Center for International Political Analysis

Last updated
Center for International Political Analysis
Predecessor Policy Research Institute (PRI) at the University of Kansas
Founded at University of Kansas
Purposegathering information regarding the nature of inter-state relations during times of conflict
Key people
Philip Schrodt and Deborah Gerner
Website www.ku.edu/pri

The Center for International Political Analysis (CIPA) is a research center at the Policy Research Institute (PRI) at the University of Kansas. At present, the project's primary focus is to gather information regarding the nature of inter-state relations during times of conflict in several localized areas, such as the Middle East, Southern, Western, and Central Africa, and the Balkans.

Contents

Purpose

CIPA aims to quantify inter-state relations, both in number and intensity, through computer-aided programming and obtaining a series of numeric codes from filtered news. In addition, CIPA employs several human coders to track mass atrocities throughout the world. CIPA operates with funding from multiple sources with different research needs, but the overarching goal of the project is to advance efforts in the understanding and prediction of civil strife, genocide, and mass killings.

Project History

CIPA is an outgrowth of Philip Schrodt and Deborah Gerner's work on the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS). The initial focus of the KEDS project was the development of techniques for converting English-language reports of political events into event data. This replaced the process of human coding with automated coding.

The centerpiece of this effort is the KEDS computer program, a program for Macintosh. In support of KEDS, Schrodt and Gerner's staff produced several programs for filtering text and aggregating the resulting event data for its use in statistical analysis. The KEDS program has now been used in about half a dozen National Science Foundation-funded event data projects, as well as several dissertations and other smaller projects. The development and popularization of the KEDS software paved the way for CIPA's current framework, Tabari.

The early KEDS work focused primarily on the Levant region from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Most of this research focused on the development of early warning techniques for political change, primarily using the Levant as a case study. The project experimented with several different methods, including factor analysis, discriminant analysis, an assortment of clustering algorithms, and hidden Markov models.

In recent years, grants from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have allowed CIPA to expand the scope of its research into Africa, Yemen, Sri Lanka, and the former Yugoslavia. In addition, these grants have facilitated a shift in CIPA's foci. Upcoming data sets will likely reflect a greater emphasis on contentious intrastate political relations.

38°57′22″N95°14′37″W / 38.956105°N 95.243633°W / 38.956105; -95.243633

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Analysis</span> Process of understanding a complex topic or substance

Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle, though analysis as a formal concept is a relatively recent development.

In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language into another language. The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a low-level programming language to create an executable program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Signal processing</span> Field of electrical engineering

Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing signals, such as sound, images, potential fields, seismic signals, altimetry processing, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniques are used to optimize transmissions, digital storage efficiency, correcting distorted signals, improve subjective video quality, and to detect or pinpoint components of interest in a measured signal.

In common usage, evaluation is a systematic determination and assessment of a subject's merit, worth and significance, using criteria governed by a set of standards. It can assist an organization, program, design, project or any other intervention or initiative to assess any aim, realizable concept/proposal, or any alternative, to help in decision-making; or to generate the degree of achievement or value in regard to the aim and objectives and results of any such action that has been completed.

Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the abstract and mathematical foundations of computation.

Edge detection includes a variety of mathematical methods that aim at identifying edges, defined as curves in a digital image at which the image brightness changes sharply or, more formally, has discontinuities. The same problem of finding discontinuities in one-dimensional signals is known as step detection and the problem of finding signal discontinuities over time is known as change detection. Edge detection is a fundamental tool in image processing, machine vision and computer vision, particularly in the areas of feature detection and feature extraction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Qualitative research</span> Form of research

Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Content analysis</span> Research method for studying documents and communication artifacts

Content analysis is the study of documents and communication artifacts, which might be texts of various formats, pictures, audio or video. Social scientists use content analysis to examine patterns in communication in a replicable and systematic manner. One of the key advantages of using content analysis to analyse social phenomena is their non-invasive nature, in contrast to simulating social experiences or collecting survey answers.

Quantitative psychology is a field of scientific study that focuses on the mathematical modeling, research design and methodology, and statistical analysis of psychological processes. It includes tests and other devices for measuring cognitive abilities. Quantitative psychologists develop and analyze a wide variety of research methods, including those of psychometrics, a field concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Huang</span> Chinese-American engineer and computer scientist (1936–2020)

Thomas Shi-Tao Huang was a Chinese-born American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and writer. He was a researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Huang was one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition and human computer interaction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management</span>

The Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences is an academic faculty of the Technion and the oldest such department in Israel. The department is currently headed by Prof. Rann Smorodinsky and is based in the Cooper and Bloomfield buildings at Technion City. The department employs 52 faculty members, who as of 2023 served a total of 500 graduate and 1000 undergraduate students.

In computing, logging is the act of keeping a log of events that occur in a computer system, such as problems, errors or just information on current operations. These events may occur in the operating system or in other software. A message or log entry is recorded for each such event. These log messages can then be used to monitor and understand the operation of the system, to debug problems, or during an audit. Logging is particularly important in multi-user software, to have a central overview of the operation of the system.

The Advanced Learning and Research Institute (ALaRI), a faculty of informatics, was established in 1999 at the University of Lugano to promote research and education in embedded systems. The Faculty of Informatics within very few years has become one of the Switzerland major destinations for teaching and research, ranking third after the two Federal Institutes of Technology, Zurich and Lausanne.

Cultural analytics refers to the use of computational, visualization, and big data methods for the exploration of contemporary and historical cultures. While digital humanities research has focused on text data, cultural analytics has a particular focus on massive cultural data sets of visual material – both digitized visual artifacts and contemporary visual and interactive media. Taking on the challenge of how to best explore large collections of rich cultural content, cultural analytics researchers developed new methods and intuitive visual techniques that rely on high-resolution visualization and digital image processing. These methods are used to address both the existing research questions in humanities, to explore new questions, and to develop new theoretical concepts that fit the mega-scale of digital culture in the early 21st century.

Michael David Mitzenmacher is an American computer scientist working in algorithms. He is Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and was area dean of computer science July 2010 to June 2013. He also runs My Biased Coin, a blog about theoretical computer science.

Computational social science is an interdisciplinary academic sub-field concerned with computational approaches to the social sciences. This means that computers are used to model, simulate, and analyze social phenomena. It has been applied in areas such as computational economics, computational sociology, computational media analysis, cliodynamics, culturomics, nonprofit studies. It focuses on investigating social and behavioral relationships and interactions using data science approaches, network analysis, social simulation and studies using interactive systems.

Conflict and Mediation Event Observations (CAMEO) is a framework for coding event data. It is a more recent alternative to the WEIS coding system developed by Charles A. McClelland and the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) coding system developed by Edward Azar.

Philip Andrew "Phil" Schrodt is a political scientist known for his work in automated data and event coding for political news. On August 1, 2013, he announced that he was leaving his job as professor at Pennsylvania State University to become a full-time consultant. Schrodt is currently a senior research scientist at the statistical consulting firm Parus Analytical Systems.

This glossary of computer science is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in computer science, its sub-disciplines, and related fields, including terms relevant to software, data science, and computer programming.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ailsa Land</span> British mathematician (1927–2021)

Ailsa Horton Land was a Professor of Operational Research in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and was the first woman professor of Operational Research in Britain. She is most well-known for co-defining the branch and bound algorithm along with Alison Doig whilst carrying out research at the London School of Economics in 1960. She was married to Frank Land, who is an Emeritus Professor at the LSE.