Phd Researcher in Data and Computational Social

**Job Reference**: - 541_24_DIR_CSS_R1**Position**: - PhD researcher in Data and Computational Social Sciences (R1) - AI4S**Closing Date**: - Thursday, 26 September, 2024**Reference**: 541_24_DIR_CSS_R1**Job title**: PhD researcher in Data and Computational Social Sciences (R1) - AI4S**About BSC** - The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, was a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and is now hosting entity for EuroHPC JU, the Joint Undertaking that leads large-scale investments and HPC provision in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 1000 staff from 60 countries. Look at the BSC experience: BSC-CNS YouTube Channel Let's stay connected with BSC Folks We promote Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, fostering an environment where each and every one of us is appreciated for who we are, regardless of our differences.**Context And Mission** In our pursuit, we focus on a wide range of key societal research areas such as Population changes and living arrangements, Democratic Quality, Social Media and the Information Environment, Social-Ecology, Education and Labor Market, Law technologies, Social Innovation, and History and Cultural Heritage. Employing a mixed of complex statistical models, AI/Machine Learning, Large Language Models (LLMs), Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), Social Network Analysis (SNA), among others, our advanced computational methods are applied to diverse datasets from official statistics, surveys, social media, news, laws, historical archives, current data archives, citizens' volunteered data, government and industry data. As a PhD researcher in the area of Communication and Social Behavior, you will contribute cutting-edge research on social science data stewardship and data preparation for AI and analysis with Prof. Ana Sofia Cardenal, Professor of Political Science and Communication at BSC-UOC, and Dr Mercè Crosas, Head of the Computational Social Science and Humanities Programme at BSC. The funding for these actions/fellowships and contracts comes from the European Union Recovery and Resilience Facility - Next Generation, within the framework of the General Invitation by the public business entity Red.es to participate in the talent attraction and retention programs within Investment 4 of Component 19 of the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan. "La financiación de estas actuaciones/becas y contratos, procede del Mecanismo de Recuperación y Resiliencia de la Unión Europea-Next Generation, en el marco de la Invitación General de la entidad pública empresarial Red.es para participar en los programas de atracción y retención del talento dentro de la Inversión 4 del Componente 19 del Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia.**Key Duties** - Contributing to data management and annotation of datasets about communication and internet use to build a world-wide internet observatory as part of a data repository - Assistance in designing and managing the internet data observatory - Collaborating in building new (semi)automatic approaches to curate and analyze the data collections using LLMs, mostly applied to text classification and topic modeling to help create secondary, merged datasets for future research - Working closely with both the Communication and Social Behavior research area and the Data and Methods technical area - Co-authoring and leading research papers as part of the doctoral dissertation - Taking active part in BSC research environment and take advantage of its interdisciplinary work and networks - Communication of projects’ results in conferences and workshops - Occasionally, assistance in organizing expert workshops, conferences and seminars **Requirements**: - Education - Master’s degree within the domain of data science, language communication and technology - Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience - Familiarity with text analysis, classification, topic modeling (e.g., use of LDA) - Some programming experience with e.g. R, Python and eagerness to work in multiple languages and code - Experience in data management and automated data annotations or labeling - Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience - Fluency in English is essential. Proficiency in Spanish and other European languages would be advantageous. - Experience in text analysis for online communication and social behavior (e.g., hate speech analysis) - Practical experience creating databases with annotated large corpus - Competences - Ability to work in a team and in