3 research positions in the NERDS team

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Project

The project “Collective Coordination through Online Social Media” (COCOONS) is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. Its goal is to unveil elements of social interactions that enable spontaneous citizen coordination in the face of societal challenges that entail social dilemmas, such as: rapid climate change, health crises, and mass migration. To reach this goal, the project will develop opinion dynamic models and advanced machine learning tools of conversation analysis, and use them to study large-scale online social interactions data in the light of theories from Social Psychology.

Team

The NERDS team conducts quantitative research at the intersection of Computational Social Science, Data Science, and Network Science. The group has collaborations with other research groups at ITU, (NLP, Machine Learning, Digital Design), with scholars from other major universities in Copenhagen (KU, DTU), and internationally with universities and research centers in Europe and in the US. The group is a down-to-earth and fun place to work. ITU offers a rewarding and stimulating international environment. Both salary and working conditions are excellent. In Denmark, parental leave is generous, and child-care is exceptional.

Project Activities

1. Study social dynamics of coordination and opinion change in online media
2. Develop NLP models to detect dimensions of conversations that are theoretically relevant to the process of coordination
3. Design new opinion of coordination dynamics in large groups
4. Run controlled experiments to validate social psychology theories of cooperation
5. Create new online communities that promote grassroots cooperation and agreement