I am a Founding Co-Director of the Caltech Linde Center for Science, Society and Policy (LCSSP). The Center launched in January 2023 - and in the winter/spring quarters of 2023 we developed a number of important new initiatives at Caltech. You can follow the Center on Twitter or sign up for our email list.
Some of our newest research activities focus on climate change and sustainability. I’m a PI of the Climate Zone Initiative at Caltech, supported by Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute.
I’m the Co-Director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which was originally formed in 2000.
Since 2017, I’ve been conducting a large-scale election monitoring and election integrity project, Monitoring the Election. In 2024 we are continuing our election research in the Caltech 2024 Protecting the Election project.
I’m an associated faculty member in Caltech’s Social and Decision Neuroscience program. My primary research in this area is in collaboration with Chujun Lin and Ralph Adolphs, studying inferences and judgments from facial images and expressions. I’m also working on the COVID-DYNAMIC research project, joint with the Caltech Conte Center and a number of other colleagues.
There’s a variety of machine and deep learning projects that I’m working on, with applications ranging from election forensics to bio-medical predictive modeling. These projects involve faculty collaborations (Anima Anandkumar, Sander van der Linden, Silvia Kim, Christina Ramirez, and Betsy Sinclair), as well as with post-doctoral scholars and graduate students (current and past) affiliated with my research group. Current postdocs include Cong Cao, Rafal Kocielnik, Beatrice Magistro and Myrl Marmarelis). We are also collaborating with postdocs at other universities, including Danny Ebanks, Melina Much, and Yimeng Li. Current PhD students include Ransi Clark, Matthew Estes, Mitchell Linegar, and Jacob Morrier, These projects also involve some of our Caltech undergraduates, and I’ll often work with Caltech undergraduates during the summer quarter on computational social science projects through Caltech’s SURF program. Current Caltech undergrads working in our research group include Etienne Casanova, Sulekha Kishore, Andrew Koclanes, Ezra Johnson, and Joon Park.
Our group maintains active collaborations with researchers in industry, currently including Nvidia and Activision. We also work closely with cloud-computing partners, as some of our machine and deep learning projects are supported by credits from Google’s GCP and Amazon’s AWS. I was named to the Google Cloud Research Innovators Class of 2022.
Our Trustworthy Social Media Project with Anima Anandkumar and her research group is develop machine learning methods to detect online trolling and harassment in social media conversations. You can learn more about our project research on the Trustworthy Social Media website, or on our Medium publication.
I periodically blog at Election Updates, typically on research and policy developments regarding election technologies and administration.
I am an co-editor of the Cambridge Elements in Quantitative and Computational Methods for Social Science series. I also co-edit the Cambridge Elements in Campaigns and Election series the Analytical Methods for Social Research series. I also edit the Oxford Series on Elections, Campaigns, and Democracy. I co-edited the journal Political Analysis (2010-2018), and remain involved in a variety of academic publishing and research transparency projects. I’m currently the interim editor of the Society for Political Methodology’s The Political Methodologist.