Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

🎉 Calling all Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) alumni!

The OII turns 25 this year, and we’re celebrating with our amazing SDP alumni community.

Whether you studied here last year or last decade as part of our SDP cohort, we'd love to have you back to Oxford, see you in London, and keep you connected to the ideas and people that make the OII what it is as we celebrate this milestone.

To make sure you receive invitations as plans are confirmed, please take a moment to complete the alumni form so we can keep in touch with you, using the link below. It only takes a minute and ensures you won’t miss out.

🔗 Update your details
Complete the alumni form: https://bit.ly/SDPalumniform
Or join the OII's Alumni and Friends LinkedIn group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12099075/

Thankyou for your time and look forward to celebrating 25 years of OII with you later this year!

50 researchers from across Europe and North America recently came to University of Oxford for a two-day workshop at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, exploring the future of social media research.

The workshop, organised by the OII’s Dr Mohsen Mosleh, Dylan Thurgood and Manuel Tonneau, featured keynotes, lightning/research talks, and a policy session focused on topics such as:

✅ Data access in the post-API era
✅ The influence of generative AI on content and research methods
✅ Social media’s highly fragmented ecosystem
✅ Polarisation, online harm, and misinformation
✅ Experiments on social media

Huge thanks to our organisers, the attendees, and our fantastic session chairs for making the event such a success.

The Oxford Internet Institute is excited to welcome Mark Boris Andrijanič as a Visiting Policy Fellow.

Mark, Governing Board Member at the European Institute of Innovation & Technology, will work with Dr. Johann Laux on advancing the responsible use of AI in government and defence.

“It’s a privilege to return to Oxford University and contribute to the OII’s pioneering work at the intersection of technology, policy, and society,” he says.

Learn more about the OII’s Visiting Policy Fellows here: https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/visitors/

Researchers, including those from the Oxford Internet Institute’s Reasoning with Machine’s Lab (OxRML), are at the  2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) in Suzhou, China!

OII researchers are contributing to debates on LLM safety and transparency, through the presentation of two peer-reviewed papers tackling some of the biggest challenges in LLM development, including; revealing the safety mechanisms in LLM post-training, and testing whether LLMs can accurately explain their own actions to human users.

Pictured here are Yushi Yang and Harry Mayne, OII DPhil students, at 💻

New doctor! Congratulations to DPhil student Lisa-Maria Neudert who recently passed her viva.

Her thesis is titled ‘A decade of regulating tech giants: Actors, resources and power dynamics in platform regulation in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States (2016–2025).’

Supervisors: Professor Helen Margetts and Professor Phil Howard, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

Examiners: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and Professor Kate Dommett, The University of Sheffield.

NEW: Researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute’s Reasoning with Machine’s Lab (OxRML) led by Dr. Adam Mahdi will attend the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) in Suzhou, China from 4-9 November.

OII researchers will contribute to debates on LLM safety and transparency through the presentation of two peer-reviewed papers tackling some of the biggest challenges in LLM development, including revealing the safety mechanisms in LLM post-training, and testing whether LLMs can accurately explain their own actions to human users.

Learn more about the OII’s involvement in EMNLP 2025 here:
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/oii-researchers-to-explore-llm-interpretability-at-emnlp-2025/

Ensh*ttification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now — 14 November 2025 at Rewley House

Join Tim Wu (“The Age of Extraction”) and Cory Doctorow (“Ensh*ttification”), two internet activists who’ve been friends since they were small children, for a lively, infuriating and invigorating exploration of the forces that drove the internet to its current miserable state, and a prescription for taking it back and making a new, good internet that is fit for purpose: serving as the digital nervous system of a planetary civilization under dire threat from the climate emergency, genocide, authoritarianism and fascism.

Learn more and register here:

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/ensh*ttification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

Earlier this week, Prof. Carl Benedikt Frey launched his new, highly anticipated publication, “How Progress Ends,” at the .

In the book, Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable.

For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world’s largest, most advanced economies—the United States and China—have fallen short of expectations.

To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change.

Congratulations to Prof. Frey on a successful launch event!

We’re settling into our new home at the Schwarzman Centre, enjoying new communal spaces to meet, eat, and work, and slowly learning our way around.

Pictured here against the spectacular atrium view are some OII students with Lord William Hague.

Photos: Jas Lehal, PA Media