The Cline Center for Democracy is pleased to announce the 2015-2016 David F. Linowes Faculty Fellows: Prof. Avital Livny (Political Science) and Prof. Dan Roth (Computer Science and the Beckman Institute). These exceptional scholars work in areas of core interest to the Cline Center; the Linowes Fellowship recognizes and supports their efforts to utilize and add value to Cline Center data and technology.
Prof. Livny works on identity politics and the comparative politics of the Middle East and Turkey. Her Linowes Fellowship project aims to enhance the Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) demographic data by cross-validating it with archived national censuses and a variety of survey-based datasets. This project should facilitate the creation of new time-varying measures of ethnic and religious diversity, as well as sub-national ethnic geography and inequalities in health, wealth and education.
Prof. Roth works on machine learning and inference methods that enable natural language understanding. In his second year as a Linowes Fellow, he aims to expand the long-term partnership between the Cline Center and the Cognitive Computation Group by developing tools for transforming the raw, natural language of news text into structured data about events and the “frames” used to explain them.
These projects reflect the values, goals and standards set by David F. Linowes during his long and distinguished service to the University of Illinois and the American people. A distinguished public servant appointed to a number of presidential commissions, he served as a US Army officer during WWII and as the Boeschenstein Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at Illinois.
Generous gifts from Professor Linowes and his family enable the Cline Center to support these Faculty Fellows as well as the annual Linowes Lecture on Public Policy. These programs demonstrate Professor Linowes’ and the Cline Center’s shared commitment to applying cutting-edge academic knowledge to the most challenging policy issues and political problems facing democratic governance today.