Zhe Xu

My name is Zhe Xu, and I am a Walter Benjamin fellow and postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Media and Communication at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch and Prof. Dr. Neil Thurman.

I currently work in humanitarianism and crisis communication through computational modeling and social computing, studying how information and technology engage with humanitarian crises and how public decision-making is shaped as a result. Two current directions:

• using natural language processing to analyze news corpora through the lens of communication ethics;
• studying responsible AI and virtual reality embodiment in the mediation of humanitarian crisis.

I have been a Visiting Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I hold degrees in engineering science and media studies and received my PhD in 2023 from the University of Cologne under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Martin Scott. While there, I served as a research and teaching assistant in media studies and received training in data science and machine learning from the Center for Data and Simulation Science (CDS) and the Department of Digital Humanities (IDH).