Dr. Tuğrulcan “Tj" Elmas is a Lecturer in Computational Social Science at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. He is the co-director of the Social Media Analysis and Support for Humanity (SMASH) group. His research focuses on computational approaches to understand and counter social media manipulation. He is also interested in understanding and describing humans’ interactions with each other on social media platforms and with the platforms themselves. He uses a combination of security, data science and computational social science methods to conduct his research. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from EPFL, Switzerland in 2022. He also spent a year in the Observatory on Social Media (OSOME), at Indiana University, USA, as a postdoctoral fellow. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Bilkent University, Türkiye in 2017 with a minor degree in Philosophy.

• Thesis Title: The Role of Compromised Accounts in Social Media Manipulation

• Minor: Philosophy

social media manipulation, political polarisation, hate speech, disinformation, applied NLP, computational social science, AI for social good