ICSA Online Webinar: Vibe Researching as the Wolf Comes

Topic: Vibe Researching as the Wolf Comes: Can AI Agents with Skills Replace or Augment Social Scientists?

Abstract: Using Scholar-Skill v3.0.0 as a case study, Dr. Zhang maps AI capabilities and limits, proposing a cognitive taxonomy that shows the human-AI boundary cuts through every stage—AI excels at codifiable tasks, while humans remain essential for tacit knowledge and originality—and concludes with three implications and five principles for responsible “vibe researching.”

Speaker: Yongjun Zhang, Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University

Moderator: Jia Miao, Assistant Professor of Sociology, NYU Shanghai

Time: Mar 13, 2026, 09:00 AM Hong Kong SAR

Registration link:

https://hku.zoom.us/meeting/register/3SVvMvKcTW6SCiMqNCU-Cw

Summary

Social scientists have survived prior automation waves. This talk argues the current one is different. AI agents can now execute multi-step reasoning workflows across the entire research pipeline — synthesizing thousands of papers, generating causal identification strategies, drafting journal-calibrated prose, and simulating peer review autonomously and in sequence. Using scholar-skill v3.0.0, a 19-skill Claude Code/Codex plugin, as a working case study, Dr. Zhang documents what AI agents can and cannot do across seven research stages. He proposes a cognitive taxonomy showing that the human–AI boundary is not sequential but cuts through every stage: AI excels at codifiable execution, while humans remain irreplaceable where tacit field knowledge and theoretical originality are required. The talk concludes with three implications — an augmentation thesis with a fragile precondition, a stratification risk, and a pedagogical crisis — and five principles for responsible vibe researching.

Bio

Dr. Yongjun Zhang is a computational social scientist who leverages large-scale data, natural language processing, and computer vision to investigate social, political, and organizational behavior. His research focuses on topics such as racial segregation, political polarization, and organizational inequality. His work has appeared in leading journals including American Journal of Sociology and Demography. He is co-editor of Computational Social Science: Applications in China Studies and serves on the editorial boards of Nature Scientific Data, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Socius, Social Science Computer Review, and The Sociological Quarterly.