I am a PhD student at the UCL Department of Security and Crime Science. I also work as a research assistant on the ERC-funded GRIEVANCE project. The focus of my research is understanding threats of violence by using computational linguistics. I aim to develop solutions to better understand and counter radicalisation, extremism, terrorism, and other forms of grievance-fuelled targeted violence. I am also interested in improving research transparency within and beyond the field of crime science: check out the open science seminar series I co-organise.

More: Twitter, LinkedIn, Open Science Framework

Brief CV

• 2018-present: PhD candidate, Department of Security & Crime Science, University College London, supervised by Paul Gill & Bennett Kleinberg
• 2015-2017: Research Master’s degree in Psychology, University of Amsterdam
• 2012-2015: Bachelor of Liberal Arts & Sciences (Psychology + Linguistics), University College Utrecht

Recent publications & pre-prints

• van der Vegt, I., & Kleinberg, B. (2020). Women worry about family, men about the economy: Gender differences in emotional responses to COVID-19. Pre-print.
• Kleinberg, B., van der Vegt, I., & Mozes, M. (2020). Measuring Emotions in the COVID-19 Real World Worry Dataset. Pre-print, accepted ACL 2020.
• van der Vegt, I., Marchment, Z., Clemmow, C., & Gill, P. (2020) Learning from the parallel field of terrorism studies. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. Link (paywall).
• van der Vegt, I., Mozes, M., Gill, P., Kleinberg, B. (2020). Online influence, offline violence: Language use on YouTube surrounding the ‘Unite the Right’ rally. Pre-print.
• Kleinberg, B., van der Vegt, I., & Gill, P. (2020). The temporal evolution of a far-right forum. Journal of Computational Social Science, 1-23. Open Access.
• Schumann, S., van der Vegt, I., Gill, P., Schuurman, B. (2019). Towards Open and Reproducible Terrorism Studies: Current Trends and Next Steps. Perspectives on Terrorism. Open access paper here.
• van der Vegt, I., Gill, P., Macdonald, S., Kleinberg, B. (2019). Shedding Light on Terrorist and Extremist Content Removal. Global Research Network on Terrorism and Technology. Paper.
• Soldner, F., Ho, J., Makhortykh, M., van der Vegt, I., Mozes, M., Kleinberg, B. (2019). Uphill from here: Sentiment patterns in videos from left- and right-wing YouTube news channels. 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science. Paper.

Recent activities

• I presented at the 2019 POLTEXT conference, on 14-15 September in Tokyo, Japan. The talk discussed the working paper: ‘Online influence, offline violence: Linguistic responses to the ‘Unite the Right’ rally (with Maximilian Mozes, Bennett Kleinberg, Paul Gill).
• I was a guest tweeter for Researc/hers code a platform supporting women in computational science, research and tech.
• I spoke at the Society for Terrorism Research conference in Oslo, 20-21 June 2019. My talk focussed on developing the GRIEVANCE dictionary: understanding terrorist language use (with Bennett Kleinberg, Paul Gill). I also co-presented the paper: Towards Open and Reproducible Terrorism Studies (with Sandy Schumann, Bart Schuurman, & Paul Gill).
• At the 2019 UCL Open Science Day, we spoke about our open science seminar series at the Department of Security and Crime Science. You can find the website for JDI Open here and our slides on ‘Promoting Open (Crime) Science’ here.