Rayid Ghani, C’99, will speak at the University of the South on “The Role of Data, Technology, and Analytics in the Presidential Election.” He will give his talk at 4:30 p.m. CST Thursday, Jan. 31, in Convocation Hall on the Sewanee campus.
Mr. Ghani was the chief scientist at the Obama for America 2012 campaign focusing on analytics, technology, and data. He will talk about how the Obama campaign used analytics to improve decision-making across the organization and will describe how data from a variety of sources was used to improve fundraising, volunteer activities, and voter mobilization.
Mr. Ghani’s work focused on improving these campaign functions using analytics, social media, and machine learning—developing algorithms to fine-tune messages to voters. He will discuss what kind of data was available to the campaign, what technologies were developed, and how the resulting products were used by the campaign. Although the focus will be on the election, Mr. Ghani will also discuss how some of the same techniques can make other organizations more successful through better use of data and analytics.
Before joining the campaign, Mr. Ghani was a senior research scientist and director of analytics research at Accenture Labs. He has more than 10 years of applied R&D experience in machine learning, data mining, text mining and other analytics areas across politics, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, intelligence and financial services industries.
At Accenture Labs, Mr. Ghani was responsible for setting the R&D vision and agenda for analytics, inventing new analytics algorithms, conducting analytics R&D, and the commercialization of early-stage research. His work has been featured in numerous stories in publications such as Time, the New York Times, Slate, Business Week, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, US News & World Report, and NBC.
Mr. Ghani’s lecture is the 2013 Sherwood Ebey Lecture, co-sponsored by Friends of the Library. The annual Sherwood Ebey Mathematics Lecture is an endowed lectureship with the goal of presenting mathematically sound ideas in a manner that makes them accessible to a general audience.