Cosima Meyer

Data Scientist


Main focus: Data science

Twitter handle: @cosima_meyer

Website/blog: https://cosimameyer.com/

Languages: English, German

City: Mannheim

State: Baden-Wuerttemberg

Country: Germany

Topics: peacebuilding, women in tech, women in science, academic writing, text mining, data analysis, data science, peace, women empowerment, computational social science, statistics, conflict

Services: Talk, Moderation, Workshop management, Interview

  Willing to travel for an event.

  Willing to talk for nonprofit.

Bio:

I work as a Data Scientist in the private sector and am also involved in promoting women in tech and data science. I founded the R-Ladies Cologne in 2021. The R-Ladies are a worldwide network founded in 2012 with local chapters offering meetings, trainings, and most importantly, a network designed to increase the diversity of those interested in programming. As part of this volunteer work, I also host worldwide collaborations across the R-Ladies Cologne Chapter as well as close collaborations that bring both PyLadies and R-Ladies together.

I am also co-founder of the data science blog "Methods Bites" which provides a forum for the latest methods in computational social sciences.

For my PhD at the University of Mannheim, I researched post-war stability after civil wars, women's representation in post-conflict countries, elections during conflicts, and autocratic cooperation. To answer these questions, I used a variety of methods, such as quantitative text analysis (NLP) and network analysis.

I hold a bachelor's and master's degree in political science from the University of Mannheim, Germany, and have spent time abroad at Rice University (USA), Universitet Uppsala (Sweden), and SciencesPo Paris (France).

Examples of previous talks / appearances:

Women in Data Science

Women in Data Science is a worldwide initiative that brings female speakers together to give insights into the newest developments in data science ranging from academia to industry and to support women in the field.

The event was co-hosted by SAP Next-Gen, Stanford University, and the University of Mannheim.

This talk is in: English
Getting the most out of text - Using supervised and unsupervised approaches in NLP at R-Ladies Tunis, Tunisia
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Text data provides an oasis of information for both researchers and non-researchers alike to explore. Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods help make sense of this difficult data type. The talk and code gave a smooth introduction to the quanteda package. I also showcased how to quickly visualize your text data and cover both supervised and unsupervised approaches in NLP. As part of the code demo, we used text data from the UN as a working example to give you first insights into the structure of text data and how to work with it.

This talk is in: English
Taking text data to the next level - Using supervised and unsupervised approaches in NLP at R-Ladies Bergen, Norway
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Text data provides an oasis of information for both researchers and non-researchers alike to explore. Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods help make sense of this difficult data type. The talk and code gave a smooth introduction to the quanteda package. I also showcased how to quickly visualize your text data and cover both supervised and unsupervised approaches in NLP. As part of the code demo, we used text data from the UN as a working example to give you first insights into the structure of text data and how to work with it.

This talk is in: English
"Where the Money Blows - Using Speeches to Identify the Effect of Chinese Foreign Aid on the US-African Relationship Structure" at POLTEXT 2019, Tokyo

China is on the rise in global politics, especially due to their increasing influence in sub-Saharan Africa. How does this affect other states that are invested in this region? My co-author, Dennis Hammerschmidt, and I argue that, as China enters the aid donor market with largely unconditional aid, it offers an attractive alternative to the highly conditional US aid. As a result, we expect that the increased leverage from the US as a sole (main) provider of foreign aid allows sub-Saharan African states both to become more critical of US foreign politics and ultimately leads to a shift in expressed policy preferences, away from the US and more toward China. To detect directed criticism, we use natural language processing (NLP) and more specifically sentiment analysis.

The POLTEXT (now COMPTEXT) is an international conference where researchers present cutting-edge research in the field of computational social sciences.

This talk is in: English
LaTeX and Overleaf (workshop as part of the Social Science Data Lab at the University of Mannheim)

The 90 minutes workshop introduced participants to the intuitive use of LaTeX with Overleaf and presented an easily accessible template.
The Social Science Data Lab brings computational social scientists together to present forward-thinking methods in this forum.

This workshop was co-hosted with Dennis Hammerschmidt.

This talk is in: English
Interactive Science - Using Shiny and R to Make Research Accessible (and to Let it Shine)

Research produces fascinating findings. But it is often difficult to present them to a broader audience beyond the research paper. Shiny apps offer researchers (both in academia and business) sophisticated tools to generate web applications that make the results accessible, understandable, and interactive. The talk will guide you through the necessary steps to set up your own ShinyApp and discuss lessons learned from building a ShinyApp using Shiny for R, shinydashboards, and echarts4r.

This talk is in: English
Talking Shiny - Creating interactive and accessible dashboards in R

Research produces fascinating findings. But it is often difficult to present them to a broader audience beyond the research paper. Shiny apps offer researchers (both in academia and business) sophisticated tools to generate web applications that make the results accessible, understandable, and interactive. The talk will guide you through the necessary steps to set up your own ShinyApp and discuss lessons learned from building a ShinyApp using Shiny for R, shinydashboards, and echarts4r.

This talk is in: English
Women in Data Science | From Social Sciences To Data Science

Women in Data Science is a worldwide initiative that brings female speakers together to give insights into the newest developments in data science ranging from academia to industry and to support women in the field.

The event was co-hosted by IBM, Stanford University, WUMAN, and the University of Mannheim.

This talk is in: English