Institute Affiliates Receive Faculty Promotions
Of the 21 Charles River Campus faculty who recently received promotions, three are affiliates of the Hariri Institute for Computing. Taylor Boas (Political Science, CAS) and Jacob Groshek (Emerging Media Studies, COM) have both been promoted to the rank of associate professor, while Betty Anderson (History, CAS) earned full professor status.
Taylor Boas was appointed a Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellow in the fall of 2013. His research examines various aspects of electoral politics in Latin America, including campaigns, political communication, voting behavior, corruption, and religion and politics, and involves a variety of methods, such as online survey experiments and the statistical analysis of electoral data. His books include Presidential Campaigns in Latin America: Electoral Strategies and Success Contagion (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Jacob Groshek is a Junior Faculty Fellow of the Institute, appointed to the fall 2016 cohort. Additionally, his a recipient of a Hariri Research Award (June 2016), titled “An Ongoing Streaming Sample Twitter Collection and Analysis Toolkit.” The project aims to develop alternative and robust collection, storage, and analysis capabilities to perform research based on communications sent via Twitter.
Groshek researches how online and mobile media technologies can influence social and political change. He is founding editor of the Journal of Communication and Technology. He also oversees a cloud-based software system, the BU Twitter Collection and Analysis Toolkit that allows all BU faculty and students to study social media through big and small data approaches.
Betty Anderson worked with BU Spark! this past spring to create an experiential learning opportunity for CS 506 students. During the semester, Anderson worked with students to map commercial activity in Amman, Jordan using data from TripAdvisor. The new collaboration was instrumental in helping Anderson expand the scope of her work in an effort to understand both how Jordanians are projecting class, gender, and consumption decisions and how the state and business owners are generating customers.
Anderson specializes in Middle Eastern history, with an emphasis on social change throughout the region, from the Ottoman Empire to the Arab Spring, incorporating history, politics, economics, education, and culture. She is director of the Pardee School’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies & Civilizations and has received both Fulbright and American Center of Oriental Research grants. Anderson is the author of four books, most recently A History of the Modern Middle East: Rulers, Rebels, and Rogues (Stanford University Press, 2016).