Social movements have the potential to reshape the world, but their success is often hindered by a failure to capture the necessary attention or resources. The AI & Social Movements Global Working Group is an interdisciplinary team of researchers working to design and build an online portal that tracks the presence of social movements worldwide and assesses their efficacy and prospects.
About the Project
Social movements evolve over time, and their varied activities, aims, and formations play a significant role in shaping our world of experience. However, there are few reliable platforms that allows journalists, researchers, and policy makers to gain a robust understanding of how social movements evolve and what impacts they might have in their communities. Our work aims to address the limited and fragmentary information we have of social movements by building the models necessary to comprehensively track their life-cycles.
Group Members
Co-leads:
- V.S. Subrahmanian, Computer Science, McCormick School of Engineering
- Brayden King, Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
Group members:
- Kate Compton, Computer Science, McCormick School of Engineering
- Jeremy Gilbert, Medill School of Journalism
- Daniel Linna, Pritzker School of Law
- Aaron Shaw, Communication Studies, School of Communication
- Rob Voigt, Linguistics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Latest Work and Developments
Publications
- The SMART project has produced the following papers:
- V. La Gatta, M. Postiglione, J. Gilbert, D. Linna, M. Manella Greenfield, A. Shaw, and V.S. Subrahmanian. “SMART: A Social Movement Analysis & Reasoning Tool with Case Studies on #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter,” accepted for publication at the ACM Web Conference (Web4Good track), Dubai, 20–26 April 2026.
- V. La Gatta, M. Postiglione, J. Gilbert, D. Linna, M. Manella Greenfield, A. Shaw, and V.S. Subrahmanian. “DEEP: A Discourse Evolution Engine for Predictions about Social Movements,” accepted for publication at the Intl. Conf. on Innovative Applications of AI (IAAI 2026), Singapore, January 2026.
Research Activities
- In February 2025, the group led a workshop at Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law convening journalists across the globe to give feedback on SMART (Social Movement Analysis & Reasoning Tool) to ensure the tool answers pressing questions reporters face.
- The AI and Social Movements Group is developing SMART, a Social Movement Analysis & Reasoning Tool that will serve as a global real-time web portal that tracks social movements from around the world. The group is also establishing legal and ethically sound methods of disseminating information about budding social movements to journalists and policymakers.
- The group has developed algorithms for online data collection from Reddit and Twitter and leveraged advancements in ChatGPT and its variants to track posts on these platforms that signal emerging social movements in virtually all major world languages.
- The SMART portal is currently being tested and validated by a select group of journalists, scholars, activists and policymakers.
- In fall 2023, the group developed a functional prototype of their SMART dashboard. The prototype tracks social media posts and news articles related to social movements across three pressing global issues—poverty, gender equality and energy.
Engagement Activities
- The group has successfully engaged with dozens of journalists from major news organizations who serve as potential users and co-designers of SMART technology. For example, in March 2025, a major workshop was held with journalists from nine news organizations, encompassing both traditional and digital media outlets: The Wall Street Journal, American Press Institute, Local Media Association, The Washington Post, Borderless Magazine, Institute for Nonprofit News, Chicago Public Media, and Chicago Sun-Times Media.