Sofia Quaglia
Doctoral Researcher at University College Dublin 

I am a doctoral candidate in Quantitative and Computational Social Science at University College Dublin (UCD) and work on the Woman in Organised Resistance (WARRIOR) project founded by Research Ireland (IRC Laureate consolidator award). My research focuses on how people explain and justify political action in contexts of conflict. I design and implement Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to analyse text and media from conflict-affected contexts, studying how emotions and beliefs are expressed and how they shape agency and narratives.

Additionally I am also part of the Aletheia Research Institution, where I founded and co-lead the CHAOS lab (Complexity and Hierarchy Analysis of Organisations and Systems). In CHAOS, we work on interdisciplinary policy research, integrating network analysis and computational approaches into current issues of political economy. 

I have been working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) since 2019. My path into AI began with a background in philosophy, where I was interested in understanding how humans think and reason. This led me to AI as an attempt to replicate these processes, and to AI ethics as a way of questioning the relationship between humans and machines.

Over time, my work has moved from the ethical analysis of AI to the design of computational methods. My current research brings these strands together: I develop algorithms to quantitatively analyse natural language, allowing me to study how people reason, express emotions, and form beliefs across large-scale political texts and media.