Florian Cafiero

I am an associate professor at LRE, EPITA and a researcher at Centre Jean Mabillon - Ecole nationale des chartes - PSL.  Together with Olivier Morin and Jean-Baptiste Camps, I am a Principal Investigator of the PSL Culture Lab, a flagship research initiative dedicated to the computational study of culture.

My work lies at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, digital humanities, and computational social science. A common thread running through my research is the study of style: the idea that formal, linguistic, and expressive patterns can reveal authorship, characterize texts and discourses, and, more broadly, help us better understand cultural, social, and political phenomena. This perspective has led me to work across a wide range of objects, from literature and forensic linguistics to disinformation, social media, and, more recently, diplomacy and international negotiations.

I am currently particularly interested in the application of computational methods to diplomacy and multilateralism, especially in relation to climate change negotiations and obstruction strategies in international arenas. I am a member of the Climate Change Social Science Network at Brown University and co-principal investigator, with Ian Gray (Johns Hopkins University), of a project on climate obstruction in international negotiations. After having been a visiting scholar at Columbia University and Aalto University, I have been a visiting professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute in the fall 2025 and 2026.

Alongside this work, I have published extensively on stylometry, authorship attribution, and forensic linguistics. With Jean-Baptiste Camps, I co-authored Affaires de style (Le Robert), a book devoted to stylometry and forensic linguistics. 

My work has appeared in journals such as Science Advances, Social Networks, Journal of Computational Science or Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, in Digital Humanites (DH, CHR, EADH, Humanistica, AIUCD etc) and computer science conferences (EMNLP, CIKM, ICCS, LREC, ESWC, DCMI etc). I have been invited to present my work at institutions including Cambridge, Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Keio, Oxford, NYU, UCLA, and the University of Tokyo.

My research has been featured in international media including  BBC, The Guardian, The Times, Le Monde, El País, Süddeutsche Zeitung, La Repubblica, Asahi Shimbun, La Folha de Sao Paolo, Pagina 12 etc. I have also contributed journalistic investigations with the New York Times, on the identity of "Q",  for Pulitzer-prize winner David Kirkpatrick with J-B. Camps, then on the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto with Pulitzer-prize winner John Carreyrou, or with NBC on the Myth of the Zodiac Killer.

Since 2019, I have also been involved in public-facing work on critical thinking, online harms, and democratic resilience. I am a member of the French Ministry of Education’s Scientific Council working group on critical thinking and media literacy. I have also conducted research for MIVILUDES—the French government agency responsible for monitoring and countering cultic abuses and sectarian manipulation—on the online presence of cultic groups, and served as co-rapporteur on online racism for the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights. I was invited by the U.S. Department of State in 2023 as part of the International Visitor Leadership Program.

My publications are available on HAL, and the code for most of my projects is openly available on GitHub.

An Ecole Normale Supérieure - Paris Saclay and Ecole nationale des chartes - PSL alumnus, I received my PhD from Sciences Po - Paris.