PhD Position in Computational Social Sciences 1087 views

The Chair of Systems Design at ETH Zurich invites applications for a PhD position in the field of Computational Social Sciences as part of a larger research project on political speeches and networks.

About the Project:

• The aim is to detect when politicians change their opinions and why.
• The parliamentary speeches (using both supervised and unsupervised ML approaches) and the temporal dynamics of how members of parliament work together will be examined.
• The project builds on a newly compiled data set of the Swiss parliament from 1891-today.
• It contains all speeches, political interactions and collaboration networks from members of parliament over the past 128 years.
• New methods to elicit political positions from different data sources allowing for more coarse-grained analyses on opinion shifts in politicians will be developed.

Starting date: February 2020 and is fully funded for 3+ years by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF).

Requirements:

• Candidate must be with a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science (or related field).
• Applicant must have skills in German, good German skills.
• Strong analytical skills and background in natural language processing are essential.
• Candidate should show an interest in social and political science questions, be able to communicate well in an interdisciplinary team, and be highly motivated and creative in what they do.

Applications:

Apply online with the following documents:

• CV
• Motivation letter
• Transcript of grades