NOW Page

Things I am involved in now ¹:

📊 Research:

📊 Research:

Project: GENIAL - GENIAL: GENerative AI Tools as a Catalyst for Learning

A focus group led by my colleague, Dr Marcos Barreto (LSE Department of Statistics), and I. We want to explore the practical applications of Generative AI tools for education and understand how they might specifically enhance (or hurt) programming skills and critical thinking. We will design exercises and learning materials and test them on several undergraduate and a graduate course at LSE this coming academic year.

You can read more about it on the dedicated website here.

Project: DISCORDIA - Uncovering Patterns of Parliamentary Dissent

Led by me and a dedicated team of research assistants, this project explores the fascinating realm of political dissent within the UK Parliament. We aim to identify and understand the indicators in MPs’ speeches at the House of Commons that may suggest a likelihood of rebelling against party lines. Using a combination of data science and political analysis, our goal is to gain insights into the patterns of parliamentary rebellion. We’re experimenting with various machine learning models and investigating the use of explainable AI to enhance our analysis. The findings from this project are expected to shed light on the nuances of political discourse.

🖇️ A dedicated website will soon appear here soon

Collaborators:

• Joint research with Prof. Ken Benoit.
• Research Assistant: Terry Zhou (2nd Year BSc in Politics and Data Science, LSE)
• Research Assistant: Nikolai Semikhatov (2nd Year BSc in Politics and Data Science, LSE)

Project: Course Selection Pathways at LSE

A dataviz project to visualise and understand how students choose and navigate through their optional courses at LSE.

Current collaborators:

• Ellen Austin (Senior Data Analyst at LSE)
• Prakrit Jayakumar (LSE BSc in Econ 2nd Year) and
• Ethan Virtudazo (LSE General Course Student from Japan).

Past collaborators:

• Ben Steiner
• Mike Christodoulou

Project: 🇵🇱🤝🇪🇺 Emoji, Language Games and Political Polarisation

What can the emojis you use in your social media profile reveal about your political values? 🤔

Read our first paper:

Luxmoore, Sara, Jonathan Cardoso Silva, and Pedro Ramaciotti. ‘Emoji, Language Games and Political Polarisation’. In Fourth Conference on Computational Humanities Research. Paris, France, 2023.

Co-authors:

• Sara Luxmoore (PhD student at UC Berkeley)
• Pedro Ramaciotti (Research Scientist @ médialab Sciences Po)

VIMuRe

You can read about VIMuRe on paper recently published at JRSS A (De Bacco et al. 2023: “Latent Network Models to Account for Noisy, Multiply Reported Social Network Data.”

• I am writing tutorials and maintaining the VIMuRe packages in R and Python.
• 🗣️ At the end of June 2023, I will be in Portland, Oregon for the Sunbelt 2023, teaching a workshop about VIMuRe alongside Daniel Redhead & Elly Power

🧑‍🏫 Teaching:

• I just finished teaching Summer School course about data engineering in R at LSE (ME204 — Data Engineering for the Social World).

• I have been preparing material for the upcoming academic year at LSE. Courses I taught recently:

DS101

Fundamentals of
Data Science

🎯 Focus:
theoretical concepts of data science

📂 How:
reflections through reading and writing

DS105

Data for
Data Scientists

🎯 Focus:
collection and handling of real data

📂 How:
hands-on coding exercises and a group project

DS202

Data Science for
Social Scientists

🎯 Focus:
fundamental machine learning algorithms

📂 How:
practical use of ML techniques and metrics

On top of that:

• I have been working on quarto-template-for-university-courses for my upcoming undergraduate courses at LSE in 2023/24.

• 📖 I might be working on a textbook too…

Footnotes

1. Read about the /now page “movement”