Selim Yaman
Political (Data) Scientist
I’m a postdoc at the University of Mannheim’s Center for Social Data Science, working with Dr. Marc Ratkovic to see just how far we can push large language models in the social sciences. I earned my PhD in Political Science from American University, where I spent a lot of time thinking about data (and perhaps a little too much time with Bayesian ways of modeling data) as well as previous, not-so-large language models. My substantive research dives into comparative politics—especially public opinion and violent conflicts (you know, all the fun stuff).
Previously, I produced political satire TV shows in London, UK. That was also fun.
Download my CV.
Experience
Post-Doctoral Researcher
- Conducting advanced research on large language models (LLMs) in collaboration with Dr. Marc Ratkovic, with a focus on applications in political methodology. Teaching data science courses.
Replication Analyst
- Worked in the most reputable academic journal in political methodology
- Evaluated statistical analyses of submitted manuscripts, and assisted authors in debugging code
- Heavily used command line tools, remote servers, SQL, R, and Python to ensure that all code reproduce authors’ original results
Graduate Assistant
- Organized and thought at data science courses at Institute for Data Science and Big Data
- Teaching Assistant for advanced Bayesian Statistics & Introduction to Statistics course
- Helped students in understanding machine learning, coding, statistical modeling, debugging; held regular office hours; graded code assignments
- R package development and maintenance (BaM, and ProtectR)
Data Analyst and TV Producer
I analyzed and visualized data on the company’s international auidence. I also helped producing shows.
Education
PhD in Political Science
- Subfields: Methodology and Comparative Politics
- Dissertation on NLP methods in Political Science
- Bayesian Statistics
- Machine Learning
- Advanced Statistical Analysis
- NLP
MSc in Political Economy of Development
- Dissertation on Religion Effect on Economic Growth
- Microeconomics
- STATA, R
BA in Economics
This is where I first learnt about the introduction of data science with plenty of econometrics classes. Bogazici University is the most prestigious school in Turkey.
Accomplishments
TA at ICPSR
I was a TA for the machine learning course at University of Michigan’s ICPSR, worked with Professor Christopher Hare
Participant at ICPSR
Intensive summer program for methodology courses. I took two classes here: Machine Learning, and Python.
Teaching Assistant at Institute for Data Science and Big Data
In this every-day intensive course, I helped students everyday in debudding code, finding relavant datasets, and doing statistical analysis.
Teaching Assistant at Bayesian Statistics
I held regular office hours, designed and evaluated Bayesian statistics assignments every week. We used JAGS to implement multilevel Bayesian modeling.
Fellowship Award
I won the prestigious Kerwin Doctoral Fellowship - 10,000 USD for PhD dissertation
Conference Presentation
I presented a research article titled Bridging the Theory and Practice: Introducing Bayesian Partially-Protected Lasso’ at PolMeth 2023, Stanford University
Completed Summer Institute in Computational Social Sciences (SICSS) Istanbul
I participated in the summer courses, and we wrote a short research project on tweets posted on Israel-Palestine conflict. We estimated ideologies of Twitter users, and extracted what topics that they discussed.
Conference Presentation
I presented a research article titled ‘Estimating User Ideology on Twitter Using Large Language Models’ at the Comptext 2023 in Glasgow, UK
Conference Presentation
I presented a research article titled ‘Political Economy of Warlords: A Local-Level Analysis from Afghanistan’ at the 78th Annual Midwest Political Science Conference. You can find the article here.
Completed Winter Institute in Computational Social Sciences (WICSS) Tuscon
I participated an online program on computational social sciences hosted by University of Arizona.
Teaching Assistant at Introduction to Statistics using R
I held weekly office hours to help students overcome programming and statistical modeling challanges.