Through sponsorship and partnership with the DHS National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center of Excellence at UNO and in collaboration with Temple University we are seeking a postdoctoral researcher on a high-exposure project related to online extremism and the transition to real-world violence.
Using NLP and Machine Learning techniques we are seeking to develop a real-time analytics system to monitor online discourse with the end-goal of estimating the threat-level faced by government officials, institutions, and other non-public persons (esp. elections officials). Related extensions of this extremism research seeks to assess the threat-risk to other targeted groups and to map the online space of violent anti-government groups and violent hate groups.
For post-doctoral candidates targeting an academic posting our team of faculty will actively support you in this endeavor through a "post-doc first" posture, while actively facilitating connections and meaningful partnerships with our CoPIs at Gatech, Nebraska, Temple, and elsewhere. Support does not just come from project PIs but the whole Industrial Engineering department at UCF - through such joint efforts we have successfully placed a number of post-docs in tenure-track faculty positions.
Accordingly, responsibilities will include leading the execution of research efforts, mentorship of students, publications/presentations, and proposal writing. Teaching opportunities are available if desired.
Qualifications
Candidates should have a background in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, and feel comfortable working with LLMs and developing sentiment classifiers. Strong candidates will have an understanding of US politics and extremism. As an interdisciplinary project with Criminology, in additional to computational methods, the candidate will leverage large scale annotation through MTurk/Prolific in combination with qualitative coding techniques.
Application Instructions
Interested candidates should apply by sending their CV to adan.vela@ucf.edu (Subject: POST-DOC Election Violence). Applications will be reviewed until the position is filled....ideally, well before the 2024 election!
