Computational Social Science has 2 open PhD positions. One on the topic is related to hate speech and the second on mental health. Please feel free to spread among your contacts.

We expect the candidate to know one or more aspects of the following techniques and programming languages (if not all):
(i) Preferred programming languages: Python or R.
(ii) Exploratory data analysis: feature extraction, visualization, etc.
(ii) Machine learning and deep learning with some hands-on experience.
(iv) Social media analysis: This includes collecting data from Twitter/Reddit and analyzing it for insights. An ideal candidate should be mindful of what’s going on social media as well.
(v) Social network analysis and Natural Language Processing

Program Benefits

The funding is for 4 years for PhD
Health insurance is provided
Academic and industrial professional development including travel support.
Interaction with world-renowned external board members and speakers.
Travel grant for attending conferences and workshops.

Location: Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Estonia.
Institute of Computer Science is located in the University of Tartu Delta Centre (https://delta.ut.ee/en/) and it is a unique multidisciplinary centre for digital technology, analytics and economic thought, bringing together more than 2500 students, university teachers, scientists and R&D staff from companies. In short you will get an opportunity to work with diverse and collaborative colleagues. Delta Centre opened in January 2020 and is one of the most modern centres of digital technology, analytical and economic thought in the Nordic region.

University of Tartu is the leading higher education and research center in Estonia, with more than 16000 students and 1800 academic staff. It is also the highest ranked university in the Baltic States according to both the Times Higher Education and the QS World University rankings. University of Tartu’s Institute of Computer Science, ranks 176-200 (according to Times Higher Education), and hosts 750 Bachelors and Masters students and 60 doctoral students. The institute has a strong international orientation: over 40% of graduate students and a quarter of academic and research staff members are international. Graduate teaching in the institute is in English.

Estonia is famous for its e-approach and home to many startups like Skype, Transferwise and Bolt to name a few. Tartu, university town, is the second largest city of Estonia and is relatively less expensive and is surrounded by nature within the walkable distance from the city.

The successful candidate will work on an European research project within the “computational social science lab” (https://css.cs.ut.ee/) at the Institute of Computer Science. The group conducts leading-edge research in the fields of social media analytics and social network analysis.

The applicant should have:

• Should have a master’s/PhD degree in computer science, IT, mathematics or other relevant discipline for PhD/Postdoc
• Excellent programming skills.
• A good command of spoken and written English,
• Background in statistics/Data Mining/Machine Learning, social media analysis would be ideal. Knowledge of social network analysis would be an additional advantage.

All applications should include a CV (PDF format, at the most 2 pages), research statement of suitability (PDF format, at the most 2 pages), Transcripts (master and bachelor), master thesis (or paper writing experience evidence). Applications can be sent to rajesh.sharma@ut.ee with the subject “(PhD application in hate speech/mental health”.

Rajesh Sharma,
Associate Prof and Erasmus+ Coordinator,
Head, Computational Social Science Group
Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Estonia CSS Group (ut.ee)