Last week, HCSS Data Scientist Emma Bokel visited Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUas) to give a guest lecture to students of the Applied Data Science & AI programme. She showed them how HCSS applies data science to issues in the fields of geopolitics, defence and security.
The lecture centred on one of the core competencies of the HCSS Datalab: the automatic conversion of text into insights. News reports, for example, provide an almost real-time picture of events around the world, but in their raw form they are too voluminous and unstructured to be analysed in depth.
Emma took the students through the process. It begins with collecting, filtering and cleaning large volumes of news data. The data is then processed using natural language processing techniques, including both traditional methods such as named entity recognition, sentiment analysis and topic modelling, and newer AI techniques, including large language models (LLMs) used to extract information from the text. The result is structured datasets and interactive dashboards that enable geopolitical, security and climate trends to be tracked as they unfold.
The students were highly engaged throughout. The lively question-and-answer session revealed a keen interest in how HCSS’s data scientists use their technical skills to contribute to international security and foreign policy. They asked questions about cyber security, language differences and which LLM models the Datalab uses.
Many thanks to Alican Noyan for the invitation, and to the students for their enthusiasm and insightful questions.
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