The 4th iteration of the Ambassadors Internship Scheme will commence in May with internship applications open by mid-February and interviews likely to take place in late March. Social and Political Sciences, Business and Health in Social Sciences are the participating schools within CAHSS. The projects address issues on gender inequalities, the use of AI in educational context, psychological therapy for depression and research management. As always skills in data analysis and visualization, programming, and statistics are much needed. Other than strong data and analytical skills, communication and teamwork are key for the interns to succeed in their role as members of multidisciplinary teams.
Dr Jordana Viotto Da Cruz, Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the Business School proposed a project on the use of AI by students. This is a crucial moment for AI within HEI, so gaining a better understanding will inform, support policy development, and enable a discussion at a societal level regarding the use of generative AI in educational contexts. The Ambassador will work on a dataset derived from students interacting with a generative AI tool, and utilise Natural Language Processing to compare AI outputs and the student's final delivery, with an emphasis on transparency and replicability.
Dr Gian Marco Campagnolo, Senior Lecturer in Science & Technology Studies and Turing Inaugural Fellow returns as a host this year with an exciting topic addressing gender inequalities in sports analytics. A high-quality dataset from leading sports data platforms about women's football will be the starting point for the intern to address computational approaches of data scarcity and under-representation of women in data. Interns may apply computational techniques such as principal component analysis and sequential analysis, and machine learning approaches such as any variation of random forest and clustering techniques.
The School of Social and Political Sciences Research Portfolio Manager, Caroline Laffey, proposed the development of a Bid Pipeline Dashboard, focused on overall engagement with funding calls and schemes, which will allow colleagues to have a view on the popularity of calls as well as a sense of interest levels in particular types of bid activity. The tool will facilitate an understanding of collective bid engagement as well as providing intelligence on service peaks and capacities. There is an emphasis on expandability with the vision for the tool to be replicated across subject areas for different funders.
Dr Laura Cariola, Lecturer in Applied Psychology and Dr Tim Bird, Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the School of Health in Social Sciences, will host a student working towards the development of a Shiny App for R performing 'Actor-Partner Interdependence Model'. The funded 'Big Accelerator' project titled "Viewing Therapists and Patients as Equals: Data-Driven Natural Language Analysis to Predict Outcomes in Psychological Therapy for Depression" employs Natural Language Processing intending to create a lexical model of patient-therapist dyadic interactions in face-to-face psychological therapy to predict therapeutic outcomes. The resulting Shiny tool will be made openly accessible and will serve as a key output of the project.
For more details on the Ambassadors Internship scheme visit https://digitalresearchservices.ed.ac.uk/training/ambassadors
Want to become an intern and work on one of these (or other) projects? Our job advert is live now, closing date 10th March. Apply here.