The Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC) at the University of Edinburgh invites applications for three-year PhD studentships starting in September 2024. ILCC is dedicated to the pursuit of basic and applied research on computational approaches to language, communication and cognition. Primary research areas include: Natural language processing and computational linguistics, Machine Translation, Speech technology, Dialogue, multimodal interaction, language and vision, Computational Cognitive Science, including language and speech, decision-making, learning and generalization, Social Media and Computational Social Science, Human-Computer interaction, design informatics, assistive and educational technology, Information retrieval and visualization. Approximately 10 studentships from a variety of sources are available, covering both maintenance at the research council rate of GBP 19,162 (2024/25 rates) per year and tuition fees. Awards increase every year, typically with inflation. Studentships are available for UK, EU, and non-EU nationals.

Digital Minds: Brain Development in the Age of Technology examines how our increasingly connected world shapes mental and cognitive health. From screen time and social media to virtual interactions, this seminar delves into the latest research on how technology influences brain development, relationships, and emotional well-being. Join us to explore strategies for harnessing technology's benefits while mitigating its potential challenges, empowering you to thrive in a digital age.

In our rapidly evolving digital world, there is increasing concern about the impact of digital technologies and social media on the mental health of young people. Policymakers and the public are nervous. Psychologists are facing mounting pressures to deliver evidence that can inform policies and practices to safeguard both young people and society at large. However, research progress is slow while technological change is accelerating.My talk will reflect on this, both as a question of psychological science and metascience. Digital companies have designed highly popular environments that differ in important ways from traditional offline spaces. By revisiting the foundations of psychology (e.g. development and cognition) and considering digital changes' impact on theories and findings, we gain deeper insights into questions such as the following. (1) How do digital environments exacerbate developmental vulnerabilities that predispose young people to mental health conditions? (2) How do digital designs interact with cognitive and learning processes, formalised through computational approaches such as reinforcement learning or Bayesian modelling?However, we also need to face deeper questions about what it means to do science about new technologies and the challenge of keeping pace with technological advancements. Therefore, I discuss the concept of ‘fast science’, where, during crises, scientists might lower their standards of evidence to come to conclusions quicker. Might psychologists want to take this approach in the face of technological change and looming concerns? The talk concludes with a discussion of such strategies for 21st-century psychology research in the era of digitalization.

In this talk I will present our recent behavioural and neuroscience research on how the brain motivates itself to form particular beliefs and why it does so. I will propose that the utility of a belief is derived from the potential outcomes associated with holding it. Outcomes can be internal (e.g., positive/negative feelings) or external (e.g., material gain/loss), and only some are dependent on belief accuracy. We show that belief change occurs when the potential outcomes of holding it alters, for example when moving from a safe environment to a threatening environment. Our findings yield predictions about how belief formation alters as a function of mental health. We test these predictions using a linguistic analysis of participants’ web searches ‘in the wild’ to quantify the affective properties of information they consume and relate those to reported psychiatric symptoms. Finally, I will present a study in which we used our framework to alter the incentive structure of social media platforms to reduce the spread of misinformation and improve belief accuracy.

The talk will detail work drawing on behavioural results, formal analysis, and computational modelling with agent-based simulations to unpack the scale of the challenge humans face when trying to work out and factor in the reliability of their sources. In particular, it is shown how and why this task admits of no easy solution in the context of wider communication networks, and how this will affect the accuracy of our beliefs. The implications of this for the shift in the size and topology of our communication networks through the uncontrolled rise of social media are discussed.

In recent years, communicating one’s research to audiences outside of academia has grown in importance and time commitment for many researchers. Science Slams or University Open Days reliably draw large crowds, and the potential of social media to amplify any message has made it possible to reach interested recipients without the traditional press as a middleman. In this presentation, I will provide insights into science communication from my perspective as a neuroscience researcher, who enjoys spreading the word about how amazing insect brains are. We will have a look at the What?, Why? and How? of science communication. What do we generally mean by the term, and what forms can it take? Why should – or must – we engage in it? And how can we best achieve our aims with it? I will provide an overview of the current communication landscape, some food for (critical) thought, and many practical tips that help me when preparing to share my science with a wider audience.

Concerns about the impact of social media use on adolescent well-being and mental health are common. While the amount of research in this area has increased rapidly over the last 5 years, most outputs are still marred by a multitude of limitations. These shortcomings have left our understanding of social media effects severely limited, holding back both scientific discovery and policy interventions. This talk discusses how developmental, cognitive and neuroscientific approaches might provide a new and improved way of studying social media effects. It will detail new studies in support of this idea, and raise potential avenues for collaborative work across the Cambridge Neuroscience community. As the digital world now (re)shapes what it means for us to live, communicate and develop, only an interdisciplinary approach will allow us to truly understand its impacts.