[AISWorld] PhD opportunity in Australia

[Kirsten Wahlstrom]

PhD scholarship in social media analysis

The .auDA Foundation (https://www.audafoundation.org.au/) has awarded doctoral research funding to the School of IT and Mathematics in the University of South Australia, for investigating the presence of social manipulation activity in social media platforms. Social manipulation includes such activities as astroturfing, shill posting, upvote/downvote manipulation, false reviews and similar. These activities all rely on appearing to be genuine user opinions, when they are undeclared commercial or political promotions.

This project will consist of a number of possible strands, each of which will be the focus of a doctoral research programme. These include:

- Development of novel software techniques for detecting social manipulation, including but not limited to text analysis for authorship attribution (to detect astroturfers, where one person operates multiple accounts) and metadata analysis (where posting patterns, density and regularity may indicate shill posting). Preliminary work has shown success with some of these methods. This project requires good programming and database skills, and a knowledge of statistics would be highly beneficial;

- Development and implementation of authorship attribution software for the purpose of identifying contract cheating activity, where one person submits the work of a paid writer as their own. However, authorship attribution may be subverted using anonymising tools, such as Anonymouth, to preprocess text prior to submission. Strategies and technologies to counter such anonymising tools will be developed in the project. This project would focus mostly on text analysis and would require good programming and statistical skills.


To express your interest in these or similar projects, please contact Associate Professor Helen Ashman on helen.ashman at unisa.edu.au<mailto:helen.ashman at unisa.edu.au> in the first instance to discuss the projects.

The deadline for applications is the 31st of October via the University of South Australia online application (http://www.unisa.edu.au/Research/Research-degrees/How-to-apply/). A first-class or upper second class honours degree or equivalent in a relevant area is a prerequisite. Both Australian and international candidates are eligible to apply.