Milad Abbasiharofteh: ‘JTS Prize boosted my research’

The Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society, Technology & AI will celebrate its anniversary at the House of Connections on June 19. In addition to various speeches, the JTS Early Career Researcher Prizes will be awarded. Assistant Professor Milad Abbasiharofteh was one of the winners last year. He shares how the award and support from CIT boosted his research.

The JTS Early Career Researcher Prize is intended for smaller and short-term activities within the University of Groningen related to the themes of the Jantina Tammes School. The prize consists of 2,500 euros for each researcher. A total of five winners will be awarded. Researchers will also be provided with technical expertise from the Centre for Information Technology (CIT).

The research of Milad Abbasiharofteh, who won the Early Career Researcher Prize last year, focuses on climate policy. The UG scientist refers to the wide-ranging European Green Deal, aimed at making Europe climate neutral by 2050. To make this Deal a success, regions and companies will have to develop ‘green’ initiatives in the coming decades. ‘However, there are several challenges in achieving this goal,’ says the assistant professor. ‘One is that policymakers lack the appropriate tools and knowledge to support regions, and local economies, in the transition from fossil to green energy.’

Therefore, Abbasiharofteh argues, gathering information on regional climate initiatives is crucial. In his research project ‘Going Green and Digital: Place-based Pathways to a Twin Transition’, the scientist collects information from company websites to inform policymakers. ‘We use machine learning and Large Language Models (LLM) to understand what companies are bringing to market in terms of green initiatives. With this, we want to identify the green initiatives of small and medium-sized companies, as these companies are still often overlooked in current analyses.'

For this analysis, Abbasiharofteh uses a ‘crawler’, a bot that searches companies' web pages. ‘Thanks in part to the award from the Jantina Tammes School, we were able to successfully develop this crawler.’ Part of the prize is the technical expertise of the Center for Information Technology (CIT). ‘This allowed me to develop an algorithm that searches companies’ web pages and uses machine learning to understand what the texts are about. As such, the prize has given a boost to my research. That applies not only to the funding, it certainly also applies to the infrastructure of CIT.’

Thanks to the crawler, Abbasiharofteh has a dataset of about 200,000 companies in the northern Netherlands and northern Germany. ‘Early June, we organised a workshop on this called ‘Leveraging the Digital Layer for development research and informed policymaking’. With our ‘digital layer’, we can analyse how we are progressing in the energy transition and where the opportunities and challenges lie at the local level. The researcher plans to use the remaining prize money to buy a dataset with data on sustainability associations in Germany. ‘This will also allow us to add social context to our dataset. Until now, this has often been overlooked.’

The Early Career Researcher Prize will be awarded on June 19 during the JTS Birthday Party. Besides the award ceremony, there will be several speeches during the birthday party. Main speaker is Bayu Jayawardhana, Professor in Mechatronics and Control of Nonlinear Systems. Also, a speech will be given by special guest Ida Stamhuis, biographer of Jantina Tammes, after whom our school is named. You can register via the Jantina Tammes School website.