[gov3009-l] Applied Stats Workshop Next Week (4/3) - Kosuke Imai

Dear workshop community, We will convene for the Harvard University Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) next week on Wednesday (4/3). The speaker is* Kosuke Imai *(Harvard) who will be presenting his work, "Automated Coding of Political Campaign Advertisement Videos: An Empirical Validation Study". *Where:* CGIS Knafel Building, Room K354 (see this link <https://map.harvard.edu/?bld=04471&level=9> for directions). *When: *Wednesday, April 3rd at 12 noon - 1:30 pm. *Abstract: * Television advertisements play an essential role in modern political campaigns with several billion dollars spent in the 2018 general election. For more than two decades, political scientists have studied TV ads by analyzing the hand-coded data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project (WAP) and its successor, the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP). Unfortunately, manually coding hundreds of variables, such as issue mentions, opponent appearance, and negativity, for many videos is a laborious and expensive process. We propose to automatically code political campaign advertisement videos. Applying state-of-the-art machine learning methods, we automatically extract various audio and image features from each video file. We show that our machine coding is at least as accurate as human coding for many variables of the WAP/WMP data sets. Since many candidates make their advertisement videos available on the Internet, automated coding can dramatically improve the efficiency and scope of campaign advertisement research. Joint work with June Hwang and Alex Tarr. *All are welcome! Lunch is provided! * Best, Connor Jerzak Applied Statistics Workshop -- Graduate Student Coordinator An anonymous feedback form for the workshop can be found here at this link <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScp4lPVBtp4Akf6K6ggmfcTUSIUHEJX89-CU8HWrQPpe9pjTw/viewform?usp=sf_link>. Workshop listserv sign-up at this link <https://lists.fas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/gov3009-l>.