SICSS-Helsinki

Matti Nelimarkka

Matti Nelimarkka leads the Helsinki Social Computing Group, an interdisciplinary group examining both computers and society. They explore digital democracy and politics in the digital era as well as computational techniques in social sciences, especially workflows and connections between social science theories and code. He is affiliated with the Faculty of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Aalto University and Futurice, a Finnish software consultancy. He is about to publish a new computational social science text book Coding Social Science via SAGE Publishing.

Markus Himanen

Markus Himanen (M.Soc.Sc in political science) is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Helsinki and works as a researcher in the project Social exclusion, polarization and security in the Nordic welfare state (SEPOS) that is funded by the Nordforsk. Himanen’s research interest include racial and ethnic discrimination in policing, ethnic profiling, internal immigration policing, and non-discrimination training in the public security sector.

Johannes Johansson

Johannes Johansson is a PhD candidate in political communication at the University of Gothenburg, SE. His research concerns media-effects on perceptions, and he previously worked at the laboratory of opinion research and SOM Institute. He holds a MA in Political Science from Universities of Gothenburg, SE and Konstanz, DE.

Elisa Kannasto

Elisa Kannasto is a Senior Lecturer of Communications in the Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences and a PhD Candidate in the University of Vaasa, Finland. Her research focuses on personal brands in political campaigns in social media. Her other research interests are personalization of politics on hybrid media, social media, and information seeking behaviour in social media. She is also a board member in a research community Rajapinta.

Angela La Colla

Angela La Colla holds a B.A. in Political Science and a MSc in International Relations from the University of Milan (Unimi), and a Master’s Degree in Governance and Human Rights from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). She aspires to become a PhD candidate. Her research interests include the way computational social sciences will be applied to a multimodal analysis of texts and images aimed at a consequential reasoning of the conceptual ways politicians, media and social media communication influence, affect and bend the common-understanding and awareness of climate change.

Jana Lasser

Jana Lasser is a postdoctoral researcher of Computational Social Science in David Garcia's lab at Graz University of Technology. Her research interests include digital health, emotion dynamics and agent based modelling of human behaviour in small communities. Next to her research, Jana cares deeply about openness and reproducibility in research.

Virve Marionneau

Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki Faculty of Social Sciences. My research focuses mainly on sociological and comparative approaches to gambling and the political economy of gambling.

Hasti Narimanzadeh

I'm a PhD candidate at the department of Computer Science, Aalto University. I hold a BSc in Software Engineering and an MSc in Communications Engineering. My research interests range from graph theory, algorithms, to machine learning and computational social science.

Yi Ming Ng

Yi Ming is an incoming Master's student in Urban Science at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He has done research in computational policy and quantitative political science, and is interested in data-driven approaches for political and urban sociology. He graduated with a BA in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics from Yale-NUS College.

Hanna Ojanen

Hanna Ojanen is a Master's student at the University of Helsinki. Her research focus is platform governance. Her previous research has focused on disinformation. Before her Master's she worked as a Project Manager at Nordic West. She is currently a Planning officer at the Finnish Government.

Joni Oksanen

Joni Oksanen is a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki. At the Centre for Social Data Science (CSDS), he researches colloquial online discussions related to health and well-being using natural language processing and text mining methods. He holds a MSc in statistics from the University of Helsinki and he has previous experience of working in the field of epidemiological research.

Sina Özdemir

PhD candidate in Political Science. I am interested in how social and political values are discursively created and contested. Specifically, what do people find acceptable and proper for political authorities. I try to incorporate automated and manual analysis as well as quantitative and qualitative methods in my research.

Henna Paakki

Henna Paakki is a doctoral candidate at Aalto University, working in projects related to automated disinformation and trolling, and crisis narratives. With a background rooted in linguistics, her research focuses on disruptive behavior in social media interaction, using applied approaches to computational conversation analysis.

Matias Piispanen

Matias is pursuing a PhD at the Facing Narcissism project at the University of Helsinki, in collaboration with Aalto University. He holds a Master’s degree in Human Neuroscience and Technology from Aalto University. His research examines self, narcissism and social interaction using methods of sociology, experimental psychology and neuroscience.

Virpi Salojärvi

Virpi Salojärvi is Assistant Professor in the School of Marketing and Communication at the University of Vaasa and is affiliated in the discipline of Political Science at the University of Helsinki. She is a work package leader in two Academy of Finland -funded projects on populism and polarization. Her research interests include populism and media, polarisation, social movements, visual analysis and Latin American studies.

Sonja Savolainen

Sonja Savolainen is a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki Doctoral School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her current research uses computational methods to examine how social movements adjust to open and closed media systems, and on the other hand tactically use opportunities provided by social media and technological development.

Laura-Elena Sibinescu

Laura-Elena Sibinescu is a post-doctoral researcher at the Helsinki Hub on Emotions, Populism and Polarization, where she studies political polarization and marginalized communities on social media. She holds a PhD from the University of Helsinki, where she is also affiliated as a researcher and instructor since 2019. Her research interests include digital democracy, computational methods in political science, and data feminism.