From the Office of Public Affairs | https://www.news.ku.edu
Headlines
Carillonneurs Congress will ring in week of summer events on the Hill
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas’ historic Campanile will serve as the setting for a gathering of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America from June 10 to 14, offering the community an opportunity to enjoy a series of free public carillon concerts. A KU-hosted concert is planned at 6 p.m. June 10.
Profit motivation of social media companies may compel them to inject bias and create polarization, study finds
LAWRENCE — Social media companies thrive on the subtle influencing of users’ behavior. “It is of interest to social media companies to nudge users in such a way that their engagement level increases, but as a result, echo chambers are created and the level of polarization increases,” said Debabrata Dey, University of Kansas business researcher and author of the new study “Polarization or Bias: Take Your Click on Social Media.”
KU Engineering students win Traffic Bowl Competition
LAWRENCE — The KU-Institute of Transportation Engineers traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, in April to compete in the 2025 Missouri Valley District Institute of Transportation Engineers Traffic Bowl Competition, where they took home first place. Students Mahgam Tabatabaei, doctoral candidate in civil engineering from Karaj, Iran; Moses Azu, graduate in civil engineering from Cape Coast, Ghana; John Devore, junior in civil engineering from Wichita; and Aayush Karki, graduate in civil engineering from Sunsari, Nepal, served as representatives from the student group.
Students recognized for contributions to KU Libraries
LAWRENCE — A pair of University of Kansas student employees who do vital work maintaining physical and digital collections and two KU Libraries Student Ambassadors were honored among their peers and supervisors at the annual Dean’s Award for Student Employee Excellence luncheon May 1 in Watson Library. The honorees are students from Lawrence, McPherson, Shawnee and St. Louis.
Full stories below.
———————————————————————–
Contact: Fally Afani, School of Music, [email protected]
Carillonneurs Congress will ring in week of summer events on the Hill
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas’ historic Campanile will serve as the setting for a gathering of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America this summer, offering the community an opportunity to enjoy a series of free public carillon concerts.
The School of Music will host the Guild of Carillonneurs 82nd Annual Congress from June 10 to 14, drawing members and attendees from across the country.
The KU Campanile is a staple of the university and a familiar sound for students, alumni and Lawrence residents. During the conference, the public is invited to roll out picnic blankets and set up lawn chairs to listen to concerts throughout the week.
Events begin with a KU-hosted concert at 6 p.m. June 10, with additional events to be announced at the conference website.
Additionally, the school will offer workshops and recitals for GCNA attendees.
“We’re thrilled to welcome carillonists from around the world to KU as we kick off the 75th anniversary of the Campanile. It’s a real honor to host some of the finest performers in the field, who will fill our campus with music from the bells that have meant so much to this community for generations,” said Elizabeth Berghout, associate professor of church and organ music. “This will be the third time KU has hosted the GCNA congress — after 1956 and 1997 — and we’re excited to carry that tradition forward in 2025.”
About the Campanile
Designed by architect Homer Neville, a student in the 1920s, and Edward Delk, the Campanile was dedicated at Commencement on May 27, 1951. The bell tower is 120 feet high and built of Kansas limestone. The carillon, played by keyboard-operated hammers, has 53 bells cast by an English foundry established in the 1360s. The bells chime the quarter hours and hours; concerts are performed by the university carillonneur, students and guest artists. A major renovation of the bells, the Campanile and the grounds was completed in 1996.
What is a carillon?
A carillon is a concert instrument made of bronze bells that are played from a keyboard. The keyboard and bells are typically situated high up in bell towers, their sound soaring over the surrounding area. A carillon has at least 23 bells of different sizes that are tuned chromatically. The performer, called a carillonneur, plays a variety of music — popular hits, classical music, music composed especially for the carillon, folk songs and national anthems. With skillful control of the keys and pedals, the carillonneur can achieve evocative sounds and great expressiveness. Carillons developed through a series of advancements in timekeeping and bell-ringing over the last 500 years. Today, there are more than 675 carillons in over 30 countries. Nearly 200 of them are found throughout North America.
For more information, please contact [email protected].
————————————————————————
KU spent $78.9 million across Kansas on research-related goods and services in FY23.
https://ku.edu/distinction
————————————————————————
Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Profit motivation of social media companies may compel them to inject bias and create polarization, study finds
LAWRENCE — Social media companies thrive on the subtle influencing of users’ behavior. Nudging, so to speak.
“It is of interest to social media companies to nudge users in such a way that their engagement level increases, but as a result, echo chambers are created and the level of polarization increases,” said Debabrata Dey, the Davis Area Director of Analytics, Information, and Operations and the Ronald G. Harper Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Information Systems at the University of Kansas.
“In this study, we create a robust, quantitative framework of how the echo chambers are created because of a platform’s nudging strategy.”
For his new study titled “Polarization or Bias: Take Your Click on Social Media,” Dey set up a microeconomic model to study whether a platform’s profit motivation compels it to adopt a user-targeting strategy that injects bias and creates polarization. His research also finds that if a policymaker tries to crack down on polarization, it could end up making the platform switch to bias instead.
The research appears in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.
“The biggest surprise we found is that polarization and bias act as substitutes toward the platform’s profit,” said Dey, who co-wrote the paper with Atanu Lahiri of the University of Texas at Dallas and Rajiv Mukherjee of Texas A&M.
“If you nudge everybody to one side and nobody to the other side, then that reduces polarization because you don’t have conflict. However, because there is only one side, the nudging strategy then becomes completely biased.”
According to the study, polarization occurs when users get split along their pro-attitudinal narratives and start doubting the legitimacy of counter-attitudinal ones. Bias occurs when a platform’s user-targeting strategy starts favoring one narrative over its alternative. This opens the door to misinformation and half-truths to propagate through the network of users.
“For the social media platform, it can generate more money using either polarization or bias, and typically their first choice is going to be polarization. But if you want to cut down on polarization, and if you put some penalty on the level of polarization that the social media platform creates, it will then shift to bias to get that extra profit,” he said.
Dey’s paper states that recent estimates indicate about 4.8 billion people around the world make regular use of social media platforms, spending each day an average of over two hours on social media activities. While researching this topic, his team found several field studies looking at polarization within platforms. But at a macro level, they didn’t address the issue of incentives.
“Since economics is a subject of incentives, we thought that an economic tool will be useful in understanding if there is any motivation or not. If there is, then people might work on those motivations … but let’s first try to see if there are any motivations,” he said.
Ideally, a social media platform should not have any bias, Dey notes. It should expose its users to both sides of a narrative. But this being a normative study, Dey doesn’t speculate whether the polarization/bias approach is actually good or bad. And neither does he speculate whether social media platforms are acting on these economic incentives.
“Chances are they would, but we don’t take a stand on that,” he said. “Our stand is that there is ample incentive for social media companies to behave in a manner others are alleging how they behave.”
A KU faculty member since 2022, Dey specializes in artificial intelligence and information systems. He has also recently focused on issues related to public policy.
Dey believes CEOs of social media platforms could use this research to address concerns users might have about the manipulation inherent in the medium.
“Optics are very important for social media companies,” Dey said. “Even if you have incentives to be polarizing or biased, you don’t want people to know about it. You don’t want people to get really frustrated with a platform that they have adopted already and leave and go to another one.”
-30-
————————————————————————
Research at KU powers 54 active startups with more than half based in Kansas.
https://ku.edu/distinction
————————————————————————
Contact: Emma Herrman, Department of Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering, [email protected]
KU Engineering students win Traffic Bowl Competition
LAWRENCE — The KU-Institute of Transportation Engineers (KU-ITE) traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, in April to compete in the 2025 Missouri Valley District Institute of Transportation Engineers (MOVITE) Traffic Bowl Competition, where they took home first place.
University of Kansas students Mahgam Tabatabaei, doctoral candidate in civil engineering from Karaj, Iran; Moses Azu, graduate in civil engineering from Cape Coast, Ghana; John Devore, junior in civil engineering from Wichita; and Aayush Karki, graduate in civil engineering from Sunsari, Nepal, served as representatives from the student group.
“Being part of KU-ITE as secretary and treasurer has been a rewarding experience,” Karki said. “It’s been an incredible journey, and winning the competition was surreal. I’m proud to represent KU and MOVITE at the 2025 ITE Collegiate Traffic Bowl this August.”
The 2025 MOVITE Traffic Bowl Competition hosts teams from the Missouri Valley District of ITE chapters. Teams from Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma all competed for a chance to represent their team at the national competition later this year. Now district champions, the KU-ITE team will travel to Orlando in August to compete against the remaining 10 district winners from the U.S. and Canada at the ITE International Conference.
“My involvement with KU-ITE has been filled with engaging events and valuable conference experiences,” Tabatabaei said. “Now, while other students are preparing for finals and summer break, we’re working on the final round. We are so honored to represent the MOVITE district at the ITE International Conference in August.”
During the MOVITE Traffic Bowl Competition, the KU-ITE team answered questions from a broad range of transportation-related topics, including traffic operations, planning, roadway design, engineering policies and more in a “Jeopardy”-style quiz. Preparing for the competition involved an in-depth review of ITE references. As a team, the KU-ITE representatives practiced with mock questions in a challenging experience that strengthened both technical knowledge and teamwork.
“I haven’t been a part of KU-ITE for long, but I have had a great time,” Deovore said. “Everyone is so welcoming and willing to help you get involved. With the competition over, I feel a lot of relief, but I am focusing all my attention on preparing for Orlando in the fall.”
Poster research award
Additionally, Tabatabaei received an award for the second year in a row during the annual MOVITE poster competition. In 2024, she took home first place for her research on driver behavior adjacent to shared lanes such as HOV lanes. This year, she took home second for her poster on defining different clusters of congested traffic conditions to classify density values.
“Being involved in KU-ITE has provided other fantastic opportunities for me, such as participating in the annual MOVITE poster competition,” Tabatabaei said. “I’m very honored to have received an award for two consecutive years.”
-30-
————————————————————————
Each of Kansas’ 105 counties receives KU Medical Center outreach.
https://ku.edu/distinction
————————————————————————
Contact: Kevin McCarty, KU Libraries, 785-864-6428, [email protected]
Students recognized for contributions to KU Libraries
LAWRENCE — A pair of University of Kansas student employees who do vital work maintaining physical and digital collections and two KU Libraries Student Ambassadors were honored among their peers and supervisors at the annual Dean’s Award for Student Employee Excellence (DASEE) luncheon May 1 in Watson Library.
KU Libraries Dean Carol Smith said in her remarks that student workers averaged about 1,200 hours of work per week across all major offices and divisions of KU Libraries while providing essential services to the Jayhawk community. Student employees grow transferable workforce skills and also gain career experience in library fields.
Levi Cromwell, a senior in history and classics from McPherson, was honored with a DASEE award for his contributions to Cataloging and Archival Processing, particularly his efforts with the libraries’ extensive collection of journals and other serials.
Cromwell has worked at KU Libraries for four years, collaborating on projects in Watson, Anschutz, Spencer Research Library, Murphy Art and Architecture Library, and Gorton Music and Dance Library, with tasks ranging from the physical relocation of volumes to proofreading foreign language titles letter by letter. He’s also been entrusted with special projects handing sensitive materials as a vital part of the team responsible for working with tens of thousands of items.
“We’re the people in the back who are processing a lot of the materials, just making sure that everything in the databases is lined up,” Cromwell said of cataloging work. “We’re rotating the collection of books. You have books that are being sent off to the (Library Annex) that, you know, aren’t being used as much, so the library can stay fresh and stay relevant to what people want and how people actually use the library.”
Oliver Grotegut, a senior in linguistics and sociology from Shawnee, received a DASEE award for his work in Cataloging and Archival Processing. Working with record groups within the University Archives at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, Grotegut inventories and describes records from various departments and organizations across campus, helping to preserve the history of the university.
Grotegut’s innovation in creating new spreadsheet tools and revitalizing workflows has enriched library processes, and his descriptions are used daily by library patrons to access campus records.
In her remarks, Smith said Grotegut’s record group descriptions will be used to create online accessibility tools that can be utilized for decades to come.
“I went looking for a library job because I wanted to work in libraries, and this has really solidified for me that that is the career field I want to go into long term,” Grotegut said.
The KU Libraries Student Ambassadors Program (KULSAP) connects students with libraries leadership to promote student input and involvement in library services and programming. Allison Bell, a linguistics and German studies major from Lawrence, and Margaret Baechle, an English major from St. Louis, were honored with KULSAP Service Awards at the DASEE ceremony.
Baechle and Bell have both contributed to special projects and served as leaders through their work with KULSAP.
Baechle served as president of KULSAP for two years, building awareness of libraries services to support her fellow students.
Bell took part in the KU Reads Common Book selection committee, reviewing nominated book selections.
Both Baechle and Bell participated in the libraries’ Student-Led Curation project, working with three other students and two KU librarians throughout the academic year to create their own library collection. The students decided on a collection theme, developed a materials list, worked on a LibGuide and assembled a display of selected materials for a launch event during the spring semester.
“I love working at Watson,” said Baechle, who is also a libraries employee. “This is probably the best job I’ve ever had. I love my co-workers and the environment that we’ve created at Watson and just for KU Libraries. It’s such a big group of people, and I’ve met so many awesome employees and staff, and I just think it’s such a great place to work.”
Camaraderie and a sense of connection have made the libraries an important part of Bell’s time at KU, making the recognition among peers special.
“I love being able to kind of just share this experience with people who are in a similar position and understand how important libraries are,” she said.
Cash prizes were awarded to the winners, who were selected by a committee including members of the KU Libraries Board of Advocates.
Former KU Libraries dean Lorraine Haricombe established the DASEE awards to recognize the dedication and quality service student employees provide.
————————————————————————
KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
https://www.news.ku.edu
Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]
Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs
