• View my research statement here.

  • Congressional Close-Up

    Congressional Close Up is an automated system which analyzes votes in the U.S. Senate. To begin, Congressional Close Up classifies each congressional vote into one of many political topics, identifies unusual behavior concerning each vote, and constructs an explanation for the anomalous behavior depending on the topic of the vote. A more in depth description can be found here. This system is in beta version, but has already garnered attention from Lawrence Lessig (view here), Sunlight Labs and was the project that helped me gain a Illinois 50 for the Future award.

  • News at Seven

    News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to artificial anchors for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented. Nathan Nichols began this project, and I joined this project during my "freshman" year of graduate school. Demos can be seen here. News at Seven has been mentioned in numerous newspapers, magazines and blogs including Le Monde, NSF Science Nation, CNN, and the CBS News blog.