Presentations

This talk based on this paper, by me, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts, with this abstract: The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called ``50c party'' posts vociferously argue for the government's

In this talk, Gary King introduces methods of matching for causal inference that are simpler, more powerful, and easier to understand than prior approaches. Software is available to implement everything discussed. Copies of some of his papers on the subject are available at his web site GaryKing.org.

In this talk, Gary King explains that the spectacular progress the media describes as "big data" has little to do with the data.  Data, after all, is becoming commoditized, less expensive, and an automatic byproduct of other changes in organizations and society. More data alone doesn't generate insights; it often just makes data analysis harder. The real revolution isn't about the data, it is about the stunning progress in the statistical methods of extracting insights from the data. He will illustrate these points

"Dr. Gary King, NAS member and Professor at Harvard University, will talk about progress in and the future of the Social Sciences, illustrated with a wide range of examples from his research. These examples include forecasting the solvency of Social Security; reverse engineering Chinese censorship; estimating causes of death in developing countries; automated text analysis of billions of social media posts; dataverse, software and protocols his team developed to run the largest archive of