Research Topics
Law
My current focus is on developing the Systematic Content Analysis of Litigation EventS Open Knowledge Network or SCALES OKN. This project is a giant effort with more than 20 faculty from 10 universities and is funded by the National Science Foundation's Convergence Accelerator program. Our mission is simple, to transform the transparency and accessibility of court records. My role is in managing the project and leading the data engineering efforts.
There are a number of interconnected efforts that are a part of this:
- Developing tools to download and process legal data.
- Developing algorithms to computationally annotate and extract meaning from court records.
- Develop crosswalks to integrate disparate legal datasets.
- Constructing an ontology of litigation actors and events.
- Conducting analyses of court procedures to demonstrate applications of the data.
- Collaborating with partner organizations and supporting their analysis goals with the SCALES OKN.
- Building an open database and applications that enables all researchers and journalists to do the same.
The tools that data engineering builds for downloading, processing, and crosswalking legal data will be released via the SCALES OKN PACER-tools repository. Data analyses are released via the SCALES OKN Research-Materials repository.
Personally, my research interests in this area revolve around issues related to access to justice and judicial decision-making.
Gun Violence and Terrorism
Two distinct domains, but my interests in both are related to understanding the time evolution and predictability of these events. This results in a mixture of organizational research, behavioral contagion, and the impacts of media and publicity.
Healthcare
My research in healthcare revolves around the diffusion of new practices, clinician decision-making, and how workplace networks affect those two. Fortunately, I am a part of a large team with a number of brilliant individuals who continue to push this research forward to answer these questions.