Princeton University

Specialization: American politics; Quantitative methodology; electoral politics

Aaron's interests lie at the intersection of quantitative methods and American electoral politics. His work for the Gore, Dean, and Kerry campaigns focused on battleground state and media market targeting as well as finding persuadable voters through electoral, demographic, and polling data. Aaron's research projects include formalizing the theory of microtargeting (as well as quantifying its effects), using text messaging as a GOTV tool, predicting the results of battleground states in Presidential race, and developing ecological inference techniques.

Employing his computer science background, Aaron co-authored a paper on airline security titled "Carnival Booth: An Algorithm for Defeating the Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening System" (First Monday, October 2002). Using computer simulations, Aaron and Samidh Chakrabarti showed how terrorists could defeat the government's profiling system by analyzing the system's observable output. Aaron's work has also appeared in the American Journal of Political Science and Political Analysis (forthcoming).

CV and current projects

M.A., Politics, Princeton University; M. Eng., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Link to: Personal Web site