Academic Administrator II

Position description

Overview :

The incumbent will be the Coordinator of a two-year project on "AI and Extremism." They will lead a range of research, teaching, and public outreach activities addressing the ways that AI technologies can be weaponized to spread hate speech and propagate political extremism as well as develop ways that such extremism can be mitigated and fought. Examples of extremism to be addressed by the initiative include the following : the use of AI to foster Holocaust denial and Holocaust inversion; how social media and AI technologies can be used to amplify and spread white supremacy, antisemitism, and racism; the specific ways that AI technologies (ranging from large language models and chatbots to image and video generation tools) can be used to distort and falsify history, including the creation of deep-fakes; and the use of AI to spread propaganda, create echo chambers, and amplify misinformation. In addition to documenting the prevalence of such speech, the position will also develop hate speech detection models (including data harvesting, data analysis, and real-time detection) to identify the prevalence and spread of such speech online; foster strategic partnerships across UCLA (such as with the Initiative to Study Hate, the Working Group in Memory Studies, and DataX) as well as major cultural institutions such as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the USC Shoah Foundation to address new challenges in Holocaust education in the 21st century; teach up to two classes per year in UCLA's Digital Humanities program and / or other interdisciplinary fields; and participate in public outreach activities including scholarly dissemination, seminars, and / or conferences.

This position is an Academic Administrator II and will report to Professor Todd Presner, Director of the UCLA "AI and Cultural Heritage Lab," and be housed with the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. This is a two-year appointment, which will conclude with a series of deliverables including a comprehensive research progress report, course syllabi, project-specific datasets, and public presentations.

The duties of the Coordinator are as follows :

Academic Mentorship and Project Leadership (20%)

• As Coordinator, serve as project lead for the "AI and Extremism" initiative; collaborate with team members to realize projects.
• Through the "AI and Cultural Heritage Lab," lead research collectives, working groups, and digital projects, fostering collaboration and shared intellectual direction for the initiative.
• Liaise with interdisciplinary groups across the university, ensuring visibility across departments
• Represent the project publicly in workshops, conferences, and other presentations
• Mentor undergraduate research assistants and graduate students, providing guidance in both technical skills and scholarly practice.
• Manage complex research workflows involving multiple contributors, maintaining both intellectual cohesion and technical reproducibility.
• Identify grants opportunities, develop proposals, and secure funding to support expansion of digital humanities projects and of the UCLA Initiative in AI and Extremism.

Data Analysis and Programming (40%)

Public Engagement (20%)

Instruction and Course Development (20%)

Qualifications

Basic qualifications

Academic Credentials & Teaching Experience

Research Proficiencies

Digital Humanities & Memory Studies

Critical AI Scholarship

Technical Proficiencies

Leadership & Collaboration

Preferred qualifications

Advanced Technical Skills

Data Expertise

Visualization & Public Engagement

Application Requirements

Document requirements

The UCLA campus has expressed these goals in its strategic plan as follows :

Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles

Expand our reach as a global university

Enhance our research and creative activities

Elevate how we teach

Become a more effective institution

Prompt for candidates for recruitment :

Reflecting on your personal and professional experiences, highlight your past contributions and future commitments to advancing UCLA's mission as embodied in the 2023-28 strategic plan. These accomplishments and ambitions may be discussed in the context of describing your teaching, scholarship, and service

Reference requirements

Provide email address, name and affiliation of your references.

Apply link :

Help contact : rchung@humnet.ucla.edu

About UCLA

As a University employee, you will be required to comply with all applicable University policies and / or collective bargaining agreements, as may be amended from time to time. Federal, state, or local government directives may impose additional requirements.

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, protected veteran status, or other protected status under state or federal law.

As a condition of employment, the finalist will be required to disclose if they are subject to any final administrative or judicial decisions within the last seven years determining that they committed any misconduct, are currently being investigated for misconduct, left a position during an investigation for alleged misconduct, or have filed an appeal with a previous employer.

Job location

Los Angeles, CA