Postdoctoral Researcher Digital Media and Politics

**Job Reference**: - 539_24_DIR_CSS_R2**Position**: - Postdoctoral researcher Digital Media and Politics (R2) - AI4S**Closing Date**: - Tuesday, 01 October, 2024**Reference**: 539_24_DIR_CSS_R2**Job title**: Postdoctoral researcher Digital Media and Politics (R2) - 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 and Household changes, Democratic Quality, Social Media, Public Opinion and Political Communication, Equity and Welfare in Education and Labor Market, tlegal systems and Legislation, Social-Ecology, Science of Science, and History, Archeology and Cultural Heritage. Employing a mixed of advanced statistical models, AI/Machine Learning, Large Language Models (LLMs), Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), Social Network Analysis (SNA), high-performance computational methods are applied to a wide range of large datasets from official statistics, surveys, social media, news, laws, historical archives, current data archives, archaeology data, citizens' volunteered and web-scraping data, and public administration and industry data. As a postdoctoral researcher for the Digital Media and Politics lab you will play a pivotal role in advancing cutting-edge research on social media and public opinion by use of novel computational methods, and will report to Dr Laia Castro, Professor of Political Science BSC-UB, and Dr Mercè Crosas, Head of the Computational Science 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** - Conduct original research on the impact of digital media use on political attitudes, cognitions and behaviors - Coordination and assistance of data collection and analysis - Assistance in team coordination and PhD supervision - Communication of projects’ results in conferences and workshops - Organization of expert workshops, conferences, seminars - Collaboration with members from other departments and disciplines (Political Science, Communication Science, Computer Science, Sociology, Economy, among others) will be encouraged - Travel internationally to engage with relevant scientific communities **Requirements**: - Education - PhD in the social sciences or computational (social) science - Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience - Experience in quantitative empirical analysis and computational methods, familiarity with at least one of the following: online experiments (e.g. large-scale online field experiments), machine learning and text analysis, network analysis, agent-based modeling. - Some experience in collecting online behavioral data via e.g. APIs, data donations, web-tracking - Some experience in analyzing and integrating large datasets from diverse sources (social media, web-browsing, survey) - Programming skills and eagerness to work in multiple languages and code (e.g. R, Python), with different statistical softwares, packages, notebook environments - Interest in researching social media use and public opinion, political communication or comparative media research. Relevant experience (published research articles, previous jobs in teams within the above-mentioned disciplines) will be considered - Additional Knowledge and Professional