17 JUN 2026 (WED) 16:35 - 17:05

AI-enabled multi-scale analysis of public perceptions toward refugees across Europe

Mr. LIU Zhihao   

( Supervisor: Prof Bo Huang)

Abstract:

Europe has long been, and will continue to be, influenced by refugees who are mainly uprooted from neighboring regions and from within Europe, due to conflicts and natural disasters. Understanding public perceptions on refugee issues is therefore essential for long-term and sustainable governance, integration and stability, as it can pinpoint more realistic societal concerns and interests, as well as the mechanisms of their short- or long-term variations. This study aims to comprehensively investigate multidimensional public perceptions on refugee issues, across hierarchical geographical scales within Europe from 2010 to 2024, thereby providing insights into the different governance levels. 

These hierarchical geographical scales were selected based on the real-world structure of refugee governance. They are fourfold: (1) the cross-country (international) level, where public perceptions could reveal unequal burdens across countries under Europe’s highly interdependent asylum system; (2) the country level, where public perceptions could reveal country-specific refugee-related pressures; (3) the first-level administrative region level, where public perceptions could reveal regional inequities within the national governance system; (4) the place level, where public perceptions could reveal the place-specific conditions of integration and social cohesion. Methodologically, we use a set of Artificial Intelligence (AI), computational methods and causal inference to examine the multidimensional public perceptions (including but not limited to general sentiment, hate speech, and main concerns) toward refugee issues and their underlying drivers, based on social media, socioeconomic, geospatial and survey data. In addition, we will also develop a novel and automated dashboard that leverages multimodal AI with multisource data, such as news and social media, to timely report and forecast the refugee-related pressures across the four scales to inform stakeholders. 

By pinpointing the public perceptions and concerns toward refugee issues, as well as the mechanisms of their spatiotemporal dynamics, this study could provide insights for more targeted and place-sensitive policymaking for sustainable refugee governance and integration in future Europe, and beyond.