Events
SoDa Symposium: “Crowdsourced Adaptive Surveys”
Event Start Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Event End Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2025 - 1:00 pm
Location: Virtual / Zoom EST
UMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—join us for the next SoDa Symposium!
Description:
Public opinion surveys are vital for informing democratic decision-making, but responding to rapidly changing information environments and measuring beliefs within hard-to-reach communities can be challenging for traditional survey methods. This discussion introduces a crowdsourced adaptive survey methodology (CSAS) that unites advances in natural language processing and adaptive algorithms to produce surveys that evolve with participant input. The CSAS method converts open-ended text provided by participants into survey items and applies a multi-armed bandit algorithm to determine which questions should be prioritized in the survey. The method’s adaptive nature allows new survey questions to be explored and imposes minimal costs in survey length. Applications in the domains of misinformation, issue salience, and local politics showcase CSAS’s ability to identify topics that might otherwise escape the notice of survey researchers. The discussion will conclude by highlighting CSAS’s potential to bridge conceptual gaps between researchers and participants in survey research.
Bio:
Yamil Ricardo Velez
Yamil Ricardo Velez is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. His research focuses on how the quality of political information influences political engagement and representation, with a particular emphasis on the impact of misinformation. His most recent work explores the potential for generative artificial intelligence to enhance our understanding of public opinion through the use of adaptive surveys. His work has been published in top journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Political Analysis. At Columbia, Yamil teaches courses on Experimental Research, Political Psychology, and Racial and Ethnic Politics. Before joining Columbia, he held faculty positions at George Washington University and Wesleyan University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stony Brook University.
Additional Information:
Please contact infoevents@umd.edu at least one week prior to the event to request disability accommodations. In all situations, a good faith effort (up until the time of the event) will be made to provide accommodations.
Virtual / Zoom ESTUMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—join us for the next SoDa Symposium!
Description:
Public opinion surveys are vital for informing democratic decision-making, but responding to rapidly changing information environments and measuring beliefs within hard-to-reach communities can be challenging for traditional survey methods. This discussion introduces a crowdsourced adaptive survey methodology (CSAS) that unites advances in natural language processing and adaptive algorithms to produce surveys that evolve with participant input. The CSAS method converts open-ended text provided by participants into survey items and applies a multi-armed bandit algorithm to determine which questions should be prioritized in the survey. The method’s adaptive nature allows new survey questions to be explored and imposes minimal costs in survey length. Applications in the domains of misinformation, issue salience, and local politics showcase CSAS’s ability to identify topics that might otherwise escape the notice of survey researchers. The discussion will conclude by highlighting CSAS’s potential to bridge conceptual gaps between researchers and participants in survey research.
Bio:
Yamil Ricardo Velez
Yamil Ricardo Velez is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. His research focuses on how the quality of political information influences political engagement and representation, with a particular emphasis on the impact of misinformation. His most recent work explores the potential for generative artificial intelligence to enhance our understanding of public opinion through the use of adaptive surveys. His work has been published in top journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Political Analysis. At Columbia, Yamil teaches courses on Experimental Research, Political Psychology, and Racial and Ethnic Politics. Before joining Columbia, he held faculty positions at George Washington University and Wesleyan University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stony Brook University.
Additional Information:
Please contact infoevents@umd.edu at least one week prior to the event to request disability accommodations. In all situations, a good faith effort (up until the time of the event) will be made to provide accommodations.
Speaker(s): Yamil Ricardo Velez