Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) is honoring the art historian Professor Bissera Pentcheva of Stanford University in California, USA, by awarding her the 2026 Gutenberg Research Award. This is the most eminent research prize awarded by JGU. It comes with an endowment of EUR 10,000 and is conferred annually by the Gutenberg Research College, the central institution designed to promote top-level research at Mainz University.

Our personal identity is composed of many dimensions, such as age, gender, ethnic background, or socioeconomic status. A research team led by Fariba Karimi from the Institute of Human-Centred Computing at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) and Samuel Martin-Gutierrez from the Complexity Science Hub developed the statistical computational model “MAPS” to calculate the influence of these factors on our social relationships. The researchers have recently published a MAPS-based analysis of high school friendships and marriages in the US in the journal Communications Physics. The study shows that humans are extremely selective.

SUTD researchers used mobile phone GPS traces, street view imagery, and open-source spatial data to show that pedestrian route choices in a rapidly developing city are shaped far more by street conditions and context than by distance alone.

Large language models may be able to make moderation of social media and online communities more effective, but they are expensive to run at scale, especially when asked to provide explanations for each piece of content they flag. Yuan Zhao will present research on creating an interpretable and low-cost method for evaluating LLMs’ hate speech classification as part of 190th ASA Meeting. His framework relies on the Rational Inattention model, an economic idea developed to explain human behavior.