Sean Gerrish will present his preFPO on Wednesday February 29 at 2:30PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: David Blei, advisor; Rob Schapire and Hanna Wallach (UMass), readers; Kosuke Imai (POL) and Matthew Salganik (SOC), nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. --------------------------- Title: Patterns of influence and decision-making in politics and foreign relations The past several decades have seen an explosion of digitized information in fields such as political science. In this period, a variety of statistical tools have been developed to better understand patterns in these records by incorporating information such as records of behavior and the text of documents. In this talk, I will present several recent statistical models for discovering patterns in digital records in the fields of politics, bibliometrics, and international relations. These models, which emphasize topic modeling, will link legislative text to voting patterns, written judges' opinions to citations of these opinions, and the text of newspaper articles to countries' international relations. I will also describe details of approximate posterior inference for these models, and will briefly touch upon advances in such methods. This talk includes ongoing work.