Context And Mission
The Computational Social Science and Humanities program envisions preparing the social sciences and humanities for the era of data, artificial intelligence (AI), and Exascale supercomputing. Our mission is to foster collaboration between social scientists and computer scientists, making high-performance computing (HPC) accessible to all researchers in the field. Through innovative approaches, we aim to apply social science and humanities research to contribute valuable insights for informed policy making. In our pursuit, we focus on a wide range of key societal research areas such as Equity and Welfare, Education, Social Services and Labor Market, Public Opinion and Political Communication in (Social) Media, Social-Ecology, Science and Technology Studies, Archived History, Archeology and Cultural Heritage. Employing a mixed of advanced AI/ML models, including Large Language Models (LLMs), Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), and Social Network Analysis (SNA), we use high-performance computational methods to a wide range of large datasets, such as official statistics, surveys, social media, web-tracking data, news, laws, bibliometric data, historical archives, current data archives, archaeology data, citizen volunteered data, and public administration and industry data.
We are seeking a Postdoctoral Researcher to join the Computational Social Sciences and Humanities Laboratory. The candidate will be expected to contribute to the development of use case “Beyond Academic Silos: Mapping Conceptual Relationships Through Citation and Semantic Dual-Graph Analysis” within the AI4SOCIAL+ project.
Key Duties
To contribute to the design and implementation of semantic graphs for academic works based on semantic similarities and co-citation patterns. To develop computational tools and methods to explore semantic and co-citations graphs and their relationships including edge and node predictions and between-layers mappings. To conduct research on the characteristics and correlations between graphs directed to the Science and Technology Studies, Information Science, Research Policy, Sociology of Science and Interdisciplinary academic venues.
Requirements
Education Ph.D. in Complex Systems, Computer Science, Information Science or related fields. Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience Experience in publishing academic research particular in science and technology studies and using graph and network-related methods. Experience with literature about science, innovation, and technology systems. Extensive hands-on experience with the R-statistical package and/or Python, particularly for data curation and management. Ability to work in both programming languages is desirable. Experience implementing computational and statistical methods to large-scale datasets. Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience Fluency in English is essential. Proficiency in Spanish and other European languages would be advantageous. Experience working with data for social science purposes. Experience applying, fine-tuning and comparing Large Language Models’ performance in social science applications will be highly desirable. Knowledge of parallel computing is an asset. Competences Interest and ability for independent learning, adapting and developing computational methods to answer research questions in the social sciences. Good communication skills for effective collaboration with researchers and other research engineers and data scientists. Ability to work in a team and in a multi-cultural environment. Interest and curiosity for artificial intelligence, machine learning, network analysis, and natural language processing applications in the social sciences.
Conditions
The position will be located at BSC within the Directors Department We offer a full-time contract (35h/week), a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance, support to the relocation procedures Duration: Open-ended contract due to technical and scientific activities linked to the project and budget duration Holidays: 22 days of holidays + 6 personal days + 24th and 31st of December per our collective agreement Salary: we offer a competitive salary commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate and according to the cost of living in Barcelona Starting date: As soon as possible after October 1st
