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., Mozes, M., Gill, P., & Kleinberg, B. (2020). Online influence, offline violence: Language use on YouTube surrounding the ‘Unite the Right’ rally. Journal of Computational Social Science. Open Access.
• van der Vegt, I., Mozes, M., Kleinberg, B. & Gill, P.(2020) The Grievance Dictionary: Understanding Threatening Language Use. Pre-print.
• van der Vegt, I., Kleinberg, B. & Gill, P.(2020). Too good to be true? Predicting author profiles from abusive language. Pre-print..
• van der Vegt, I., & Kleinberg, B. (2020). Women worry about family, men about the economy: Gender differences in emotional responses to COVID-19. Accepted SocInfo 2020: Pre-print.
• Kleinberg, B., van der Vegt, I., & Mozes, M. (2020). Measuring Emotions in the COVID-19 Real World Worry Dataset. Proceedings of the 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics conference. Pre-print..
• 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).
• 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.

Recent activities

• For International Women in Engineering Day 2020, the UCL Engineering faculty interviewed me in this short video about my work, how the Covid-19 situation has impacted this, and what advice I’d give to a young person wanting to enter the field of STEM.
• 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.