G. Elliott Morris is a staff data journalist and US correspondent for The Economist. He writes about American politics, public opinion polling, demographics, and elections. He is responsible for many of the paper’s election forecasting models, including the 2020 US presidential election forecast and polling models for several European countries. He writes for The Economist‘s weekly “Checks and Balance” newsletter on US politics. He is proficient in machine learning models, Bayesian statistics, and the various tools in the standard social science toolkit.
Michael Colaresi is the William S. Dietrich II Chair of Political Science and the research and academic director of Pitt Cyber, as well as the director of the Pitt Disinformation Lab. His work leverages the accelerating availability of computational tools, including machine learning and Bayesian approaches, along with unstructured information, such as from digitized text, to build and improve models of information technology in democracies, national security secrecy and oversight, international and intrastate violence, and changes in human rights over time. He also develops computational and visual tools that enable domain specialists to work alongside computer scientists to improve specific applications. In 2022-23, he is a fellow of the Stability and Change program at the Center for Advanced Studies in Oslo, Norway. He was the co-editor of the journal International Interactions from 2014-2019 and was co-recipient of the Best Visualization Award from the Journal of Peace Research in 2017 and the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology from the Methodology section of the American Political Science Association in 2006. His book Democracy Declassified was shortlisted for the 2015 Conflict Research Society Book Prize. He has been PI or co-PI on four NSF grants and is a research affiliate for the ERC-funded Violence Early Warning Project at the University of Uppsala and the Peace Research Institute Oslo. At the University of Pittsburgh he co-founded the new major in Computational Social Science and in his previous position at Michigan State University, he founded and directed the Social Science Data Analytics initiative.