Department of Applied Social Sciences
Research Assistant
(Ref. 260430011)
[Appointment period: twelve months initially, with possibility of further appointment]
Duties
The appointee will assist the project leader in the research project - “Digital governance in an age of AI and big data”. The project focuses on digital governance and AI in the public sector, human-computer interaction and citizen-government communication. He/She will be required to:
(a) assist in designing research tools such as experiments and questionnaires;
(b) conduct data processing and analysis; and
(c) perform any other duties as assigned by the Head of Unit or his delegates.
Qualifications
Applicants should:
(a) have an honours degree in Public Administration, Public Policy, Political Science, Economics or Computational Social Science or other related disciplines;
(b) have research interests in at least one of the areas, digital governance, AI in the public sector, human-computer interaction and citizen-government communication in Chinese or Hong Kong context;
(c) have knowledge of Git, LaTeX, and reproducible-research practices;
(d) have a good command of both written and spoken English and Chinese;
(e) demonstrate competence in quantitative and computational methods, including inferential statistics and causal inference in Stata and/or R, and working proficiency in Python for data processing, text mining and machine learning; and
(f) be proficient in handling large, messy, real-world corpora and datasets in HKEX filings, government reports, citizen-government interaction logs, or survey data, including scraping, cleaning, structuring.
Preference will be given to those with hands-on experience in one of the areas: transformer-based NLP BERT, Chinese-language variants such as BERT-wwm or ERNIE, agent-based modeling e.g., Mesa, NetLogo, configurational methods on QCA/fsQCA, structural equation modeling, experimental or survey-based HCI research, or representation-learning techniques on VAEs, contrastive or prototype-based models.
Applicants are invited to contact Prof. Nie Lin at telephone number 3400 3492 or via email at lin-apss.nie@polyu.edu.hk for further information.
Conditions of Service
A highly competitive remuneration package will be offered.
Consideration of applications will commence on 7 May 2026 until the position is filled.
Posting date: 30 April 2026