Program Overview

PhD Scholarship: AI for Mining, Understanding, and Augmenting Public Opinion and Public Discourse

Overview

The PhD project will develop AI and statistical methods to mine, understand, and augment public opinion and public discourse. The goal is to innovate AI-based systems for extracting representative signals about the public from millions of social media and news media data points.

Research Area

The research will involve development and deployment of AI-based systems analyzing millions of news articles, social media posts, and users. This research will span the areas of data science, natural language processing, responsible and explainable AI, computational social science, and social computing.

Location

The PhD candidate will be based in UCD's School of Computer Science. Hybrid working arrangements are possible.

Scholarship

The scholarship value is about 114,000 and includes a 4-year tax-free stipend (22,000 annually), registration fee, a travel budget for international travel to conferences (3,000), and a new computer.

Mandatory Criteria

• BSc degree in Computer Science or similar discipline
• Excellent programming skills
• Excellent English communication skills
  • Non-native English speakers should have an IELTS with a minimum total score of 6.5 (with at least 6 in all components) or equivalent

Selection Criteria

• MSc degree in Computer Science or similar discipline
• Research and/or industry experience commensurate with the stage of your career
• Excellent quantitative research skills
• Self-motivation and research interests
• Expertise in programming in Python
• Experience in Machine Learning and/or Statistics
• Experience in Computational Social Science and/or Social Computing
• Excellent written and oral communication and interpersonal skills

PhD Project Details

The PhD candidate will:

• Develop AI-based systems for extracting representative signals about the public from millions of social media and news media data points
• Study social media and AI systems that influence the public, while helping to identify misinformation, bias, and polarization
• Pioneer fair and explainable AI systems that address biases and misinformation by aiming for representativeness

Responsibilities

The PhD candidate will contribute to making our AI systems and digital media of tomorrow accountable, representative, explainable, and ready to interact with our open world for public good. The candidate will also do some demonstration and/or teaching assistant hours in the School as part of their career development.