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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  • Nov 2025
    Majid Akhtar joins our group as a Postdoctoral Research Associate focusing on countering disinformation campaigns. Majid completed his PhD at UNSW Sydney in Computer Science and Engineering, where he specialised in cybersecurity with a focus on detecting social media manipulations, fake news detection, and bot detection. Welcome, Majid!
  • Oct 2025
    🎓 Elaine Gong submitted her PhD thesis. Elaine did an Industrial Doctorate Program (IDP) thesis, working midway between industry and academia. Her research focused, among other, on personality prediction based on social media text and learning the relationship between personality and engagement in job market. Congrats Elaine!
  • Oct 2025
    Artur Grigorev joined our group as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on quantifying and closing skill gaps for local governments. Artur completed his PhD in Information Technology at UTS, where his research focused on traffic incident analysis including duration and impact prediction, severity classification, and risk forecasting using deep learning and traffic simulation. Welcome, Artur!
  • Sep 2025
    Andrei filmed with Dr Karl two “Shirtloads of Science” vodcast episodes. We talked about what is misinformation (spoiler alert: not an information problem, but a human and social problem), the impact on our society, the addictive nature of social media, the social media ban for under 16s, how misinformation leads to radicalisation and many other topics. Check out Episode 1 and Episode 2
  • Sep 2025
    📄 The paper Cosmos 1.0: a multidimensional map of the emerging technology frontier by Elaine, Andrei and collaborators was accepted in the prestigious Nature Scientific Data! Nature’s Scientific Data is among the Top 20 Multidisciplinary Science Journals in the world. It is arguably the highest impact data journal in the world and of similar impact to Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Machine Intelligence. Well done, Elaine!

Recent Posts

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Jun 20, 2025 Research, blogpost

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.

May 9, 2025 Research, blogpost

Some Reddit users just love to disagree, new AI-powered troll-spotting algorithm finds

Our article from the The Conversation from our paper presented at WWW'25.

Pio Calderon, (edited by Marian-Andrei Rizoiu)
Oct 13, 2023 Research, blogpost

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.