Andreu Casas

🚨 I'm recruiting 2 postdoctoral researchers for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social, to be based at the University of Oxford (@ox.ac.uk). These are both full-time positions for 2 years. Deadline for applications: June 23. Expected start date: September 2026. 🔁 Please share and help me spread the word! 🚀

📣 Official job description: my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

🚨 I'm recruiting 2 postdoctoral researchers for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social, to be based at the University of Oxford (@ox.ac.uk). These are both full-time positions for 2 years. Deadline for applications: June 23. Expected start date: September 2026. 🔁 Please share and help me spread the word! 🚀

The postdocs will join a lively research group. We hold weekly meetings featuring internal or external talks, host regular workshops with top researchers in the field, and engage with a variety of relevant stakeholders at the intersection of technology, media, AI, and politics in the UK and abroad.

🚨 I'm recruiting 2 postdoctoral researchers for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social, to be based at the University of Oxford (@ox.ac.uk). These are both full-time positions for 2 years. Deadline for applications: June 23. Expected start date: September 2026. 🔁 Please share and help me spread the word! 🚀

(Postdoc #2) Computational Social Science: strong computational expertise in working with large amounts of social media and digital trace data. This person will have experience fine-tuning and implementing large open-weight multimodal models, remote computing, and high-performance clusters.

🚨 I'm recruiting 2 postdoctoral researchers for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social, to be based at the University of Oxford (@ox.ac.uk). These are both full-time positions for 2 years. Deadline for applications: June 23. Expected start date: September 2026. 🔁 Please share and help me spread the word! 🚀

🔬 These researchers will be involved in, and lead, a variety of studies examining the determinants and effects of the curation and moderation of political speech across social media platforms, and developing new computational methods to study of large amounts of multimodal social media data.

🚨Hiring a fully funded (3.5 years) PhD for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social to research social media and politics. Candidates should have quantitative/computational skills and/or be interested in content curation/moderation. UK home candidates only unfortunately. www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/hquftp...

The candidate will join a very exciting work environment, work side by side with me and the team in our central London location, and have access to funding for conferences, training, and data collection, on top of the stipend. Help me spread the word!

Very happy to have people from our @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social attend the DSA40 Data Access Days organized by @dsa40collaboratory.bsky.social. With threats to our online and political safety in the rise, access to platform data for independent and academic researchers is more important than ever.

The Memorandum of Understanding from the UK government about the deal I fear confirms some of these suspicions, with language such as “advancing pro-innovation AI policy frameworks and efforts to support U.S. and UK-led AI technology adoption” (full memo here: lnkd.in/dw3NYvGz).

Very happy to have people from our @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social attend the DSA40 Data Access Days organized by @dsa40collaboratory.bsky.social. With threats to our online and political safety in the rise, access to platform data for independent and academic researchers is more important than ever.

We went to Berlin this week to learn more from our peers about ways to leverage DSA to access platfrom data and conduct relevant research, and to keep building a coalition to advocate for this topic in the EU, the UK, and everywhere.

🥰I had so much fun again teaching computer vision and other computational methods to these bright social scientists this week. (Un)supervised classification, image encoding, content similarity, object detection, face detection/analysis, muldimodal modeling, video data, etc., you name it!

And as usual, the highlight of the week was to learn about the participants’ projects and to discuss with them how to take them to the next level. Here a few pictures from our traditional final session “Slides with Slices” 🍕 where participants presented the projects they worked on during the week.

🥰I had so much fun again teaching computer vision and other computational methods to these bright social scientists this week. (Un)supervised classification, image encoding, content similarity, object detection, face detection/analysis, muldimodal modeling, video data, etc., you name it!

🚨Very honored to receive the Future Leaders Fellowship from @ukri.org I’ll use this 2.3 million £ investment to create the London Social Media Observatory, for cutting-edge research on social media and politics, and novel computational tools for social science research. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-an...

Additionally, the Observatory will engage with key stakeholders in this area (@ofcom.bsky.social, @electoralcommission.org.uk, platforms, and others) to promote evidence-based policymaking in this area. Stay tuned for a first public event that we are putting together for the first week of December.

Do you want to use large amounts of visual data (or text + visuals) in your research but don't know how? Join my "Computer Vision for Image and Video Analysis" course at GESIS this September (15-19th) to learn about machine learning for automatic visual analysis: training.gesis.org?site=pDetail...

I will cover a wide range of relevant topics: video/image processing, supervised classification, unsupervised classification, facial analysis, multimodal modeling, Large Visual Language Models, cloud computing, etc.

On my way to Madrid-EPSA! Please join in if you want to hear about (political biases? in) content moderation on YouTube during the 2024 US Election, and/or about using open-source Large Visual Language Models (VLMs) for supervised multimodal classification in political science research.

Friday (11:20-13:00: 1A.12) Large Visual Language Models for Supervised Multimodal Classification in Political Science Research. We compare 2 VLMs to 6 other supervised classifiers (incl. LLMs: Llama2&3), across 2 datasets and 10 tasks. VLMs outperform all models across all tasks, w. some caveats.

On my way to Madrid-EPSA! Please join in if you want to hear about (political biases? in) content moderation on YouTube during the 2024 US Election, and/or about using open-source Large Visual Language Models (VLMs) for supervised multimodal classification in political science research.

🚨New Publication @thejop.bsky.social We study who sets the issue agenda of state policymakers in the US. We find a mixed picture: they respond to shifts in attention by members of Congress, but also to the constituents in their states, particularly their own party supporters.

🚨New publication @The_JOP on human biases in data annotation (w. Nora Webb Williams, @kevinaslett.bsky.social, John Wilkerson). Extremely important given the increasing societal reliance on AI tools often trained on human coders www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

🚨New publication @The_JOP on human biases in data annotation (w. Nora Webb Williams, @kevinaslett.bsky.social, John Wilkerson). Extremely important given the increasing societal reliance on AI tools often trained on human coders www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

We show systematic differences between annotators of different gender and ideology. These emerge even for fairly objective tasks (e.g. is a protest shown in the image?), may not be detected by inter-rater reliability statistics (e.g. Cohen Kappa), and can bias downstream analyses

🚨New publication @The_JOP on human biases in data annotation (w. Nora Webb Williams, @kevinaslett.bsky.social, John Wilkerson). Extremely important given the increasing societal reliance on AI tools often trained on human coders www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...