James Evans is Professor of Sociology, Director of Knowledge Lab, and Faculty Director of Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research uses large-scale data, machine learning, and generative models to understand how collectives think and what they know. This involves inquiry into the emergence of ideas, shared patterns of reasoning, and processes of attention, communication, agreement, and certainty. He is especially interested in innovation—how new ideas and practices emerge—and the role that social and technical institutions (e.g., the Internet, markets, collaborations) play in collective cognition and discovery.