Datalab Academy

At the HCSS Datalab we believe that staying at the frontier means never stopping learning. Computational methods move quickly, and keeping pace with them is part of the Datalab’s work itself, not something we do on the side. The Datalab Academy is how we make that commitment concrete. It brings together three strands of activity: learning from academic research, contributing to it, and sharing our own work with the wider academic community.

Learning from Academic Research

Once a month the Datalab hosts a guest lecture, a session of one to two hours in which an invited speaker takes us through a recent development in computational methods. These range across the techniques shaping our work, from agentic workflows to the latest approaches in modelling and machine learning. The aim is simple: to give the team dedicated time to engage with new ideas, ask hard questions, and work out what each development means for the applied research we do at HCSS.

Alongside these sessions we run Coding 101, a series of lectures on the basic principles of computer science and coding aimed mainly at HCSS colleagues outside the Datalab, reflecting our belief that a working understanding of data and code is increasingly valuable right across a modern think tank. Interns also choose to do their graduation thesis at the Datalab, taking on a real research question and seeing it through to publication, as with No Bang for Buck, on development assistance and intrastate conflict, and Catching the Trigger, on predicting interstate conflict.

Uncovering the Climate – Conflict Link: Mapping the Causal Pathways in Iraq

Hybrid threat modeling

Optimizing Causal Interventions in Hybrid Bayesian Networks

Disentangling causality: assumptions in causal discovery and inference

PreviousNext

Contributing to academic research

The Datalab publishes peer-reviewed academic work alongside its applied research at HCSS, spanning automated event data, event extraction, and conflict and threat modelling. This is applied research in the truest sense: we take computational methods developed in academia and put them to work on real strategic questions, then feed what we learn back into the academic conversation. Publishing our work brings those methods to a wider audience and sets them against the standards of peer review. You can find the full collection on our ResearchGate page.

Book-open Book-open Explore academic research

Sharing our work

The Datalab takes its research out into the academic community by giving presentations and lectures and by attending conferences, both at home and internationally, at research institutes and universities alike. Recent examples include ACL 2026 and the International System Dynamics Conference 2026, as well as guest lectures at universities. We also train organisations and governments directly, sharing the computational methods and tools we work with so that others can apply them in their own settings. Presenting and teaching in these settings keeps us accountable to academic standards and, just as importantly, keeps us in conversation with the people pushing the methods forward.

Get in touch

Interested in a guest lecture, a training session, or a collaboration with the Datalab Academy? Contact us and we’ll be glad to talk it through.

Intern Testimonials

Oscar Lodeizen on dashboards, AI, and all things data

Arne Eichholtz on his time as a Datalab intern and finding the perfect place to combine his technical background in a policy setting

PreviousNext
© The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies