Team
Here is a list of current students working under my supervision.
Postdoctoral Students
Andreea Musulan
Andreea Musulan is currently working with me on a two-year IVADO postdoctoral project focused on studying coordinated groups and malicious agents on social networks. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto in the field of computational social science. Her thesis explores the dynamics of online communication from a political perspective, with a strong interest in understanding how and why actors use digital tools to engage with the world. While her academic experience is full of NLP and ML applications to answer real world problems, she has also gained industry experience working with a cryptocurrency investment company. She is passionate about learning new skills and developing tools meant to positively influence society.
PhD Students
Julien Robin
Julien Robin is a PhD student in political science at the Université de Montréal. A graduate in public law and public management (Université Paris-Dauphine PSL and ENA), his research focuses on AI safety, parliamentary politics, and the evolution of the French party system. His thesis looks at the impact of regulatory changes on the development of parliamentary groups in the French National Assembly since 1910. A keen populariser of science, Julien regularly publishes articles in The Conversation (e.g., here, and here) and is involved in developing the datan.fr project, a tool designed to report on the parliamentary activity of French MPs.
Kellin Pelrine
Kellin Pelrine is a PhD candidate at McGill University and the Mila AI Institute, co-supervised by Reihaneh Rabbany and myself. He’s also a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, research advisor at FAR AI, and cofounder and CSO at startup Stitch. Pelrine leads research hoping to create practical, transformatively impactful machine learning systems. Recently, his focus is AI safety, misinformation mitigation, and AI agents. He’s also worked on education, political polarization, human trafficking, and temporal graphs. At FAR AI, he and collaborators have several projects on robustness of frontier models and of superhuman AIs that play the board game Go; for beating the latter as a human he has been called the “man who beat the machine”. At Stitch, he’s building the AI extension of imagination with a visual interface for LLMs.
Khadija Oubedda
Khadija Oubedda is a doctoral student with a master’s degree in political science from Doha Institute, Qatar. Her research focuses on the study of political behaviors in the Arab world using quantitative methods, particularly political trust, which was the subject of her thesis.
Matthew Taylor
Matthew Taylor is a PhD candidate in political science at the Université de Montréal, co-supervised by Ruth Dassonneville and myself. His research interests are principally on the subject of Canadian party politics, with a particular focus on the linkages between party systems at the federal and provincial levels. He did his undergraduate and master’s degrees in political science at the University of Toronto. He has published the article “Voting for women in recent Canadian elections” in French Politics, and he has written a recension titled “The Motivation to Vote: Explaining Electoral Participation” reviewed in Politiques et Sociétés.
Virginie Vandewalle
Virginie Vandewalle is a PhD student in political science at the Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on Canadian politics, with a particular emphasis on the gender gap in politics at both the federal and provincial levels. Under the supervision of Ruth Dassonneville, her master’s thesis at the Université de Montréal examined the question: “Are right-wing political parties favored by female suffrage in Canada and Quebec?” Vandewalle has contributed to the field with her article “Voting for women in recent Canadian elections”, published in French Politics.
MA Students
Camille Thibault
Camille Thibault is a master’s student in political science at the Université de Montréal and is simultaneously pursuing a microprogram in big data analysis. She is co-supervised by Reihaneh Rabbany and myself. Her research interests revolve around Canadian and Quebec politics, artificial intelligence, and misinformation. As part of her involvement with the Complex Data Lab, she has published “Towards Reliable Misinformation Mitigation: Generalization, Uncertainty”, and “GPT-4 and Uncertainty Resolution in Misinformation Detection”. Her master’s thesis, scheduled for completion in December 2025, will focus on detecting misinformation within the Quebec electoral context.
Svetlana Zhuk
Svetlana Zhuk is starting her Master’s in Political Science in Fall 2024. Her main interest is exploring the influence of artificial intelligence on political institutions.
Other Student Collaborators
I am also collaborating with these student researchers from Computer Science, Education, and Political Science on several different projects.
Aarash Feizi
Aarash Feizi is a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University and the Mila AI Institute, under the co-supervision of Professors Reihaneh Rabbany and Adriana Romero-Soriano. His research is centered on leveraging machine learning for social good, with a focus on exploring multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) as fair evaluators, extending self-supervised methods to practical applications, and assessing the impact of AI-generated misinformation on social media platforms.
Bijean Ghafouri
Bijean Ghafouri is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California. He studies public opinion, political psychology, information processing and computational social science.
Florence Laflamme
Florence Laflamme is an undergraduate student at the Université de Montréal, simultaneously pursuing a B. Sc. (Honors) in political science, a microprogram in big data analysis and a microprogram in Indigenous studies. She is particularly interested in AI governance, environmental politics and redistribution policies.
Gabrielle Péloquin-Skulski
Gabrielle Péloquin-Skulski is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is a member of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL), under the guidance of Professor Adam J. Berinsky. Her research interests lie in the fields of American politics and quantitative methodology, with a focus on political misinformation. Gabrielle’s work more specifically delves into the psychological underpinnings that influence individuals’ propensity to accept and disseminate political misinformation online. Her doctoral research examines how the content of political (mis)information interacts with emotional responses, shaping people’s attitudes and behaviors. Gabrielle is also affiliated with the Complex Data Lab, directed by Professor Reihaneh Rabbany. Prior to her graduate studies at MIT, she graduated with a B.Sc. Honors and a M.Sc. in political science from the Université de Montréal.
Roxanne Corriveau
Roxanne Corriveau is a first-year undergraduate student in political science at the Université de Montréal, where she is also pursuing a minor in Quebec studies. She is interested in the political history of Quebec, as well as linguistic and identity issues in the province.
Ruben Weijers
Ruben Weijers is an M.Sc. student in Artificial Intelligence at Utrecht University, working on effective text simplification for adolescents with a mild intellectual disorder. Under the supervision of Kellin Pelrine, he has published a workshop paper: “Quantifying learning-style adaptation in effectiveness of LLM teaching”. He is currently continuing this research by using LLMs to reduce misconceptions in physics concepts. He is also working under the supervision of Aris Richardson from RAND, creating a registry of sovereign compute projects and analyzing global patterns of technological dependence. His interests include AI governance, AI hardware and improving education.
Sahar Omidi Shayegan
Sahar Omidi Shayegan is an MSc student in Computer Science at McGill University. She is supervised by Dr. Reihaneh Rabbany and focuses on network science, particularly graph neural networks and natural language processing. Her research delves into computational social science, with a keen interest in using language features on graphs to uncover patterns. Her latest work explores political ideologies in spaces without well-defined parties.
Tamara Jacod
Tamara Jacod is an experienced Education Specialist holding a Master’s degree in Society, Culture and Politics in Education from the University of British Colombia focusing on the impact of AI and data collection on education systems. Boasting extensive expertise across varied regions such as North America, Asia, and Western and Central Africa, she has demonstrated proficiency in planning, coordinating, and overseeing research endeavors (both quantitative and qualitative), with a successful history of managing projects across diverse countries. She possesses strong skills in offering technical guidance, fostering capacity building, and ensuring quality assurance in education research initiatives in NGOs, public health and international organizations. She has a strong track record in enhancing partnerships with governments, implementing partners, and donors as well as facilitating resource mobilization and knowledge exchange.
Zachary Yang
Zachary Yang is a PhD candidate at McGill University and Mila. He is passionate about the practical application of AI and ML. Under the expert guidance of Dr. Reihaneh Rabbany, he explores innovative ways to harness AI/ML for real-world impact. His research centers around making AI/ML accessible to people, bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and practical solutions. He’s worked on detecting toxicity for in-game chat in real time. As a member of the CSDC (Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship), he engages in interdisciplinary intersection between AI and social science. His mission is to apply AI to developing user-friendly tools, applications, and systems. Let’s explore the exciting intersection of AI, ML, and societal impact.