Two recent research seminars

The Program in Quantitative Social Science recently sponsored two research seminars. Assistant Professor of Political Science Daniel Thompson from UCLA and Dr. Apoorva Lal, who is an independent researcher working for Netflix, presented on September 20. The title of their talk was, "Did Private Election Administration Funding Advantage Democrats in 2020?". In this presentation, Professor Thompson was in Los Angeles and seminar attendees were on campus in Hanover. The seminar used an Owl camera so that Professor Thompson could tell who was posing questions to him. This seminar and its experimental format were successful and might be a new way QSS moves forward with speakers who are out of state, helping minimize Dartmouth's carbon footprint.

The program's second talk was on October 2, and it featured Associate Professor of Sociology Brandon Stewart from Princeton University. The title of Professor Stewart's talk was "Using Imperfect Surrogates for Downstream Inference: Design-based Semi-supervised Learning for Social Science Applications of Large Language Models." Professor Stewart served on the dissertation committee of Dr. Elsa Voytas, who started as Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science this past July.