Patrick Wu

Patrick Wu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at American University, with additional affiliations as Faculty Fellow at the Center for Data Science and Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology. He holds a PhD in Political Science and Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan, an MA in Statistics from Michigan, and a BA in Political Science and Statistics from the University of Chicago.

His research develops AI/ML and natural language processing approaches for computational social science, focusing on:

• Political elite and non-elite ideology measurement
• Affective polarization on social media platforms
• Detection of hateful/abusive speech and memes
• Application of large language models to political science research

Recent work explores innovative methods for political attitude measurement using LLMs, in-context learning techniques for social media analysis, and frameworks for multimodal representation learning.

His publications demonstrate consistent innovation in applying NLP and machine learning to political discourse analysis, with emerging focus on generative AI's impact on political science education and methodology. Wu teaches courses including Object-Oriented Programming and topics in Natural Language Processing/Text as Data.