Andreu Casas Salleras

I am a research fellow at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), in the University of Amsterdam. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington . Before joining ASCoR, I was a Moore Sloan research fellow in the Center for Data Science at the New York University, where I worked in the Social Media and Political Participation lab.

My research interests encompass the areas of political communication, public policy processes, and computational social sciences. I am particularly interested in how social movements and interest groups influence the political agenda and the decision making process in the current media environment. Moreover, my current work at ASCoR focuses on building a better understanding of the conditions under which people get exposed to dissimilar views, and the extent to which such exposure increases or reduces affective and political polarization. My methodological interests and strengths are natural language processing (text as data), computer vision (images as data), and machine learning and artificial intelligence in general.

In addition to my work at ASCoR, I still collaborate with the Social Media and Political Participation lab, in studying how social media shapes protest dynamics and in using social media data to better understand political responsiveness. I also collaborate with John Wilkerson and Matt Denny in a NSF-funded project developing text as data methods to study the lawmaking process in the U.S. Congress; and with John Wilkerson and Nora Webb Williams in another NSF-funded project developing computer vision methods to study how images shared in social media contribute to the diffusion of outsider groups such as civil society organizations, social movements, and radical violent groups.