SCI Assistant Professor Malihe Alikhani and Associate Professor Yu-Ru Lin were recently among the awardees for the Pitt Cyber Accelerator Grants Program (PCAG). This program provides initial funding for projects that address critical questions of networks, data, and algorithms, with a focus on the ever-changing gaps among law, policy, and technology.
Alikhani's project, titled "A Computational Approach to Measuring and Explaining Sophistication and Argumentation in Political Discourse," aims to create new computer science methods tailored for political speech to quantify and measure the structure of argumentation - an "interdisciplinary collaboration between computer science and political science," as characterized by Alikhani.
"By combining the strengths of each discipline, we can build sophisticated models to measure political arguments alongside the substantive knowledge to understand their impact on many aspects of political life," Alikhani says. Alikhani will collaborate on this project with Max Goplerud and Tessa Provins, assistant professors in Pitt's Department of Political Science.
Lin's project, titled "Developing Digitally Mediated Transparency for Police-Community Relations," aims to explore the development of digital tools for mediating and increasing the transparency in police reform and citizen complaint processes. She will collaborate on this project with Sera Linardi, an associate professor in Pitt's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
Congratulations to Malihe and Yu-Ru on these exciting endeavors!