Recruit

Overview:

The incumbent will be the Coordinator of a two-year project on “AI and Extremism.” They will lead a range of research, teaching, and public outreach activities addressing the ways that AI technologies can be weaponized to spread hate speech and propagate political extremism as well as develop ways that such extremism can be mitigated and fought. Examples of extremism to be addressed by the initiative include the following: the use of AI to foster Holocaust denial and Holocaust inversion; how social media and AI technologies can be used to amplify and spread white supremacy, antisemitism, and racism; the specific ways that AI technologies (ranging from large language models and chatbots to image and video generation tools) can be used to distort and falsify history, including the creation of deep-fakes; and the use of AI to spread propaganda, create echo chambers, and amplify misinformation. In addition to documenting the prevalence of such speech, the position will also develop hate speech detection models (including data harvesting, data analysis, and real-time detection) to identify the prevalence and spread of such speech online; foster strategic partnerships across UCLA (such as with the Initiative to Study Hate, the Working Group in Memory Studies, and DataX) as well as major cultural institutions such as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the USC Shoah Foundation to address new challenges in Holocaust education in the 21st century; teach up to two classes per year in UCLA’s Digital Humanities program and/or other interdisciplinary fields; and participate in public outreach activities including scholarly dissemination, seminars, and/or conferences.

This position is an Academic Administrator II and will report to Professor Todd Presner, Director of the UCLA “AI and Cultural Heritage Lab,” and be housed with the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. This is a two-year appointment, which will conclude with a series of deliverables including a comprehensive research progress report, course syllabi, project-specific datasets, and public presentations.

The duties of the Coordinator are as follows:

Academic Mentorship and Project Leadership (20%)
● As Coordinator, serve as project lead for the “AI and Extremism” initiative; collaborate with team members to realize projects.
● Through the “AI and Cultural Heritage Lab,” lead research collectives, working groups, and digital projects, fostering collaboration and shared intellectual direction for the initiative.
● Liaise with interdisciplinary groups across the university, ensuring visibility across departments
● Represent the project publicly in workshops, conferences, and other presentations
● Mentor undergraduate research assistants and graduate students, providing guidance in both technical skills and scholarly practice.
● Manage complex research workflows involving multiple contributors, maintaining both intellectual cohesion and technical reproducibility.
● Identify grants opportunities, develop proposals, and secure funding to support expansion of digital humanities projects and of the UCLA Initiative in AI and Extremism.

Data Analysis and Programming (40%)
● Use Python-based tools and workflows to design, build, and manage large-scale text- and image-based corpora drawn from archival sources and online environments.
● Work with social media datasets and archives applying methods for data extraction from structured and unstructured sources.
● Conduct web archiving, access data through APIs, and perform web scraping to support research, such as semantic search and text classification.
● Stay current with scholarly publications and public projects on AI ethics, algorithmic justice, and the cultural politics of computation.
● Critically assess and contextualize AI-generated outputs within broader histories of race, white supremacy, and technological governance.
● Analyze historical and contemporary materials related to propaganda, disinformation, and platform-mediated extremism to prepare essays, courses, reports, and/or presentations.
● Design and apply prompt engineering strategies for large language models

Public Engagement (20%)
● Develop digital exhibits, storytelling applications, and interactive interfaces that connect scholarly research with public audiences.
● Create and interpret visualizations of humanistic data using advanced visualization tools.
● Produce and disseminate research-informed materials across fields such as critical AI studies, digital humanities, memory studies, and Holocaust studies.
● Translate complex research outcomes into accessible formats for academic peers, educators, and the broader community.
● Participate in public-facing outreach, including scholarly dissemination seminars and academic conferences.

Instruction and Course Development (20%)
● In collaboration with the Director, design and teach courses examining how AI technologies can be weaponized to spread hate speech and political extremism, as well as strategies to mitigate and counter such extremism.
● Teach up to two classes per year in UCLA’s Digital Humanities program and/or other interdisciplinary programs.
● Work with key stakeholders at UCLA such as DataX to develop curricular initiatives.
● Develop curricular materials that integrate technical training, critical theory, and applied case studies.

As a University employee, you will be required to comply with all applicable University policies and/or collective bargaining agreements, as may be amended from time to time. Federal, state, or local government directives may impose additional requirements.

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, protected veteran status, or other protected status under state or federal law.

As a condition of employment, the finalist will be required to disclose if they are subject to any final administrative or judicial decisions within the last seven years determining that they committed any misconduct, are currently being investigated for misconduct, left a position during an investigation for alleged misconduct, or have filed an appeal with a previous employer.

• “Misconduct” means any violation of the policies or laws governing conduct at the applicant’s previous place of employment, including, but not limited to, violations of policies or laws prohibiting sexual harassment, sexual assault, or other forms of harassment, discrimination, dishonesty, or unethical conduct, as defined by the employer.
• UC Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment Policy
• UC Anti-Discrimination Policy for Employees, Students and Third Parties
• APM - 035: Affirmative Action and Nondiscrimination in Employment