[talks] S Gerrish preFPO

[Melissa M. Lawson]

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.
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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.