Episode 7 - Dr. Tolu Odukoya

What happens when law, data science and global security collide?

In this episode, Tolu Odukoya, assistant professor in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, shares her journey into political science and computer science—and why the two are stronger together.

She explores her research on Boko Haram, the hidden patterns of Jim Crow laws uncovered through machine learning, and the next big topic she’s tackling: The role of AI in terrorist recruitment.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Roots of Research, where we go behind the publications and dig deeper with the movers, shakers, and rainmakers that make Georgia Southern University so very special. I'm your host, Dr. David Weindorf, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Tolu Otakoya. Joining Eagle Nation in 2025, after earning her PhD from the University of Virginia, Dr. Otakoya is an assistant professor in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. She maintains appointments in two different departments, Political Science and International Studies, and Criminal Justice and Criminology. She earned her Bachelor of Laws and JD from the University of Lagos in her native Nigeria before attending American University in Washington, D.C., where she obtained a Master of Laws and Criminal Law and a Master's Degree in Terrorism and Homeland Security Policy. Her PhD has a dual focus in international relations and statistical methodology, specializing in terrorism and counterterrorism. Studying everything from global terrorism to data science, Dr. Otakoya aims to inform effective counterterrorism and criminology strategies and support evidence-based policy making. Welcome to the show, Tolu.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

It is so nice to have you here today, truly. Thank you for being with us. Now, in many ways, your educational background is typical of a lot of experts in your field, spanning law, policy, international relations. However, in today's data-driven world, a dual focus in international relations and statistical methodology seems like it would be both incredibly valuable, but also very rare. When did you realize you wanted to combine the worlds of political science and law with computer science? And what does that look like for you?

SPEAKER_01 1:44

I took a class for in American University on data for statistical analysis, and I fell in love with the process of using, you know, machines to get answers to questions that I've always had. And that kind of started my love for it. And then when I went to American University, my professor John Kropko used started teaching us in R, and I fell in love with R. I think if I had started using R in the beginning, I think the love would have started earlier on.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Open source coding and everything.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Yes, it felt so native to me, and I fell in love with it, and that just started the races of that. And for me, it looks like you know there's a trove of data out there, and you have tools to find questions and answers from it, but because we separate all of our fields, right? Community scientists are separate and political scientists are separate. Sometimes the questions we have, we don't have the tools to answer them as political scientists. And it's like bridging that gap.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

So are your approaches more quantitative, qualitative, qualitative, or a mix of the both?

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Mix of both. Okay. I also enjoy interviewing people. So my dissertation is a qualitative research, and then my other papers are quantitative research.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Excellent. Good mix of both. That's fantastic. That is great. Now, in your 2024 study, keeping the ex-enemy close, but not in my backyard, you examined Nigerians' receptivity to reintegration of de-radicalized ex-Boko Haram fighters. And interestingly, you found that those living further away opposed uh reintegration of any kind, while those living closest to the violence were open to it, as long as it took place in a different state, right? Why do you think that is? And aside from the data provided, what was your biggest takeaway from those interviews?

SPEAKER_01 3:39

So I think it is a multitude of reasons. Um I would like to conduct additional research to find out exactly why it is. But from just all the interviews I saw, there were about three things that stood out. First is fatigue from the war. A lot of people thought if they came back, then it signaled the end of the war, the end of the uh attacks against them, and they could go back to living their daily life. Um, secondly, is knowing those people. They look at them as these are our sons, our nephews, our cousins, and they were forcibly kidnapped from here, and it's fine for them to come back because they're there. And so that shared kinship might be speaking to why they're open to them coming back. And then the third was more subtle, but there were a lot of religious um understanding of they said we should forgive these people. Um God said we should forgive, and they were also kidnapped, so it's not their fault. And understanding the drivers of program, like okay, so they were poor, they didn't have anything to do, let's let them come back as long as they won't make um a fuss again.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

But separating them from where they stayed was kind of the linchpin of the discussion because yes, they can come back, it was signal the end of the war, but for people who still held trauma from the attacks of Boko Haram, putting them somewhere else in Nigeria was preferred to putting them beside them.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Now you mentioned the religious aspect. Uh, which is the dominant religion uh influence in in that area? Is it uh Christianity, Islam, or others?

SPEAKER_01 5:23

It's Islam in the northern side of um half of Nigeria and then Christianity on other sides, but just like in Lagos, they uh, you know, my house is here and there's a mosque here. Right, so it's kind of a mix of the two. But in the northern side, it's mostly a Muslim population. Okay, excellent.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Very good. Well, you spearheaded a project at the University of Virginia using machine learning to identify Jim Crow laws in Virginia's history with a 99% accuracy rate. Now, for those who think AI is something that only looks forward into the future, how did you use it to look into the past? And did your early legal training in Nigeria help you see the patterns of these laws differently as you were building the predictive models? Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

So um uh the so my um bosses when we started the project were very intent on, you know, having somebody who's data science focused or can do machine learning on the project. And we had not thought about the fact that I was a lawyer as much. It was like, oh, you're a lawyer, that would be helpful, but it was like we have experts, we have lawyers, this is being done at the school of law, we're good on that side, so you know, just focus on the machine learning part. But what I learned was in reading the terms, it was not the lawyer part of me that was more important, it was actually the historians on our team that were the most important because the terms legally, the way I would interpret it, is fine, but historically, they could add that context of no, this word actually is designed to create racial um uh disenfranchisement. And one of the biggest ones was uh election policy that said uh freeholders, which in legal terms just means you don't have any um lands on your house, right? You own it completely, land and property. Um, but historically that was meant to say you having possession of the land as a owner, and there are other laws that said only white people could own land. So even though it said freeholder, which technically means someone who owns property, it in turn meant white, because only white people held property. And so having that distinction meant those laws had to be coded one, which if I was reading it just as a lawyer, they would be coded zero. So we had multiple um laws come up like that where we had coded them zeros and the historian historians would help us change it. But the most interesting part was getting into the flow of things and then having to help the model get better and realizing that now I could be helpful because I knew all sides of the puzzle and could find what was wrong in the code easier. Yeah. Because if it's not generating what we expect it to generate, then something is wrong in either the input or the output. Yeah, and this was an input problem. So it made it easy.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

You know, I've worked with attorneys over the years doing consulting projects and things like that. I have never met an attorney or a lawyer who is that focused on uh sort of machine learning and those approaches. I think that is so unique and so valuable. I mean, it's really amazing.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Do you know other attorneys who have those kind of skills, or is that something that you've kind of uniquely carved out?

SPEAKER_01 8:47

I don't, off the top of my head. I do have friends who do AI law. So looking at the legal ramifications of AI or how to properly regulate it. Right. Um, but I don't know anybody who actually does with like the coding work. I did go to a conference um for like legal librarians and they all all the law firms, they were like, oh my God, you should come back into law and work with us.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Right, but that is such a unique skill. It really is. That is so cool. I'm so glad you carved that out. That's fantastic. Well, listen, you've taught classes here at Georgia Southern, a variety of different classes, including Homeland Security, quantitative research and design, terrorism and governance in Africa. Um, how do you take these complex global topics and make them feel real for your students right here in Southeast Georgia?

SPEAKER_01 9:34

So I look at education as the goal of it is to equip my students with all the tools that they would need to function as adults when they grow up, uh leave the uh state uh the school. Um, but adults not in the sense of oh, be moral, more as competent working adults. So the ability to speak for yourself in an office, the ability to share your ideas and communicate them effectively. And so looking at that, I then back um back design my class from the goals that I want them to learn. And so, for example, in my homeland security class, we had simulations where everybody had an agency that they respond uh represented. And so they had the scenario where there was a bomb blast in three states, and now we have to respond, and you're the FBI and you're working for the local sheriffs, and you guys have to find a solution to the problem and present it to me, the president.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

And really coming at that from so many different angles, right? I mean, there's so many different layers that they would have to unpack for something like that.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

And so they all have because at the point in the semester, we had covered most of the agencies that they were working with. They had enough knowledge from the class and had to do external research to understand the agency well enough to represent them. And they I had somebody say, you know, the FBI was going to uh close off an airport as in in as the solution, right? And the TSA person was just sitting there and didn't interject to be like, no, right, that's we don't do that.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Right. Well we saw that recently in El Paso. Remember there that that entire airspace was closed down, that was just a couple of months back.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Yes, and so it was good to have them realize that you are the agency, you have the right to say, we do not do that. That's TSA job job. But for TSA to say, the FBI can't do this, we control this space. Right. Um, and so having them do that allowed them to feel more connected to the ideas versus um just reading about it.

SPEAKER_00 11:33

Yeah, kind of knowing which agency or which group handles different things. I think that's really critically important. I mean, we think about these complex topics, and a lot of times we see things on the news, but they come across to students as sort of nebulous ideas that are out there, right? You know, for somebody else to deal with. But really, in the working world, they're gonna have to deal with a lot of those things, you know, when they graduate. So that's amazing. You know, and speaking of your students, what's the number one skill you would want them to walk away with? And as you know, a recent graduate, I mean, you graduated just a year or two uh back, I mean, has your experience as a student influenced how you convey all that information in the classroom now as a faculty member?

SPEAKER_01 12:09

So, number one skill I would want them to leave the world the class with is being able to be a I don't want to use the word ethical, but a good citizen of the world. Right, be able to understand the complexes of the environment that you live in and respond accordingly. Yeah, right. So don't just go in browbeating everybody, take a minute, see what's happening, and then approach it understanding everybody's play and what they have to gain and what they have to lose. Right. Um, and that allows you to be a better navigator of workspaces. Absolutely. Um, so that would be the number one skill. But on my experience as a student bringing it in hilariously enough, I think it it's made me better at catching the students that don't want to do work. Right, right. Because I'm like, I've used that skill once or twice. I know where you're going with this. Right. I've told my professor I lost my assignment before. Um, but that also sometimes makes me the uh wicked witch of the west because I'm checking. I'm not just saying yes and saying, okay, let me see your laptop, let's see if we can recover it together. Exactly. And then it's like, oh, actually, I use my friend's laptop and it's not available right now. Right. Um and so that kind of makes me, you know, the mean professor who is like checking everything. Right. But it's also part of being that ethical citizen. Because it's like if you can't be accountable to yourself, then you're not accountable to anybody, and then you stop understanding that there are consequences for your actions. And it's when people don't understand consequences for their actions that they act pejoratively, they act without thinking. Right. And so for me, being that checker allows me to be the one person who says there are consequences to your actions, the gatekeeper of the consequences. But even in my consequences, I try to be as nice as possible to give room for redemption.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Absolutely. I I love that. You know, the idea of the good citizen, uh, the ethical person. Um, you know, oftentimes I use the saying good goes around, and I do believe in the goodness of people, and I think there's a lot of that around these days. Um now, between your work on Boko Haram and your expertise in big data, what is the next big question that you are attacking and hoping to answer?

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Well, so I have multiple questions. Um, but the the most important one for me right now is understanding how to leverage AI for um propaganda and recruiting. Oh, yeah. So how to use it to reduce or eliminate uh terrorists' ability to recruit uh vulnerable people. Okay. Um and that's because you know, when you see somebody who is thinking about joining a group or being recruited into a group, the secrecy of that process means there's nobody else they can go to to cross-check when they have doubt, apart from the person recruiting them, who has all the you know needs in the world to confirm what they think they're hearing instead of giving them the other side of the question. Right. And so because of how siloed those people are, usually they don't know they're in trouble and they're too far in to get out. And so my goal is to create something that is available and accessible for people who are going that uh route to get the other half of the conversation. You know, America is the evil West. Yes, America has done bad things, but it doesn't make them evil here, all the good things that they've done. You know, you know, uh people hate you in America. It's like no, individual people can act that way, but on average, you know, more people are fighting for you than not. Look at how many people came to protest for this thing that happened against people who look like you, right? Right, and giving them that place where you're not talking to a person, it's a website, it's a link, it's uh and they can go there and have their doubts confirmed and hopefully leave before they get too far.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

That's right, before they get drawn in deeper.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

That would be that's kind of the most important one.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

So many things come to mind. I'm thinking of deep fakes, I'm thinking of election interference, I mean, certainly, you know, counterterrorism, those kinds of things. I'm even aware that uh sometimes those organizations are using games and gaming community uh to make inroads. And so, you know, investigating that type of research I think will be incredibly valuable. So thank you for your work there. So well, listen, as we start to wrap up today, um, one question I love to ask all my guests is tell us one thing about you that people would not know about you simply from reading your research.

unknown 16:48

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Does he have to be researcher leading? No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Just anything, any kind of fun, curious fact about you that uh people wouldn't know about you normally.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Oh, I used to be a very avid weightlifter. Okay. And I have a Guinness World record in deadlifting.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

No kidding.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

It's been taken down because people found out about it and went for it. Wow. Oh, once a record holder, always a record holder.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Absolutely. That is fantastic. I love that. Very good, very good. Well, Tolu, thank you so much for joining us today. Uh, your amazing work. This is just incredible to learn about all this. Um, so thankful to have you here at Georgia Southern University. And until next time, I'm David Weindorf, and may your curiosity run as deep as the roots of research. Hail Southern