HICT: Doctoral Candidate in Reconstructing Crisis Narratives for Trustworthy Communication and Cooperative Agency

The Helsinki Doctoral Education Network in Information and Communications Technology (HICT) is a collaborative doctoral education network hosted jointly by Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, the two leading universities within this area in Finland. The network serves as a collaboration platform for doctoral education combining all the relevant subfields of computer science and information technology at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. It involves at present 80 professors and almost 300 doctoral students, and the participating units graduate altogether more than 40 new doctors each year.

We offer the possibility to join world-class research groups in both universities with multiple interesting research projects to choose from. The list of all open Doctoral Candidate positions in this joint call can be found here: https://hict.fi/admissions/

HICT Doctoral Candidate in Reconstructing Crisis Narratives for Trustworthy Communication and Cooperative Agency

Supervisor(s): Nitin Sawhney (Aalto University)

Join a collaborative team of PhDs, Postdocs and academic researchers working on a project jointly conducted between Aalto University and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). The project seeks to analyze and reconstruct crisis narratives using mixed-methods, combining qualitative research for narrative inquiry with computational data analytics of crisis discourses in news and social media to understand global pandemics. Candidates will work at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), design research, computational social sciences, and public health for critical societal impact. We expect the candidates to have backgrounds in computer science and/or the social sciences.

Potential duties and tasks may include the following (to be conducted as part of the research team):
1.     Examining the narratives emerging in crisis-related communication using qualitative research methods across various data sources including organization communications, news/media coverage, and social media exchange among diverse publics.
2.     Automating content analysis for narrative work using suitable machine learning techniques for Natural Language Processing (NLP) such as Conversation Analysis, Content Classification, and/or Sentiment Analysis. This includes collecting and curating datasets, devising suitable methodologies, setting up the research infrastructure and tools, and a pipeline for data extraction, analysis and validation.
3.     Representing and visualizing crisis narratives to support understanding and collaborative sensemaking among key stakeholders and diverse publics. These tools should support browsing, searching, and exploring information for selected crisis themes and narratives. Work in this area includes not only developing prototypes of visualizations, but also conducting design research, user experience (UX) evaluation, and pilot assessment of such tools.

The candidate is not expected to master all these domains, but work closely with a multi-disciplinary research team to lead design and development efforts, while learning and contributing to ongoing work in specific research areas of interest.

Research Areas: Computational Social Science, Machine Learning, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Ready to apply?

If you want to join our community and start your journey towards Doctoral dissertation submit your application via our electronic recruitment system. The application form will close 6th February 2022 at 23:59 Finnish time (UTC +2).

If you are currently working at Aalto University, please submit your application via HR System Workday (Career – Find jobs – Apply).

Please be prepared to add the following attachments:

• Cover letter
• CV
• Transcript of your Master’s studies

You will be asked to provide also the contact details of 2-3 academic referees.

What we offer?

HICT is a network of world-class professors and researchers with huge passion for their field of study. In HICT you will become part of enthusiastic and professional team of bold and innovative thinkers.

During your Doctoral studies you will be a full-time employee in either Aalto University or the University of Helsinki depending on the supervisor and the research area. You will be covered by occupational health care based on the employment contract.

More information:

General information about the joint HICT call and HICT: https://hict.fi/

General questions about HICT: Christina Sirviö, HICT team

General questions about recruitment process: Sanni Kirmanen, Aalto University HR

[email protected]

More about Aalto University:

Aalto.fi
twitter.com/aaltouniversity
facebook.com/aaltouniversity
instagram.com/aaltouniversity