Behavioral Data Science lab

The Behavioral Data Science lab is a research group in the UTS Data Science Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

Our research aims to make sense of large amounts of behavioral data, to understand online behavior and its offline effects. We develop core methods in machine learning and optimization in order to distill heaps of raw data into meaningful insights in areas including

  • social and information network analysis,
  • information diffusion across social networks,
  • mis- and dis-information spreading,
  • tomorrow’s labour markets and labour transitions,
  • machine learning,
  • computational social science,
  • data mining, and
  • natural language processing

Two 1-Year Postdoc and multiple funded PhD positions available in detecting and modelling mis-/dis-information spread. If you are interested in working with us, please get in touch.

Recent News

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  • Sep 2025
    Kevin started his PhD with us, after securing the USyd’s University Medal. Huge congrats, and welcome Kevin!
  • Aug 2025
    📄 The paper X-Troll: eXplainable Detection of State-Sponsored Information Operations Agents by Lin, Andrei and collaborators from RMIT and DSTG was accepted for publication at CIKM'25! X-Troll integrates adapter-based models with expert linguistic knowledge to detect state-sponsored information operations agents, while providing human-readable explanations of the used manipulation strategies. Enjoy Seoul, Korea, Lin!
  • Jul 2025
    🏆 Andrei is a finalist for the 2025 Australian Museum Eureka Prizes in the Department of Defence category for Outstanding Science in Safeguarding Australia! This recognition celebrates his innovative work on ethical AI systems that detect misinformation while protecting democratic values.
  • Jul 2025
    Andrew started his Masters by research with Andrei and Emily as supervisors. Welcome, Andrew!
  • Jul 2025
    Our startup personality research made headlines in The Economist’s Bartleby column! The piece highlights our study of 21,000 global startups, revealing that successful founders exhibit distinct personality traits and that diverse founder teams significantly increase success chances.

Recent Posts

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Before It's Too Late: A State Space Model for the Early Prediction of Misinformation and Disinformation Engagement

We present IC-Mamba, a state space model that that forecasts social media engagement by modeling intervalcensored data with integrated temporal embeddings.

Opinion Market Model: Stemming Far-Right Opinion Spread using Positive Interventions

We introduce the Opinion Market Model (OMM) as a testbed to measure the impact of positive interventions on online opinion dynamics.