I'm a computational social scientist. I work on issues in online trust and safety, digital media, and the Internet in civic life. I lead research teams and collaborate with other researchers or research labs.
I am currently a Lead Research Engineer at the Digital Safety Research Institute. At DSRI, I lead a research program on chatbot safety assessment.
Previously, I led testing and evaluation for for Twitter's Birdwatch project, which is now called ``Community Notes.''
Before joining Twitter, I was a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Chicago. I taught politics and society, and quantitative research methods. I have also held fellowships at Pew Research Center Data Labs and The Sunlight Foundation.
I hold a PhD in sociology from The University of Chicago, with concentrations in social statistics and democratic politics.
I've also worked as a reporter, writer, and editor, but not in a pretty long time. My most recent position in media was as managing editor of techPresident, a news site covering technology and politics. (It's not really around anymore.)
If you're a human, you can email me at nick at nclarkjudd.com.
Recent events
IASEAI 2026. Feb. 23-26, 2026, UNESCO House, Paris, France.
Dagstuhl Seminar 26051: User-Aligned Assessment of AI Systems. Jan. 25-30, 2026. Schloss Dagstuhl, Liebniz Centrum fur Informatik, Wadern, Germany.
AI Village at DEF CON 33. Aug. 7-10, 2025. Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
UL Research Institutes Third Annual Summer Symposium. July 2025. Washington, DC.
Third International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories Applications for Privacy and Security. March 2025. Co-located with SANER. Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Responsible Crowdsourcing for Responsive AI: Engaging Crowds in AI Auditing and Evaluation. October 2024. A workshop at the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
AI Village at DEF CON 32. August 2024. Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
UL Research Institutes Second Annual Summer Symposium. July 2024. Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Invited talk at George Washington University's Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics. January 2024. Washington, DC (online-only event).
Selected works
Academic publications
Assessing the sociotechnical risks of AI
Judd, Nick, Alexandre Vaz, Kevin Paeth, Layla Inés Davis, Milena Esherick, Jason Brand, Inês Amaro, Tony Rousmaniere. 2026. "Independent Clinical Evaluation of General-Purpose LLM Responses to Signals of Suicide Risk." Accepted at IASEAI 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27521.
Rabin, Rafiqul, Sean McGregor and Nick Judd. 2025. "Malicious and Unintentional Disclosure Risks in Large Language Models for Code Generation." 2025 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering - Companion (SANER-C). Conference proceedings | Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22760.
McGregor, Sean, Allyson Ettinger, Nick Judd, Paul Albee, Liwei Jiang, Kavel Rao, William H. Rao, Shayne Longpre, Avijit Ghosh, Christopher Fiorelli, Michelle Hoang, Sven Cattell, and Nouha Dziri. 2025. "To Err is AI: A Case Study Informing LLM Flaw Reporting Practices." Proceedings of the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Conference Proceedings | Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12104.
Deng, Wesley Hanwen, Mireia Yurrita, Mark Díaz, Jina Suh, Nick Judd, Lara Groves, Hong Shen, Motahhare Eslami, and Kenneth Holstein. 2024. "Responsible Crowdsourcing for Responsible Generative AI: Engaging Crowds in AI Auditing and Evaluation." Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing. Conference proceedings.
Finding facts with polarized crowds
Wojcik, Stefan, Sophie Hilgard, Nick Judd, Delia Mocanu, Stephen Ragain, M.B. Fallin Hunzaker, Keith Coleman, Jay Baxter. “Birdwatch: Crowd Wisdom and Bridging Algorithms can Inform Understanding and Reduce the Spread of Misinformation.” Working paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723.
A research agenda for political sociology
Martin, John Levi and Nick Judd. 2020. “Tasks of the Political Sociology of the Next Ten Years.” In The New Handbook of Political Sociology, edited by Thomas Janoski, Cedric de Leon, Joya Misra and Isaac Martin. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Software
Revealing "issue advocacy" spending in United States politics
Judd, Nicholas. poindexter: A software package for processing IRS data on 527 political organizations. Chicago, IL: 2018. https://github.com/nclarkjudd/poindexter.
Reporting and essays
A Recent History of Uber: Lobbying, Lawsuits, and a 'Scuffle'. Vice.com. July 18, 2014.
Michael Scherer, Please Remember We've Argued Over NSA Spying Since Before Millennials Were a Thing. TechPresident. June 13, 2013.
Ender's Game: The Problem With "The End of History" In Technology Debates. TechPresident. April 29, 2013.
The Guns and Gun Data Debate, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the End of Privacy. TechPresident. Jan. 11, 2013.
Meet the newest tech start-up: the Obama campaign. Yahoo News. April 6, 2012.
The fast-paced frenzy of a low-tech Supreme Court. Yahoo News. June 27, 2012.
How Free Software Activists are Hacking Occupy's Source Code. TechPresident. Sept. 17, 2012.
#OWS: Tech-Savvy Occupiers Hope to Open-Source a Movement. TechPresident. Nov. 21, 2011.
Local candidates add Internet to campaign arsenal. The Riverdale Press. Aug. 21, 2008.