Biography
Dr. Kevin Aslett (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, specializing in political communication and computational social science. He is also a member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Research Cluster at UCF, a Research Affiliate at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University, and a Fellow at the Political Economy Forum at the University of Washington. His research broadly focuses on the effect of technological change and supranational institutions on threats to liberal democracy (specifically fake news/misinformation, populism, and patronage). In addition, he has have developed new methods in the field of political communication that remove obstacles to extracting information from enormous collections of electronic text and images that users encounter online. He has published applications of machine learning that unlock big and complex data, so that he and others can effectively research the effect of social media on political preferences and opinions. He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Science Advances and Policy Studies Journal and in popular outlets such as the Washington Post. He also serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety run by the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Research Interests: political communication, computational social science, comparative politics.
Personal Website: https://kaslett.github.io//