The médialab at Sciences Po is hiring a Postdoctoral Researcher to work on mathematical modeling of political opinions, interactions in online social platforms, and algorithmic recommendations.
The offered position is part of the AI-Political Machines project, funded by the McCourt Institute, a research center established at Sciences Po in Paris and Georgetown University in Washington DC, devoted to conducting research tackling the challenges of the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, and their impact in society.
The goal of project AIPM is to improve the understanding of how AI systems perceive large social, political, and informational online systems, and what the implications are for algorithmic mediation and recommendation, and their impact on social phenomena. Most AI systems mediating social platforms (e.g., generating friend and content recommendations) are trained using digital traces: networks of friends in social platforms (social graphs), content consumption and behavioral trace data (clicks, views, shares, retweets, etc.), in addition to text and images. AIPM seeks to improve the understanding of what these systems are implicitly inferring about users when trained to propose algorithmic recommendations. Are AI systems capable of inadvertently learning political stances of users when computing recommendations? What are the effects of algorithms mediating digital space in opinions and polarization? How to leverage knowledge about machine perception of large social systems in designing better AI systems?