Our lab focuses on computational methods to study the human mind and behaviour.

Academic backgrounds of lab members include from Psychology, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Mathematics, Law, Cognitive Science.

We meet once a week for a lab meeting.

PhD students

• Riccardo Loconte, Computational advances in verbal deception detection, 2022-2025, joint PhD with IMT School of Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy (role: primary supervisor; co-supervisor: Prof. Pietro Pietrini)
• Sanne Peereboom, Assessing the artificial mind through the marriage of natural language processing and psychometrics, 2023-2027 (role: primary supervisor; co-supervisor: Dr Inga Schwabe)
• John Caffier, Computational methods to measure and manipulate trust with hyperpersonalised messaging, 2024-2028 (role: primary supervisor; co-supervisor: Prof Olga Stavrova, University of Lübeck)
• Weng Lam Ao, Analyze and design effective policies to encourage people to cycle Understanding decision-making in transport behaviour through social media data, 2023-2027, joint PhD with University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy (role: primary supervisor; co-supervisor: Dr Francisco Bahamonde Birke)
• Rasoul Norouzi Nikjeh, Text-mining methods for theory development in psychological and social science research, 2023-2027 (role: joint primary supervisor Dr Caspar van Lissa and Prof Jeroen Vermunt)
• Jennifer Chen, Adolescent-Specific Assessment and Psychotherapy (ASAP): Innovating Idiographic Methods for Youth-Tailored Care, 2024-2028 (role: primary supervisor; co-supervisor: Dr Melissa de Smet)
• Tijn van Hoesel, Investigating the impact of spin and other reporting practices in scientific research, 2024-2028 (role: primary supervisor; co-supervisor: Dr Marjan Bakker)

Visiting PhD students

• Qian Chen, Measuring interpretation bias and cognitive inflexibility through textual data, visiting period: 1/2024-8/2025, home institution: Central China Normal University, China.
• Fabio Russo, Human perceptions of explainable artificial intelligence, visiting period: 1/2025-12/2025, home institution: IMT Lucca, Italy.

Completed PhDs

• Dr Isabelle van der Vegt, Understanding and predicting threats of violence using computational linguistics (supervision with Prof Paul Gill) - completed in 1/2021 (current position: Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at Utrecht University, NL)
• Dr Felix Soldner, Detecting and mitigating online customer fraud (supervision with Prof Shane Johnson) - completed in 6/2023 (now: postdoc at Leibniz Institute GESIS, Cologne, Germany)
• Dr Maximilian Mozes, Adversarial perturbations in natural language processing (supervision with Prof Lewis Griffin) - completed in 12/2023 (current position: Senior Research Scientist at Cohere AI, London)
• Dr Arianna Trozze, New forms of financial crime (supervision with Dr Toby Davies) - completed: 12/2023 (current position: Cryptocurrency Intelligence Scientist at Elliptic, London).
• Daniel Hammocks, Information prioritisation for horizon scanning using data science techniques (with Prof Kate Bowers) - thesis submitted, viva date in May 2025 (current position: Senior Data Scientist at the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), London).