Team

Andreas Graefe (Ph.D., Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) has joined the PollyVote project in 2007. Andreas is currently a research fellow at LMU Munich, Germany, and at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. He also holds the Professorship in Customer Relationship Management at Macromedia University. Before that, Andreas was a researcher at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, a Senior Manager in CRM at the German pay-tv company Sky Deutschland, and a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Columbia University. Andreas' research is quantitative-empirical, interdisciplinary, and problem-oriented. He does not limit himself to a particular domain or method but looks across many domains and use different methods to address important problems. In the area of election studies, he has done extensive validation work on the benefits of combining forecasts, vote expectation surveys, and index models. Andreas also brought the PollyVote to Germany. For more information see his personal website.

Alfred G. Cuzán, Distinguished University Professor at The University of West Florida, is one of the founders of the Pollyvote. Alfred received a Ph.D. in Political Science and Economics at Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana) in 1975.  He has published many articles on American politics and policy, Latin American and Iberian politics, and political theory.  His current work focuses on basic elements and laws of politics. For more information see Alfred's personal website.

J. Scott Armstrong (Ph.D., MIT, 1968), Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, is one of the founders of the PollyVote. In addition, he is a founder of the Journal of Forecasting, the International Journal of Forecasting, and the International Symposium on Forecasting. He is the creator of forecastingprinciples.com and editor of Principles of Forecasting, an evidence-based summary of knowledge on forecasting. In 1996, he was selected as one of the first six “Honorary Fellows” by the International Institute of Forecasters. He was named by the Society of Marketing Advances as “Distinguished Marketing Scholar of 2000.” One of Wharton’s most prolific scholars, he is the most highly cited professor in the Marketing Department at Wharton. His current projects involve the application of scientific forecasting methods to climate change and the use of the index method to make predictions for situations with many variables and much knowledge (e.g., political elections and the effectiveness of advertisements). His book, Persuasive Advertising, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. It summarizes evidence-based knowledge on persuasion and it is supported by advertisingprinciples.com. For more information see Scott's personal website.

Mario Haim is a PhD candidate in communication as well as a trained computer scientist. He studied Media and Communication in Augsburg, Munich, and Helsinki and gained his Master's degree in communication in 2014 with a thesis on participants of political stock markets. Since 2014, Mario is a PhD candidate at LMU Munich’s Department of Communication Studies and Media Research. In his research, he focuses on all aspects of algorithmic influences on journalism. This includes data-driven journalism as well as personalization and Filter-Bubble effects, audience metrics, and news distribution within social network sites. His work on computer-generated news (i.e., robot journalism) was recently featured in the TV magazine ZAPP as well as in various programs of BR, WDR, and Die ZEIT. In his teaching, Mario focuses primarily on data-driven journalism. He has offered hands-on workshops in data journalism at the German Journalism School (DJS) and Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) as well as an academic seminar on data-driven journalism at the University of Southern Denmark. For more information see Mario's personal website.

Randall J. Jones, Jr. (PhD University of Texas at Austin), Professor of Political Science at the University of Central Oklahoma, is one of the founders of the PollyVote. Randy was Chair of the political science department and served as Assistant Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. Jones's current research interests relate to political forecasting, particularly predicting election outcomes. He also has published studies on forecasting political risks encountered by U. S. oil companies abroad. He is author of Who Will Be in the White House? Predicting Presidential Elections (Longman, 2002) and is co-editor of 21 Debated: Issues in World Politics (Prentice-Hall 2000, 2004). Jones chaired the organizing committee of the Political Forecasting Group, a Related Group of the American Political Science Association since 2006, and is currently the group's Secretary-Treasurer. He is a collaborator in the Special Interest Group PoliticalForecasting.com. Jones has been designated Oklahoma Political Science Scholar of the Year and Oklahoma Political Science Teacher of the Year, both awards of the Oklahoma Political Science Association, of which he has been president. At UCO Jones was named a Herbert Hauptman faculty research fellow and is director of the interdisciplinary minor in Global Studies. He previously served on the Board of Directors of the World Affairs Council of Central Oklahoma and of the United Nations Association, Oklahoma City chapter. For more information see Randy's personal website.

AX Semantics is one of the world's leading providers of NLG software for e-commerce, publishing and business intelligence. Their platform ax-semantics.com is able to process structured data and world knowlege into stories in up to 11 languages. It can be trained for any topic using the configuration language ATML3. The company was founded in 2001 and employs 40 people in Stuttgart, Berlin and Santiago de Chile.

A team of researchers from DW Innovation has been collaborating with the PollyVote project since late 2015 with the support of the Volkswagen foundation. The key goal is to learn more about scientific methods as a resource for journalism. The team will explore how to visualize election predictions in ways that make prediction analytics useful for public reporting. Deutsche Welle (DW) is Germany's international broadcaster. The innovation team takes part in European and national research projects to develop technologies which can enhance the quality of journalism and enable newsrooms with new technology tools.