Salim Hafid

Salim Hafid is a postdoctoral researcher at SciencesPo. He is trained as an engineer at the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA de Lyon), and holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Montpellier, completed as part of the “AI4Sci” european project in collaboration with the Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences (GESIS) in Germany.

His doctoral research focused on the study of scientific online discourse and led to the development of novel methods to detect, differentiate, and contextualize the diverse forms that scientific online discourse can take, with the aim of improving the quality of scientific debates online and facilitating fact-checking.

Salim joined the médialab in January 2025 as part of the “Democratic Commons” project, which aims to understand the impact of artificial intelligence on democratic processes. Specifically, the project seeks to explore the effects of generative artificial intelligence—Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT or Gemini—on democratic processes of deliberation or online debate: Do AI systems exhibit democratic biases that could influence the users they interact with? To address this question, Salim develops quantitative and computational methods to measure the democratic biases of generative AI.

More broadly, his research interests include computational social sciences, the analysis and modeling of online discourse, and the use of artificial intelligence for science and democracy. He is a member of the organizing committee for the international CheckThat! workshop, and a recipient of the “NSF/SIGWEB Student Award” for his work presented at the international CIKM2022 conference.