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Hiring Postdoc or data scientist

The médialab is recruiting a Postdoc or data scientist / engineer for 12 months (initially) to work on online misinformation spread.

Notice, Job

This position is part of the SPSM project focused on the spread of misinformation online. 

The person hired will employ NLP, social network analysis, and regression techniques to analyze media data associated with misinformation on public platforms, including data from Twitter/X, that has been collected and stored in an SQL database. To a smaller extent, s/he will also help in the preparation of randomized controlled experiments to test how forms of scientific and political endorsements curb or foster the sharing of misinformation.

About the project

The project is led by Achim Edelmann and funded by Project Liberty Institute. It intends to study the role of scientific and political actors in the propagation of misinformation on public and private online social networks in the U.S. and France as well as the impact of fact-checking on the public discourse surrounding misinformation. 

Objectives of the position

The primary objective of this position is to analyze text data collected from digital platforms as well as their diffusion thereon. The secondary objective is to use the results of the text analysis to help in the preparation of related online experiments. The person hired will take part in the following activities:

  • Run NLP/ML analyses, entity and event detection algorithms, and network analyses on fact-checked articles, including their propagation and related reactions on social networks to measure, visualize, and (statistically) evaluate circulation, endorsements, and impacts of misinformation online;
  • help in the preparation of randomized controlled web/online experiments to test how endorsements from social institutions curb or foster the sharing of misinformation across public and private messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.);
  • contribute to the preparation and submission of academic articles on misinformation spread using all of the above.

Desired skills and experience

  • Experience with Python and/or R (essential)
  • Experience using NLP and ML libraries/packages to identify and categorize argumentative structures, contents, and their authors (essential)
  • Experience working with SQL/PostgreSQL databases (essential)
  • Experience working with heavy datasets on remote servers (recommended)
  • Experience working with data collected from the web (web archives, HTML parsing, etc.) (recommended)
  • Experience with statistical modeling (recommended)
  • Experience with social network data and analysis and/or graph theory (helpful)
  • Experience in web data collection (collection tools, scraping, APIs) (helpful)
  • Experience in publishing peer-reviewed articles (recommended)
  • Fluency in English (essential)
  • Fluency in French (helpful)

Position environment, salary and benefits

You will join the médialab at Sciences Po (Paris 7) and work with researchers, software engineers, and data scientists. This is a good opportunity to learn and apply a wide range of data science tools in the domains of natural language processing, machine learning, and network analysis with applications to sociopolitical analysis. Depending on your career goals, you will lead or participate as co-author in the production of academic articles.

This position is for 12 months initially. Envisioned start date is June 2024; a later start is possible. 

Competitive salary depending on experience, complemented with full health insurance, 40 days paid leave per year (+5 RTT) and restaurant-tickets. Possibility and extent of remote work can be negotiated in line with Sciences Po’s agreement.

To apply

Send a CV and cover letter detailing your motivation and relevant skills for the position as well as links to code and/or scientific publications to this email address while including “[SPSM]” in the subject: recrutement.medialab@sciencespo.fr

Review of applications will start on April 25th 2024 and continue until the position is filled. 

Please indicate in your application when you would be able to start. 

Please also provide contact details for two references; we will request those in the form of an informal Email and only for short-listed candidates. 

For inquiries about the position, please contact:
achim.edelmann@sciencespo.fr