Research Projects
Peloria Insights
I was the Chief Ethnographer and Co-Founder of Peloria Insights. Peloria draws on qualitative knowledge to inform artificial intelligence methods that advance our understanding of the complex and dynamic relationships between economic, security, environmental, cultural, and demographic factors. Peloria’s deep learning methods employ NLP and orthodox data to develop predictive capacity in relation to change in social phenomena like violence, social unrest, poverty, and their effects on broader political and economic issues, including supply chain disruption.
Ethnographic Edge
I was the founder of Ethnographic Edge, a multidisciplinary geopolitical risk forecasting project using technology from Recorded Future. It was used as an online tool for traders operating in the financial markets. It used a combination of Data Analytics technologies and Ethnographic methods, that allowed users to obtain forecasts on the development of international crises and their impact on asset prices.
Ethnographic Edge addressed a deep rooted and fundamental problem: Uncertainty. With markets being increasingly interconnected, volatile and complex, and participated in by traders that needed clear and concise forecasts in order to manage risk, Ethnographic Edge informed them of the most likely scenarios and thus decreased uncertainty.
Prosthetic Ethnography
Prosthetic ethnography is a term I use to describe the process of co-calibrating algorithmic technologies with ethnographic experience. Doing this allows us to considerably expand the range of fieldwork and to achieve more interesting insights into the dynamics of social and political phenomena. Specifically, I argue that by using software to collect large quantities of online language and satellite imagery data, alongside ethnographic fieldwork among the social groups involved, it is possible to find recurring patterns of social behavior and identify increased likelihood of future events.
