Short CV

Education

• Ph.D. in Political science, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Germany), 2018.
  • Note: Magna Cum Laude/1,1 (equivalent to ~ 4 GPA in the US).
• M.A. in Public Management and Governance, Zeppelin Universität (Germany), 2011.
• B.A. in International Economic Relations, UAEM (Mexico) & MENDELU (Czech Republic), 2008.

Work experience

• Current: Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University (Think tank), Germany.
  • 2021-to date: Data scientist at the Department for Research on Terrorism and Radicalization for the Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funded projects ERAME and ERAME-Rex, aimed at developing software solutions that use machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify a) islamic and b) extreme-right radicalization on YouTube and Telegram.
  • 2020: Fellow at the Department of Maritime Strategy and Security.
• 2012-2020: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany.
  • 2018-2020: Postdoc/lecturer at the sociology and political science departments.
  • 2012-2018: Research associate/lecturer at the political science department.
• 2015: Internship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center (Think tank), Washington D.C., USA, specifically for the projects:
  • The impact of crime and violence on economic sector diversity
  • Territory and Ideology in Latin America: Policy Conflicts between National and Subnational Governments
• 2013: Internship at the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy (Think tank), Mexico City.
• 2010: Internship at the Centre for European Policy Studies (Think tank), Brussels, Belgium.

Skills

• Methods/Analytics: advanced statistics/Econometrics, Machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) , social media analytics and text-as-data analytics.
• Programming: Python, R, Mata (Stata) and git.
• Web design: Ruby & HTML
• Languages: English, German, Spanish and French.

Publications

• Cruz-Aceves, Victor et. al. (2024): ERAME & ERAME-REX – Monitoring and Machine learning-based evaluation of islamic and right-wing radicalization on social media. Poster/software-demo at the Monitoringsystem und Transferplattform Radikalisierung Conference 2024 (MOTRA-K) in Wiesbaden, Germany
• Cruz-Aceves, Victor (2023): Automated identification of islamic radicalization in social media. Working paper.
  • Presented (with Jannis Jost) at the Monitoringsystem und Transferplattform Radikalisierung Conference 2022 (MOTRA-K) in Wiesbaden, Germany.

• (Book) Cruz-Aceves, Victor (2021b): The Diffusion of Morality Policies. State-Level Comparative Analyses in the United States of America. Publishedd by Nomos Publishing.

• Cruz-Aceves, Victor (2021a): Social-Network (Facebook) Connectedness and COVID-19 Outbreak in German Municipalities.. Working paper.

• Cruz-Aceves, Victor (2020): The Role Of Naval Power In Settling Competing Claims About Contested Maritime Areas. Working Paper.

• Cruz-Aceves, Victor; Mallinson, Daniel (2019): Clarifying the Measurement of Relative Ideology in Policy Diffusion Research. In State and Local Government Review 51 (3), pp. 179–186. DOI: 10.1177/0160323X20902818

• Beer, Caroline; Cruz-Aceves, Victor (2018): Extending Rights to Marginalized Minorities. Same-Sex Relationship Recognition in Mexico and the United States. In State Politics & Policy Quarterly 18 (1), pp. 3–26. DOI: 10.1177/1532440017751421

• Cruz-Aceves, Victor (2018): The Diffusion of Morality Policies. PhD/Doctoral dissertation. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Germany). Note: Magna Cum Laude/1,1 (equivalent to ~ 4 GPA in the US)

TV Appearances

Interview about Germany’s bunker/shelter capacity amid Russia tensions (multilingual subtitles available)

November 30, 2024

13-minute interview in Spanish, multilingual subtitles available by activating YouTube's captions at the bottom right corner of the video at Deutsche Welle, Berlin, Germany

20 years after 9/11 (multilingual subtitles available)

September 10, 2021

42-minute TV Discussion in Spanish, multilingual subtitles available by activating YouTube's captions at the bottom right corner of the video at Deutsche Welle, Berlin, Germany

2022 profile story (multilingual subtitles available)

February 22, 2021

44-minute interview (mostly in Spanish, partially in German; multilingual subtitles available by activating YouTube's captions at the bottom right corner of the video) at aired on February 22, 2022 on the program 'Mirada Global on 'TV channel 'TV Mexiquense', Kiel, Germany

2017 profile story (multilingual subtitles available)

January 15, 2017

43-minute interview in Spanish, multilingual subtitles available by activating YouTube's captions at the bottom right corner of the video at 'Alumniversitario' profile-feature series of the 'Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México', Toluca, Mexico

Data Visualization