Research

Projects from my master's and my own independent work, grouped by where they stand. The code for most of them is public on GitHub.

Current work

In progress

Spherical maps of survey-based distance matrices

Supervised research internship at the Institute for Analytical Sociology. Social scientists often draw distances between respondents, parties or countries as flat two-dimensional maps, and those maps distort. I build distance matrices from survey data, place them on the surface of a sphere and compare the fit with standard PCA and MDS using Kruskal stress.

Data
European Social Survey, Swedish party survey data
Methods
Euclidean and correlation distances, PCA, MDS, spherical embedding
Working paper in progress

Who accepts AI at work? Socioeconomic inequalities in workplace AI attitudes across the EU

An independent secondary analysis of which socioeconomic and experiential factors go together with positive views of AI at work. The data are cross-sectional, so the results describe associations, not causes.

  • Self-rated digital competence is the strongest predictor, well ahead of education or age.
  • People with prior exposure to AI at work are more accepting, not less.
  • Financial precarity predicts lower acceptance through a channel that digital competence does not explain.
Data
Special Eurobarometer 554 (GESIS ZA8844), n = 26,404, EU27
Methods
Survey-weighted regression with country fixed effects, robustness checks
Tools
R, Quarto
Pilot

Nordic University AI Policy Tracker

How do Nordic universities frame generative AI in teaching? The pipeline collects official guidance, processes it and codes it on two independent indices: a Restriction and Enforcement Index and a Pedagogical Integration and Support Index. A policy can score high on both. The pilot covers one university in each Nordic country and is built to scale to 30 or more European universities.

Scope
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland
Tools
Python, BeautifulSoup, Selenium, spaCy, BERTopic, SQLite, Streamlit, pytest
Proposal

Who gets left behind? AI use and trust among university students

A study design on how socioeconomic and demographic background predicts AI use, trust and learning behaviour among university students in Sweden, framed as a question of digital inequality. The proposal and a 38-item survey instrument are written.

Grounding
Digital divide research, AI literacy, UTAUT

MSc projects

Completed

Adolescent friendship network dynamics

How do best-friend networks change over a school year? A longitudinal analysis of one secondary-school class across three waves, testing reciprocity, same-sex preference and triadic closure.

Methods
Stochastic actor-oriented models, goodness-of-fit simulation
Tools
R, RSiena, igraph
Completed

Human freedom profiles: PCA and clustering

Do personal and economic freedom form one shared structure across countries, or distinct country profiles? Eleven indicators for 161 countries, reduced with PCA and grouped with hierarchical clustering.

Data
Human Freedom Index, 2016
Tools
R
Completed

Agent-based models

Three models of how large patterns emerge from local interactions: inequality under random exchange versus redistribution, diffusion with social blacklisting across network types, and a tipping point in a forest fire model.

Tools
NetLogo
Completed

Stockholm events web scraping

A scraper that turns the public Visit Stockholm events pages into a structured dataset of events by category, date and location.

Tools
R, XPath, regular expressions

Tools I have built

Live prototype

>LoopLearn

A tutoring web app that answers in the language of the learner's device (Portuguese, English, Spanish or French) and keeps the conversation on educational topics.

Stack
Progressive web app, Vercel serverless, Gemini API
Code
github.com/patriciagvrt/looplearn