Hi everyone,

Hopefully you enjoyed the summer! The Hot Politics lab meetings are back again! Our first session will be this Friday (17/9) from 15:00 – 16:00. In this session of the Online Hot Politics Lab, Pere-Lluis Huguet Cabot (Sapienza University of Rome) and David Abadi (University of Amsterdam) will give a talk titled “Computational approaches on modeling political rhetoric: basic emotions, media bias, metaphor, social identity and populist attitudes”. The talk will be followed by a Q&A, and everybody is welcome to join via Zoom: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/96492065253 at 3pm (CET). Below some information about the speakers.

Pere-Lluis Huguet Cabot is a PhD candidate at the Computer Engineering Department (Sapienza NLP group), Sapienza University of Rome, where he is supervised by Roberto Navigli. He is an MSc-graduate of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam. His research interests encompass deep learning, knowledge graphs, natural language processing (NLP), multilingual NLP models and multi-task learning (MTL).

David Abadi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Amsterdam Interdisciplinary Centre for Emotion (AICE), Department of Social Psychology, University of Amsterdam. His research interests across (computational) social science encompass social identity, affective science (basic emotions and appraisal theory), conspiracy beliefs, threat (terror management theory), political psychology (extremism and populism) as well as perspective-taking and empathy in online-communication.

Also, check out the exciting program of this semester on the website. Below an overview of the upcoming talks of the coming weeks:

• 24/9: Paul Stroet (graduate student) talking about "Predicting Personality Scores from Parliamentary Speeches"
• 1/10: Henk van der Kolk (University of Twente) about “Confusing Discontent: are Populism, Political Distrust, Efficacy and Cynicism really so much different?”
• 8/10: Hugo Mercier (CNRS) about “Not born Yesterday: Why humans are less gullible than we think”
• 15/10: Christopher Lucas (Washington University) talking about "More than Words: How Political Rhetoric Shapes Voters’ Affect and Evaluation”

Looking forward to “seeing” you all again!

Maaike Homan

PhD Candidate at the Political Science Department

Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research

University of Amsterdam

Room B10.01