Avner Kantor

About

My research sits at the intersection of information systems, economics, and computational social science. I study how information environments shape collective engagement, asking not just who shows up to online public discourse, but what structural and strategic conditions make participation possible in the first place. My primary empirical setting is large-scale online news commenting, where I analyze how journalistic information design influences the coordination dynamics that precede network formation. Methodologically, I combine formal modeling (global games, rational inattention, strategic complementarities) with causal identification strategies and text-based computational methods applied to corpora of millions of observations.

I completed my PhD at the University of Haifa under Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli. My background spans philosophy, education, healthcare analytics, and official statistics, fields that have each sharpened a different part of how I think about data, rationality, and evidence. I approach empirical questions with a commitment to both theoretical grounding and methodological rigor, and I am drawn to research settings where the stakes for democratic participation are real.

Currently a Statistician at the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel.

Education

University of Haifa2024

PhD, Information & Knowledge ManagementHaifa, Israel

Dissertation: Online Deliberation and Data Journalism
Advisor: Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem2015

MA, PhilosophyJerusalem, Israel

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem2010

BA, PhilosophyJerusalem, Israel

Academic Positions

Reichman University (IDC Herzliya)2021–2022

Adjunct Lecturer, Lauder School of GovernmentHerzliya, Israel

Taught “Introduction to Data Science with Python for Government.”

University of Haifa2015–2018

Research Fellow, Center for Internet ResearchHaifa, Israel

Designed and launched OpenPISA, an open-data platform for the OECD PISA database.

Publications

Information Systems & Online Deliberation

Kantor, A., & Rafaeli, S. Fewer but More Elaborate: How Information Accessibility Filters Participation and Shapes Online News Comments. Journalism Studies. Forthcoming
Kantor, A. Before Ties Form: How Information Environments Shape Collective Engagement Through Coordination Dynamics. Under review at Information Systems Research. SSRN
Kantor, A., & Rafaeli, S. (2025). Conversations with data: How data journalism affects online comments in the New York Times. Proceedings of HICSS-58, 8, 2386–2395. ScholarSpace
Kantor, A., & Rafaeli, S. (2025). Data, sense, and sensibility: How data journalism style shapes interactivity. Selected Papers of Internet Research (AoIR). DOI
Kantor, A., & Rafaeli, S. (2021). Independence through data journalism. Selected Papers of Internet Research (AoIR). DOI
Kantor, A., & Rafaeli, S. (2020). Open PISA: Dashboard for large educational dataset. Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Learning@Scale, 253–256. DOI

Healthcare Analytics

Mor Shalom, M., Kantor, A., et al. (2025). Changes in trends of visits and service utilization by mental health patients in the community: a twelve-year study in Israel. Israel Journal of Health Policy Research.
Shapiro Ben David, S., Kantor, A., et al. (2025). Reported penicillin allergy in Israel: Clinical outcomes and antibiotic costs in a nationwide population-based cohort study. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: Global.
Kertes, J., Shapiro Ben David, S., …, Kantor, A., et al. (2023). Association Between AZD7442 (Tixagevimab-Cilgavimab) Administration and SARS-CoV-2 Infection, Hospitalization, and Mortality. Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Conferences Without Proceedings

Aug 2026
Information Environments and the Structure of Political Discussion Networks. Accepted
Political Networks Conference, University of Manchester
Jul 2026
Beyond Who Shows Up: Information Design and Online Political Discourse. Accepted
“Elections in Times of Crisis” Conference, Israeli Political Science Association, Reichman University
Jun 2026
When Information Is Both Costly and Empowering: Equilibrium Selection Under Strategic Complementarities. Accepted
42nd Annual Conference of the Israel Economic Association (IECA), Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University
May 2026
The Architecture of Evidence: How Data Journalism Restructures the Topology of Online Deliberation.
COMPTEXT Conference, University of Birmingham
2025
Now You See Me: Using Generative AI to Drive Engagement with Data Visualizations. Poster
IEEE VIS Workshop on GenAI, Agents, and the Future of VIS, Vienna
2025
Modeling How Data Journalism Shapes Discussion Networks. Poster
Israel Statistics and Data Science Association (ISDSA)
2020
Does Data Journalism Engage Its Audience?
Computation + Journalism Symposium, Virtual Event

Invited Talks & Seminars

2024
Data journalism and learning analytics.
Learning Analytics Café MOOC (Prof. Ido Roll), Faculty of Education in Science and Technology, Technion
2017
How can the public be encouraged to investigate educational questions?
Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation, Technion
2017
Education data journalism.
Open Media and Information Lab, Open University of Israel
2015
Data journalism.
Special Seminar for World Statistics Day, Israel Central Bureau of Statistics

Professional Experience

Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS)
Statistician

2024–Present
Jerusalem, Israel
Maccabi Health Services
Data Scientist

2021–2024
Tel Aviv, Israel
Corona National Information and Knowledge Center
Data Scientist

2020–2021
Israel
Center for Educational Technology (CET)
Data Scientist

2018–2020
Tel Aviv, Israel

Research Grants

Trump Family Foundation (2015–2020): $120,000 for the Open PISA Project.
AllCloud Co. (2017): $11,000 for cloud hosting support.
DAAD Center for German Studies (2010–2011): $10,000 for “Narrative, Dreams, Imagination.”

Technical Skills

Methodologies: NLP, SNA, time-series forecasting, psychometric modeling, causal inference Tools: Python (pandas, scikit-learn, NetworkX), R (tidyverse, fixest, igraph), SQL