Post by Seckin Ozbek

After eight years as a career diplomat, I have decided to resign from the foreign service and move on to my next chapter. During my career, I had the opportunity to undertake duties in the HQ units engaging with bilateral and multilateral economic affairs, as well as working in Erbil and Permanent Mission to WTO, based in Geneva. I coordinated G20 summit files, represented Turkey at UNCTAD and ITC, navigated the ethnocultural mosaic of Iraq, and organized a side event on Turkey's national AI strategy. I am proud of every day of it and witnessing the dedication and hard work of all our staff members. Last year, midway through my career, I have completed my MSc studies in Applied Social Data Science at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) as a Chevening Awards Scholar, with a Distinction for a dissertation that used NLP to measure how values and norms surface in the UN General Debate speeches. It brought my two halves into one research, and it changed the trajectory of my thinking. Since then I have kept building: Project Shimmer, a domain-agnostic multi-agent system for analyzing regulatory and legal texts, now public on GitHub; NLP pipelines on large text corpora; and curiosity-driven efforts reaching from comparative cosmology to the economics of AI. Above all, my ongoing engagement with empirical work as the Research Team Member of the #ValuesforCohesion project amplified my enthusiasm for adopting a research-based career path with tangible impact. The through line is one mind looking for the same structures across different domains, and testing whether the pattern holds. My current focus is producing works of research that leverage computational methods on questions of how geopolitcal actors, institutions, and societies behave, particularly around how AI is governed and how it reshapes them. I want to do the analysis itself: building pipelines, testing hypotheses on real data, turning curiosity into disciplined questions and measurable outcomes. My toolkit spans causal inference, machine learning, deep learning, NLP, ontology, network science, algorithmic governance, and statistical analysis. I am open to the opportunities that share the same direction and principles, whether a permanent role or contract work, and in research teams, think tanks, international organizations, or academia. github.com/seckinozbek1 medium.com/@seckinozbek #AIGovernance #ComputationalSocialScience #OpenToWork #AIPolicy #DataScience #Values #Norms #SocialSciences #Research