Creating a Platform for the Sharing of Sensitive Online Data

David Lazer is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, and Co-Director, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Prior to coming to Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009). His research has been published in such journals as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Political Science Review, Organization Science, and the Administrative Science Quarterly, and has received extensive coverage in the media, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News. He is lead author of the paper in Science in 2014 that critiqued Google Flu Trends, which has emerged as an important piece in the use of big data to understand human behavior. He is lead author on the 2009 Science paper on computational social science, which has been described as the manifesto for the emerging field. His work on online personalization has received wide media coverage. His online experimental work on deliberation garnered best paper of the year in the American Political Science Review. His research on exploration and exploitation has been highly cited within the literature on collective intelligence. He has been PI on more than $13m of grants from the NSF, ARL, ARO, IARPA, and other entities. Dr. Lazer has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science, numerous other editorial boards and program committees.

Joshua A. Tucker is Professor of Politics, affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University. He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia, a co-Director of the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory, and a co-author/editor of the award-winning politics and policy blog The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post. He serves on the advisory board of the American National Election Study, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and numerous academic journals. Originally a scholar of post-communist politics, he has more recently studied social media and politics. His research in this area has included studies on the effects of network diversity on tolerance, partisan echo chambers, online hate speech, the effects of exposure to social media on political knowledge, online networks and protest, disinformation and fake news, how authoritarian regimes respond to online opposition, and Russian bots and trolls. His most recent book is the co-authored Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Jonathan Nagler is Professor of Politics at New York University, and a co-Director of NYU's Center for Social Media and Political Participation. He received his AB in government from Harvard University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1989. He has been a visiting associate professor at Caltech and Harvard, and has taught at the Summer Program, European Consortium for Political Research, Essex University, England, and the Summer Program, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan, as well as the ESRC Oxford Spring School in Quantitative Methods for Social Research. In 2012 Professor Nagler was a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. Professor Nagler’s research focuses on voting and elections. He is a co-author with Jan Leighley of Who Votes Now: Demographics, Issues, Inequality and Turnout in the United States (Princeton University Press, 2014).

Lilliana Mason is assistant professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press). She received her PhD in Political Psychology from Stony Brook University and her BA in Politics from Princeton University. Her research on partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and American social polarization has been published in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Behavior, and featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio. Mason received the 2017 Emerging Scholar Award from the Political Organizations and Parties Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation.

Adam Berinsky is the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT and serves as the director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL). He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Berinsky received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2000. He is the author of "In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq" (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is also the author of "Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America" (Princeton University Press, 2004) and has published articles in many journals. He is currently the co-editor of the Chicago Studies in American Politics book series at the University of Chicago Press. He is also the recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.