Skagerrak seminar: Broken limits to social science? Foundation models for demography

We welcome Laust Hvas Mortensen to the Skagerrak Demographic Series on June 1, 2026. Register to secure you spot.

Demography is a scientific discipline that applies principled, elegant, and transparent methods to the study of human populations. In many other parts of the social sciences, more messy methods for high-dimensional data are gaining traction. At the extreme of the methods spectrum are foundation models. Foundation models are a large machine learning model trained on broad, diverse data at scale so that it can be adapted to many different tasks. Examples are ChatGPT, Mistral and other LLMs. In my talk, I will describe how foundation models are used as tools in demography-adjacent research. I will also cover how foundation models that are built using population data might be useful for demography.

Laust Hvas Mortensen is a Research professor at ROCKWOOL Foundation. Learn more about his work on his page.

Skagerrak Demographic Series are a joint initiative of the Danish and Norwegian Demographic Societies. The series aims to be a regular platform for knowledge exchange and discussion within our demographic community.