Dr Zhuofei Lu, University of Oxford
Department of Sociology (42-43 Park End Street) or MS Teams
Please join either in person or online. For in-person attendees, the talk will be preceded by a light lunch at 12.15pm.
Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions.
Abstract
This project addresses a timely question for public policy and social research: why do people in some countries in the EU feel more ready than others to use, trust, or accept artificial intelligence?
Public debate about Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often framed either as a matter of individual skills or as a matter of national technological capacity, but very little research connects these levels in a single comparative design. The project will build a new pilot dataset that links an existing European social survey (CRONOS-3 2025) to country-level indicators of AI media visibility, AI research activity, and AI policy and economic context drawn from GDELT (a global news database), OpenAlex (a scholarly publication database, which is similar to Google scholar), and OECD indicators on AI investment, talent concentration, and skills migration.
Using 11 European countries as a test bed, the study will examine whether national AI environments help explain differences in individuals’ AI literacy, frequency of use, acceptance, and concern above and beyond age, gender, education, income, and employment status. The project will produce a documented analytical workflow, a cleaned research dataset, a draft article, and the foundation for a larger external funding application. It will also strengthen Oxford's capacity in interdisciplinary research on AI and society by connecting sociology, computational social science, and science policy.
