Roundtable Series: Learning How to Play with the Machines

The Cassandra Project organizes a roundtable discussion series which engages experts in both political and computational science from multiple universities across the United States. Participants discuss the commonalities, divergences, and hopes for the two fields, tackling difficult topics such as the limits of automatic analysis and applications of big data.

The roundtable discussion series provides an opportunity for voices that are underrepresented, both in terms of identity and research focus, to be brought to the forefront of the field. Each event will be live-streamed and live-transcribed for the hard-of-hearing and shared on this page. Further, this series gives students the opportunity to speak and listen in dialogues about the co-evolution of the two fields that come together to form computational social science.

  1. APSA Annual Meeting, Montreal. Cassandra Inaugural Roundtable. September 15, 2022, 12pm EDT.
    • Amber Boydstun, UC Davis
    • Jennifer Pan, Stanford
    • Justin Gross, UMass Amherst
    • Joshua Tucker, NYU
    • Noah Smith, UW

    Watch the roundtable.

  2. Johns Hopkins University. Ethical usage of computer science and the limits of automatic analysis.
    September 23, 2022, 2pm EDT.
    • Lisa Singh, Georgetown
    • Philip Resnik, UMD
    • Sarah Oates, UMD
    • Tom Lippincott, Johns Hopkins

    More Information →

  3. Cornell University (in association with TADA 2022). Misinformation and dataset biases.
    October 7, 2022, 9am EDT.
    • Arthur Spirling, NYU
    • David Mimno, Cornell
    • Kathy McKeown, Columbia
    • Sarah Shugars, Rutgers

    Watch the roundtable.

  4. University of Michigan (co-sponsored by the Center for Political Studies). Mismatches between computational tools and social science needs.
    November 11, 2022, 1:30pm EDT.
    • Chris Fariss, UMich
    • Andy Halterman, MSU
    • Walter Mebane, UMich
    • Julia Mendelsohn, UMich

    Watch the roundtable.

  5. University of California, Berkeley. What big data and big models bring to the table.
    February 24, 2023, 11am PST.
    • Kawin Ethayarajh, Stanford
    • Kristina Gligorić, Stanford
    • Lucy Li, Berkeley
    • Austin van Loon, Stanford

    Watch the roundtable.

  6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Integrating textual with non-textual data: stocks, geospatial, etc.
    March 3, 2023, 3pm EST.
    • Camille Barchers, UMass Amherst
    • Joel Martinez, Harvard IQSS
    • Jason Radford, Northeastern University and Volunteer Science
    • Erin Walk, MIT IDSS
    • Sunny Yang, Northeastern University

    Watch the roundtable.

  7. Season Finale (co-sponsored by the JHU Center for Language and Speech Processing).
    April 7, 2023, 12pm EDT
    • Antonis Anastasopoulos, George Mason University
    • Ernesto Calvo, UMD
    • Jeff Gill, American University
    • Hale Sirin, JHU

    Watch the roundtable.