „Who Counts? Survey Quality in the Age of AI“. Her dissertation examines whether and under which conditions LLMs can enhance survey research, particularly in generating data and coding open-ended responses, while assessing risks of bias. It provides guidance on ensuring data quality when using LLMs in survey methodology and contributes to the broader discourse on LLMs as social science research tools.

Anna Fuchs won the Master's Thesis Award for her thesis, „AI for Survey Design: Generating and Evaluating Survey Questions with Large Language Models.“ Her master’s thesis offers empirical evidence on how LLMs can be integrated into survey question design, providing a systematic basis for evaluating emerging AI tools in survey research and informing methodological decisions in applied settings. A part of this research was also presented on a poster (PDF, 1,344 KB).

Congratulations to all award recipients!