Denis Stukal

My name is Denis Stukal. I am Lecturer in Data Analytics in Social Sciences at the Department of Government and IR (School of Social and Political Sciences) at the University of Sydney.

In 2018-2020, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab at New York University. I received my PhD in Political Science from NYU (2018). My research interests lie in Data Science, Computational Communication, and Comparative Politics. Most of my work relates to analysing large corpora of texts and collections of other social media data to study misinformation and computational propaganda.

In one of my projects (co-authored with Sergey Sanovich, Josh Tucker, and Rich Bonneau), I use supervised machine learning to develop a new tool for identifying bots on the Russian political Twitter and measuring their political orientation. Another project (co-authored with Arturas Rozenas) analyzes how the Russian state-controlled television (mis)informs citizens about the economic performance of the country.

My current work focuses on analysing the use of Twitter bots during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. In particular, I'm working on building a new state-of-the-art bot detection technology based on an ensemble of neural networks. My work involves advanced natural language processing and machine learning. I am proficient in R and Python and have developed software that facilitates research on the political use of social media.