About us

Violent ideologies and targeted aggression are complex, evolving challenges. At the Tackling Hate Lab, we bridge the gap between research and real-world impact through cutting-edge, data-driven analysis.

  • From Data to Policy – We harness computational, social, and psychological science methods to uncover online patterns of hostility, terrorist propaganda, violence, and ideological aggression, ensuring our research informs policies with real-world impact.
  • Shaping the Future of Research – We train the next generation of researchers, equipping them with interdisciplinary skills across social science, psychology, data science, and economics to address violent ideologies and targeted aggression with innovative, evidence-based solutions.
  • AI for Action – We leverage AI-assisted methodologies not just to study violent behaviours, but to intervene—developing smarter tools to detect, analyse, and counter harmful behaviours both online and offline.

At the Tackling Hate Lab, research is not just about understanding ideology- and prejudice-motivated violence. It’s about finding solutions that work.

Meet the team

Director. A/Prof Matteo Vergani (Deakin University). Matteo is an internationally recognised applied researcher who takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining the causes of prejudice, discrimination, hate crime, and extremist violence, as well as strategies to address them. His research combines social science, psychology, and data science to develop innovative methodologies, reliable measurement tools, and cumulative knowledge to address complex societal challenges. Matteo has secured and completed numerous large grants, collaborating with government agencies and civil society organisations. Matteo is an Associate Editor of Terrorism and Political Violence, the leading journal in terrorism studies. Matteo’s publications can be found here.

Co-director. A/Prof Kewen Liao (Deakin University). Kewen is an accomplished algorithms researcher with a PhD in Computer Science. His expertise spans data science, machine learning, and theoretical computer science, with a focus on algorithm design and analysis, clustering and graph mining, time series and streaming analytics, and image and text data analysis. He is a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project and previously led a Defence Next Generation Technologies Fund Project. He also holds a US patent with Canon Inc. for a novel object-matching method in computer vision. Kewen is committed to cross-disciplinary research, leveraging data science and AI to drive significant societal and economic impact. He also holds key leadership and professional roles in leading national and international data science and AI conferences. Kewen’s publications can be found here.

Co-director. Dr Andrea Giovannetti (Australian Catholic University). Dr. Giovannetti is assistant professor in economics at the Australian Catholic University and a member of the Violence Research Centre at the Institute of Criminology of Cambridge University, where he conducted his Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellowship. In his work, Andrea develops statistical models and applies high-power computational and modelling techniques to investigate the causes and measure the consequences of complex real-life problems, with a focus on the diffusion of behaviours across human networks. Andrea holds active operative and research collaborations with the largest police force of Europe, London Metropolitan Police, and several U.K. organizations, including Merseyside and Cambridgeshire police forces. Andrea’s publications can be found here.

A/Prof Scott Barnett (Deakin University). Scott specialises in designing and implementing robust AI-centric applications, focusing on augmenting human workflows and incremental AI adoption. At the Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute, he leads the generative AI team, advising organisations on AI integration. He founded Melbourne’s GenAI Network (+1100 members) to foster safe and robust AI use. Over five years, he has led 24 translational research projects, contributed to two spin-outs (one ASX-listed), and secured $13M in research funding. His research addresses AI system robustness and failure mitigation. Scott’s publications can be found here.

Dan Goodhardt (Deakin University). Dan Goodhardt is a casual researcher at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. He was the previous administrator of the South East Asian Network of Civil Society Organisations (SEAN-CSO) from 2018-2022. Mr Goodhardt previously worked as a community practitioner analysing antisemitic incidents and threats to the Victorian community. He has extensive experience in collecting reports of hate incidents and providing victim support at a community level. He has presented at many seminars regarding security and prejudice motivated incidents. He holds a Masters in Counter-Terrorism from Monash University.

Dr Haily Tran (Deakin University). Haily is a mixed-methods researcher in social psychology, focussing on psychological drivers of online radicalisation, violence, and hate-based ideologies. Her PhD examined the role of masculinity and victimhood in the mobilisation of Australian men toward far-right extremism. Experienced in experimental research designs and evidence-based practice, Haily has also contributed to multiple projects in hate crime prevention and countering violent extremism (P/CVE). She currently serves as HDR/ECR coordinator for the AVERT Research Network and is a member of the Australian Psychological Society’s College of Forensic Psychologists.

Dr Rouven Link (Deakin University). Rouven is a social researcher with a PhD in sociology from Deakin University and experience in a wide range of quantitative and qualitative research methods. His research interests broadly evolve around migration, diversity and multiculturalism, spanning issues from hate crime to social cohesion. At Deakin University, he has contributed to numerous research projects, including a systematic review of definitions and measurement tools of hate crime, hate speech and hate incidents. Rouven currently works as Senior Research Analyst at the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute.

Dr Bogdan Mamaev (Deakin University). Bogdan is a political scientist with a PhD from Griffith University. Applying both qualitative and quantitative methods, and working with social media and textual data (such as news reports), he investigates how political regimes repress their opponents, what methods they use to silence opposition, and how they reshape citizens’ political participation to achieve political ends. Using computational techniques, he also explores their application in the generation of event datasets on protests, riots, and other forms of contentious action, and which tools may allow researchers to produce higher-quality datasets when facing the issue of data scarcity, particularly in restrictive regimes.

Muhammad Sakib Khan Inan (Deakin University). Sakib is a PhD candidate in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Deakin University. His research focuses on developing advanced AI methods, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), to solve complex cross-disciplinary research problems. He has meaningful research experience across multiple AI domains, including time series data, computer vision (CV) for image analysis, and natural language processing (NLP) for text data. His work applies AI to diverse domains, including but not limited to IoT sensor data, biomedical research, and geotechnical engineering, addressing real-world global social challenges through innovative and impactful data-driven solutions. Sakib’s research publications can be found here.

Amiee Taylor (Deakin University). Amiee is an Honours student researching radicalisation, far-right extremism, and new religious movements. Her research also explores the role of Christian nationalism and premillennialist worldviews in fuelling conspiracy narratives and religiously motivated extremism. Her thesis investigates the geographical and social landscapes that shape Neo-Nazi recruitment and ideological commitment, considering how structural conditions and cultural anxieties sustain extremist movements. She works as a researcher with the Tackling Hate Lab, contributing to research on AI and machine learning applications for detecting and analysing online hate.

Joel Moss (Deakin University). Joel is a current Honours student at Deakin University. His thesis examines normal patterns of conversation online among the Australian radical and extreme far-right. He focuses on how “positive sentiment” contributes to the creation of emotional belonging and the fostering of social bonds within far-right communities, which may play a role in radicalisation. As a research assistant, Joel has contributed to the development of several datasets focused on online hate, including those addressing diverse genders and sexualities and political fringe groups, with an emphasis on the far and extreme-right in Australia and the UK. He has also contributed to research on AI and machine learning tools for detecting and analysing online hate, including recent work on hate targeting Indigenous Australians.

Research collaborators

Prof Kerry O’Brien (Monash University). Kerry is the Director of the Behavioural Sciences Research Lab and Associate Dean Research. His research focuses on health and social behaviour, social harms, and the development of novel methodologies and measures, including psychometric testing and program evaluation in complex settings. Trained in psychology and public health, he holds an honours degree in psychology/neuroscience and a PhD in applied cognitive psychology. He has secured over $4.5 million in competitive research grants, including ARC and NHMRC funding. A lead member of the $110 million Digital Health CRC, he applies innovative research designs to investigate the antecedents and mediators of health-related outcomes. Kerry’s publications can be found here.

Prof Greg Barton (Deakin Lancaster Institute). Greg is Rector of the Deakin Lancaster Institute in Bandung (Indonesia) and Research Professor in Global Islamic Politics at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. He specialises in Islam, terrorism, and countering violent extremism, with over 35 years of research on social movements in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. A Senior Fellow with the Hedayah Center, he leads the South East Asian Network of Civil Society Organisations working on Countering Violent Extremism. He frequently contributes to global security discussions. Greg’s publications can be found here.

Prof Paolo Pin (University of Siena). Paolo is a mathematician turned economist with a strong interdisciplinary approach to social sciences. After serving as an Associate Professor at Bocconi University, he is now a Full Professor at the University of Siena. His research combines game theory, experimental economics, and network analysis to study social and economic interactions, bridging insights from economics, psychology, and complex systems. His work explores how individual behavior and strategic decisions shape social dynamics in various dimensions, including opinion formation and polarization, with applications ranging from policy design to market structure analysis. Paolo’s publications can be found here.

A/Prof Derry Wijaya (Monash University Indonesia). Dr Wijaya conducts research in natural language processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a focus on machine learning, deep learning, and large language models (LLMs) applications in multilingual and low-resource NLP. Her studies also include improvement of LLMs performance through self-consistency, critiques, contrastive learning, and reasoning. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, Derry’s studies include the applications of NLP and AI to public health and communication and journalism, in detecting and analysing how articles in traditional and emerging media on various public health issues or public affairs are written and framed. Derry has also conducted research on analysing toxicity, bias and misinformation, within AI models and in public communications. Derry’s publications can be found here.

A/Prof Ika Idris (Monash University Indonesia). Ika Idris is an Associate Professor at Monash University Indonesia. With a PhD from Ohio University on a Fulbright Scholarship, she brings a wealth of knowledge on the digital humanities, which she has applied to digital propaganda in Southeast Asia, government public communication, and digital platform policies. In 2020, she broke new ground by becoming the first fellow from outside the United States to train at the PhD Digital Bootcamp at Texas State University. She is Co-Director of the Monash Data & Democracy Research Hub. During the 2024 Indonesia election, the hub collaborated with journalist organizations to monitor hate speech and online polarization, garnering approximately 500 media mentions across 250 Indonesian and international media outlets. Ika’s publications can be found here.

Impact oriented

We generate evidence-based insights to inform policies and interventions that effectively counter violent behaviours driven by ideology and prejudice.

Interdisciplinary and data driven

We integrate social science, psychology, economics, and data science methods with computational and machine learning technologies, applying them to large datasets to empirically study on- and offline violence.

Ethical and transparent

We uphold ethical principles of respect, benefit, and do no harm, ensuring our research does not contribute to harm. Our work is transparent, reliable, and methodologically rigorous to maintain the highest standards of scientific integrity.

Privacy

As we work with online data, we prioritise individual privacy and uphold fundamental freedoms, ensuring that our methods comply with ethical standards and data protection regulations.

Acknowledgements

The establishment of the Tackling Hate website was supported by the Victorian Department of Justice and Community Safety. The TH Lab acknowledges the support of the NSW Government, the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Department of Home Affairs.