The Network Contagion Lab at Rutgers University (NC Lab at Rutgers) is a cyber-social threat identification and forecasting center developed through a partnership between the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), Rutgers’ Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience, and Rutgers’ Center for Critical Intelligence Studies.
The NC Lab at Rutgers provides an immersive training program in which students are prepared to participate as active members of a multidisciplinary research team. Students of varying backgrounds, from literature, to psychology, to mathematics and computer science, learn by observing, integrating, and modeling the latest cutting-edge techniques and skills essential for deriving intelligence from open sources. The Lab acts as a center for identifying and forecasting cyber-social threats.
Learn more about the contributions of Rutgers IC CAE students to the NC Lab at Rutgers here.
Rutgers IC CAE Research Fellowship Program with the NC Lab at Rutgers
Selected students will join a multidisciplinary team of scholars and analysts to help profile and report on emerging threats of extremism and terror forming on social media. Ideal candidates possess a background in computer science or statistics and have some understanding of working with large data sets, or alternatively, experience in OSINT (open source intelligence gathering). Students will be expected to meet virtually several times a week both independently with individual senior scholars and analysts to carry out specific research tasks and collectively on occasion with the larger working team to present findings. Depending on participation, students will have the opportunity to participate and obtain authorship on high quality and data-driven intelligence reports on emerging extremist threats.
Students will provide approximately 15 hours of research assistance per week. IC CAE Research Fellows must be United States Citizens. Students from all academic disciplines with a minimum 3.0 GPA are invited to apply.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Selected Rutgers students must register for 01:790:484:03 (in-person section of Research in Critical Intelligence Studies) with a special permission number for Fall 2024. Students selected for this opportunity, whether from Rutgers or another college/university, must be available for a weekly team meeting on Wednesdays from 10am-1pm. A stipend will be provided to students who are selected to participate for Fall 2024.
APPLY HERE [Students from Rutgers, NJCU, CCNY, BMCC, and all IC CAE colleges/universities are eligible to participate]
Featured Research Products from NC Lab at Rutgers
- 12/21/2023 - A Tik-Tok-ing Timebomb
- 7/5/2023 - Ireland's Emerging Cyber Crisis
- 5/4/2023 - Reckoning with Reconquista
- 11/10/2022 - Cyber Social Swarming Precedes Real World Riots in Leicester
- 7/11/2022 - Anti-Hindu Disinformation
- 3/9/2022 - Sudden Massive Spike in Twitter Activity for “Free Aafia Movement” Preceded Attack on Congregation Beth Israel
- 3/4/2022 - On the Diseconomy of Memes: Stonks, Crypto and the Wager against Democracy
- 1/21/22 - Antisemitic Disinformation: A Study of the Online Dissemination of Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theories
- 4/17/21 - Mapping Mistrust: The NCRI's Geospatial Analysis of civil-unrest activity, relating to the COVID-19 Pandemic, in the United States (2020)
- 3/11/21 - A Contagion of Institutional Distrust: Viral Disinformation of the COVID Vaccine and the Road to Reconciliation
