Today, quantitative efforts to understand the information environment almost all rely on one or more of the following:
- Bespoke or short-term data collection isolated within an institution;
- Platform-provided data via dashboards, researcher APIs, or downloadable data sets (all of which are brittle and can be unreliable);
- Commercial social listening services with opaque data collection and inclusion criteria and limited platform coverage.
Princeton University’s Empirical Study of Conflicts project and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Partnership for Countering Influence Operations undertook a joint scoping effort to better understand the extent of the situation and explore solutions.
Learn more about the joint scoping effort >
Ultimately, the team’s findings supported the creation of a large-scale, multi-national institution to support research on the information environment, as described in this white paper. The Accelerator is developing initial infrastructure and will contribute to this overall vision by providing global resources to address issues faced by researchers examining the information environment.
Our Team
Executive Committee
Curt Hillegas
Associate CIO, Princeton University
Arvind Narayanan
Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University; Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy
Matthew Salganik
Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
Brandon Stewart
Associate Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
Olga Troyanskaya
Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University
External Advisors
Christine Balagué
Professor-HDR of Management and founder of the “Good in Tech” research network at Insitut Mines-Telécom Business School
Chris Mattmann
Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at NASA JPL; Adjunct Research Professor of Computer Science at University of Southern California
Katie Shilton
Professor and Program Co-Director of the BS in Social Data Science at the University of Maryland; leader of the Ethics & Values in Design (EViD) Lab.
Josh Tucker
Professor of Politics at New York University; co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at NYU
Chris Wiggins
Chief Data Scientist at New York Times; Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University
Staff
Kristen DeCaires Gall
Deputy Director, Operations and Research Development
Sean Norton
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Kelly Pereira
Administrative Coordinator
Jen Rosiere Reynolds
Director of Program Management and Strategy
Jake Shapiro
Faculty Director; Professor Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University