Research Asst Professor - Media Forensics Hub

Clemson University: College of Business: John E. Walker Department of Economics
Research Asst Professor - Media Forensics Hub

Location: 320 Wilbur O. and Ann Powers Hall, Clemson, SC

The Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University (Clemson, SC) seeks applicants to contribute to building standardized measures for understanding coordinated social media information operations across platforms.

The initial appointment is for two years, during which time the candidate will provide valuable technical skills, especially in the collection and analysis of large and heterogeneous social-media datasets, with focused effort toward two primary tasks that will provide foundational resources for the study of coordinated inauthentic (disinformation) operations (CIOs), on social media and beyond.

The selected candidate will initially contribute to two ongoing efforts, but they are expected to establish their own research portfolio as they grow into the position. These two initial projects are: A General Characterization of the Strategy and Tactics of Coordinated Information Operations The selected candidate will develop preliminary results to support mid- to largescale proposals focused on the systematic characterization of coordinated inauthentic informational operations on social media. Working with an existing media forensics team at Clemson, the successful candidate will develop new modes of analysis for large datasets containing records from known inauthentic CIOs. This will involve the application of existing NLP and ML techniques to analyze the content of social media data. Combining this content analysis with other metadata sources, the candidate will develop descriptive and statistical models to robustly characterize the strategy and tactics behind a range of CIOs. Cross-Platform Data Collection and Regularization. CIOs often operate across several media channels and social media platforms. The selected candidate will develop a suite of tools for the collection, normalization, and analysis of data from a variety of social-media platforms including Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and others. The candidate will leverage content analysis techniques to identify matching narratives across these platforms. Combining narrative information with other account characteristics, they will begin to build a framework for connecting accounts, groups of accounts, and the narratives they promote across the platform datastreams. The goal of the position is to strengthen the already strong research program in disinformation and media forensics at Clemson University by increasing the ability to access reliable and comparable data across campaigns and platforms.

QUALIFICATIONS

Earned PhD with an interest in social media, data science/engineering, and social science. Experience building data pipelines, especially for social media, strongly preferred.

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS

For full consideration, submit all application materials by May 18, 2022. Please submit the following documents to Interfolio: http://apply.interfolio.com/106082

(1) A Current Curriculum Vitae (2) A Letter of Interest (3) Contact information, including names, email addresses, and phone numbers, for three (3) professional references (4) Examples of Written Work (5) Evidence of programming expertise and experience, ideally in Python.

${desc4}

Clemson University is an AA/EEO employer and does not discriminate against any person or group on the basis of age, color, disability, gender, pregnancy, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status or genetic information. Clemson University is building a culturally diverse faculty and staff committed to working in a multicultural environment and encourages applications from minorities and women.

PI175630016