Research Assistant

We have an exciting opportunity to join Professor Ekaterina Hertog to work on her project “The Promise of AI in Childcare: Comparative Analysis of Parental Control Apps to Support the Work of Childcare” at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.  

This project examines monitoring technologies, often referred to as “parental control apps”, and how parents make use of them to help them with the work involved in childcare. 

The research assistant will work under Professor Ekaterina Hertog’s guidance and scrape data from Google and Apple app stores to get a basic picture on the use of parental control apps (apps used to monitor children (often by their parents), children’s online behaviours and sometimes offline behaviours (like tracking kids with a map app).

Skills required:

• Strong proficiency in Python and related libraries such as BeautifulSoup and Selenium 
• Experience in web scraping using Python and related libraries 
• Proficiency in working with databases (SQL, NoSQL) and Docker 
• Understanding of HTTP requests and responses, web page structure, and HTML/CSS 
• Knowledge of Git and version control systems
• Experience with Natural Language Processing in Python: the candidate will need to be able to pre-process a large body of parental control app reviews in multiple languages and then carry out topic modelling of the reviews using packages, such as BERTopic.

To give you an example: have a look at this paper on fertility apps: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2va3n/

Professor Ekaterina Hertog’s would like to do similar kind of work, but for parental control apps.

This is a variable hours role, starting as soon as possible thereafter.  

You will have an opportunity to contribute to a resulting research paper that will aim to answer the following questions: 

RQ1: How do cultural factors influence the use of parental control apps, as reflected in user reviews across different countries or language groups? 

RQ2: Are there differences between parents and children’s perceptions?

If you would like to discuss this role please email Ekaterina.Hertog @oii.ox.ac.uk. Further details are also found in the Job Description provided.  

You will be required to upload a supporting statement, setting out how you meet the selection criteria, curriculum vitae and the names and contact details of three referees as part of your online application. 

Only applications received before noon UK time on 3 April 2024 can be considered. 

Committed to equality and valuing diversity