Data Science & Society Colloquium Series Talk presents Jeremy Springman, Senior Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Political Science and DevLab@Penn.

The Machine Learning for Peace (MLP) project is equipping stakeholders working to defend democracy with new tools to navigate increasingly sophisticated attacks on human rights and civil society. Specifically, they provide policymakers and civil society in more than 40 countries with high-frequency, up-to-date data on 42 important political events and use these data to forecast future shifts. They accelerate the provision of data to stakeholders by continuously scraping online news, using recent advances in Natural Language Processing to measure reporting on civic space events; and using this information to generate monthly forecasts of future trends in civic space. To date, MLP has scraped and processed more than 70 million news stories from more than 100 online news sources in more than 22 languages.

Reception to follow. 

Campus community only, please.