Research Assistant Computational Philosophy Lab

Position: Research Assistant at the Computational Philosophy Lab
Location: Greater London

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** About the Opportunity**#
** Position overview
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* Title:

** Student Research Assistants
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* Location:

** Working remotely with regular meetings in Devon House
** Term:
** Approximately 10 hours until no later than 31st May 2026
** Salary:**            £16.64 per hour
** Start:
** asap#
** The research projects
** Researchers at the Computational Philosophy Lab () are seeking support across three distinct but related interdisciplinary projects in philosophy and computing: (1) The Launch of GenAI - Perceptions of AI in Art and Creativity in Twitter Communities (PIs - Alice Helliwell and David Freeborn); (2) A Graph-theoretic analysis and visualisation of logical inferences (PI – Ioannis Votsis); and (3) Network Analysis of AI Ethics Literature (PI
- Brian Ball).Project 1 makes use of a dataset of ~15 million tweets on AI from early November 2022 to February 2023, spanning before and after the launch of ChatGPT, and shortly after the launch of Stable Diffusion. We are analysing public discussion on AI in this time period, examining communities of discussion, attitudes towards AI and perceptions of creativity.

Project 2 builds on existing work in graph theory and logic to provide: (a) intuitive ways of visualising logical proofs through graphs, (b) a means through which shorter proofs can be discovered.

Project 3 makes use of a number of datasets surrounding the academic AI ethics literature in philosophy and computer science to provide a network analysis of the interdisciplinary research landscape in this fast-evolving area.

The projects are methodologically unified, with similar (computational and philosophical) skills and interests needed for each role. Candidates may wish to express their preferences amongst these projects at interview.#
** ROLE SUMMARY
** The projects’ research assistants (RAs) will work with the PIs. These roles will ideally be related to the student’s area of study and will involve. Guidance will be provided by the PI and others, and will build on the existing skills of the role holder.#
** Duties and responsibilities
** The Principal Investigators (supervising faculty) determine the goals to assist in the preparation for and achievement of the overall projects. Key tasks are likely to include the following.
** Project 1**:

The RA will work with the project research team at the Computational Philosophy Lab, and co-investigators at Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy to analyse the dataset to extract
1. Community and network structure
2. Content analysis includinga. Topic modellingb. Semantic clusteringc. Sentiment analysisd. Conceptual analysis

And to analyze the relationships between them. This will involve the use of a range of computational techniques from network science and natural language processing.
** Project 2**:
The RA will work with the project research team at the Computational Philosophy Lab, and particularly the PI Ioannis Votsis, to help design and computationally implement intuitive visualisations of logical proofs using graphs.
** Project 3**:
The RA will work with the project research team at the Computational Philosophy Lab, particularly the PI Brian Ball, to access a range of datasets surrounding the academic literature to extract edge-lists linking e.g. authors, journals, and/or publishers based on a range of connections (e.g. citation, co-authorship, similarity of topic, etc.). This will involve the use of a range of computational techniques from network science and natural language processing.

RAs on all three projects will also:
* Meet with faculty supervisor on regular basis to maintain ongoing communication regarding the quality of the assistant’s performance.
* Perform other related duties as required.##
** Scope of the Assistantships
** The Research Assistants will work on dedicated tasks as indicated above.

The RAs will at times work online and will be expected to have the necessary equipment (laptop/PC, internet connection, standard licensed software package, College licensed library resources access, etc) to work remotely.## ##
** Supervision
* * The Research Assistants will be supervised by their respect projects’ PIs. This is envisaged to be on a…