Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and Department of Computer Science, Aalto University is looking for
a part-time research assistant
to support our research on computational social science. The job includes tasks related to data collection and computational data analysis, together with our researchers and collaborators. Based on your interest, the tasks can also include original research on this topic
The focus of this research is the digital manifestation of political activities. We need to collect data from online media spaces (such as Facebook, Twitter, Suomi24 etc.) and analyse such data using statistics and machine learning tools and existing APIs. The research can focus on topics like electoral campaigning and racisms.
The research assistant is also welcomed to participate in other activities in Digital Content Communities, such as our emerging research on MyData and political study of socio-technical systems.
The required skills for the position are
- Good knowledge of Python-language and libraries, such as requests and BeautifulSoup
- Good understanding of quantitative research, in particular, statistical testing
Furthermore, following skills are considered an advantage in this position
- Basic understanding of social science (sociology, communication research, political science, etc.
- Good knowledge of qualitative research, in particular, grounded theory and interview analysis
- Basic understanding of supervised and unsupervised machine learning
- Understanding of other programming environments, such as R or Javascript
We are happy to provide support for a Bachelor or Master thesis in the context of this work!
Length of contract: 4 months with possible extension based on job performance and progress on studies, starting from September
Work time: about 18 hours per week, flexible timing. We expect to see you in Otaniemi weekly.
Salary: Between 900 and 1100 euros, based on the number of credits. (per Aalto University policy)
In your application
We aim to conduct this application round anonymously. Kindly leave out all identifiable information from your answers.
- Summarise your interest towards the position (300 words) and your expectations and hopes towards us and the job (500 words). Also, describe your future plans (200 words).(word lengths only indicator, we are not gonna count them)
- Provide a summary of the number credits and grade point average per subject you’re studying. If you have finished your Bachelor thesis, mark the grade also.
- Describe tasks that you’ve done using programming tools, e.g. "Data collection from Twitter (Python) " or "Running topic models of the Twitter data (R, Python)"
- Describe your familiarity with social science research
- Describe your previous work experience if it is relevant, mention institutions and outcomes (no need to provide references at this point of time), e.g., "I have worked at the University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science as a teaching assistant for introduction for programming courses." or "I worked at Faculty of Social Science in a research project examining voting behaviors. We are working towards a published paper on these findings."
Send your application via E-lomake . Apply by August 5th (18.00). Interviews take place the next week.
More information, contact Matti Nelimarkka (matti.nelimarkka@hiit.fi) via email.
Last updated on 30 Aug 2016 by Matti Nelimarkka - Page created on 7 Jul 2016 by Matti Nelimarkka