I am a third year Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My advisor is Libby Hemphill. My research centers around using data science and statistics to analyze political science data, especially social media activity of politicians and survey datasets like the American National Election Studies, the National Asian American Survey, and the Collaborative Multi-Racial Post Election Survey. In my doctoral research, I study political preferences of Asian American communities, especially on racialized policy issues like affirmative action and police reform. Finally, I work on a wide range of computational social science projects, leveraging my skills in data science, statistics, natural language processing, and survey analysis.

At UMSI, I manage the archive of tweets of Indian and US politicians and influencers. Previously, I worked as a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India with Joyojeet Pal, Monojit Choudhury and Kalika Bali. We studied the use of Twitter for political propaganda and election campaign strategies by politicians in India. I led the NivaDuck project to compile a dataset of Twitter handles of >36K Indian and >8K US politicians. Some of the projects I am working on are listed below.

Prior to that, I have worked as a Research Associate in the Cloud and HPC lab at the Department of Computer Science at IIT Delhi under the supervision of Professor Sorav Bansal from August 2016 to June 2018. I graduated in B.E. (Hons.) Computer Science from BITS Pilani in July 2016.

Resume
Curriculum Vitae (PDF) (last updated Oct, 2022)

Contact

Email

Research Interests

My primary research and professional objective is to use quantitative research methods to study political interactions on digital media platforms. I use a diverse array of data sources - political tweets, news media stories, results from nationally representative surveys, among others. Primarily, my current work focuses on developing a conceptual model that represents major factors that influence attitudes of Asian Americans on racialized policy issues. I have relied on prior work to build this model of factors that moderate and mediate the relationship between ethnic identity (national origins) and attitudes on racial policies, and I am now using datasets like the National Asian American Survey, the Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey, and the Cooperative Election Study to test those relationships for significance. Finally, I plan to study the role social media discourse is playing in driving attitudes of Asian Americans on issues relating to (anti) racism in the United States, in conjunction with the factors already accounted for in the above model.

Projects

  • Race, Technology, and Racial Justice - In this project, I have relied on prior work to build a conceptual model of atttiudes of Asian Americans toward racialized policies like affirmative action, the Black Lives Matter movement, and policing. I have analysed the ANES 2016 and 2020 surveys to understand racial divides between White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans on such policies. We used multi-variate regressions to model the impact of racial identity, partisan affiliation, income, gender, education, generation, and anti-Black stereotypes on attitudes toward racialized policies and issues. These included affirmative action programs, preferential hiring and promotion of Black Americans, the police, the Black Lives Matter movement, racial justice protests, and urban unrests. We found that even after controlling for aforementioned factors, the White/Black, Asian/Black, and Hispanic/Black racial divides remain significant. This work is being submitted to Public Opinion Quarterly.

  • Paywalls' Impact on Local News - In this project, we are using data from proQuest to gauge the impact of paywall introduction on the content of local newspapers in the United States. Since the advent of digital media platforms, newspapers have been forced to move away from traditional subscription-based print formats to digital editions that aimed to leverage advertising revenues to pay for their day-to-day operations. Did the change from free to paid digital content impact the editorial decisions surrounding published material? If so, which newspapers witnessed the largest shifts? What are the other factors that impact such shifts, if any? I have used tomotopy LDA models to classify news articles into local/not-local, and soft/hard news. Moreover, I leveraged the sentence-transformer package by huggingface to estimate content diversity of news articles. For both of these metrics - topical categories of articles and content diversity - we evaluate temporal changes with respect to paywall introduction using a difference-in-difference approach. This work is mentored by Paramveer Dhillon and Libby Hemphill.

  • Public Figures Twitter Archive - At MSR India, I led the project to collect a database of Twitter accounts of public figures relevant to Indian and US politics. We have built NivaDuck - Marathi word for selector - a machine learning classification pipeline that can find Twitter handles of politicians in a given country by leveraging the Twitter bio, tweet data, hashtags used and friend network of a seed set. Using this and other archives of political and celebrity twitter accounts, I have built and maintain the archive of tweets of over 60K Indian and 70K US Twitter handles at the University of Michigan, hosted at the Michigan Institute of Data Science (MIDAS). The tweets are updated regularly, and can be shared with researchers through collaborative research projects.

Key Publications

  • Comparative sensitivity of social media data and their acceptable use in research. New!
    Libby Hemphill, Angela Schöpke-Gonzalez, Anmol Panda [Scientific Data]

  • Political hazard: misinformation in the 2019 Indian general election campaign New!
    Syeda Zainab Akbar, Anmol Panda, Joyojeet Pal [South Asian History and Culture]

  • Devotees on an Astroturf: Media, Politics, and Outrage in the Suicide of a Popular FilmStar New!
    Syeda Zainab Akbar, Ankur Sharma, Dibyendu Mishra, Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Himani Negi, Sachita Nishal, Anmol Panda, Joyojeet Pal [ACM COMPASS 2022]

  • COVID, BLM, and the polarization of US politicians on Twitter.
    Anmol Panda, Divya Siddarth, Joyojeet Pal [ArXiv]

  • Misinformation as a Window into Prejudices: COVID-19 and the Information Environment in India
    Syeda Zainab Akbar, Anmol Panda, Divyanshu Kukreti, Azhagu Meena, Joyojeet Pal
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW 2020 [Under Review]

  • Topical Focus of Political Campaigns and its Impact: Findings from Politicians' Hashtag Use during the 2019 Indian Elections.
    Anmol Panda, Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Monojit Choudhury, Kalika Bali, Joyojeet Pal.
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW 2020, Vol 4 [ACM Digital Library]

  • NivaDuck - A Scalable Pipeline to Build a Database of Political Twitter Handles for India and the United States.
    Anmol Panda, A'ndre Gonawela, Sreangsu Acharyya, Dibyendu Mishra, Mugdha Mohapatra, Ramgopal Mohapatra, Ramgopal Chandrasekaran, Joyojeet Pal
    SMSociety'20: International Conference on Social Media and Society [ACM Digital Library] [Video] [Dataset]

  • Leader or Party? Personalization in Twitter Political Campaigns during the 2019 Indian Elections.
    Ashwin Rajadesingan, Anmol Panda, Joyojeet Pal
    SMSociety'20: International Conference on Social Media and Society [ACM Digital Library]

  • Affording Extremes: Incivility, Social Media and Democracy in the Indian context.
    Anmol Panda, Han Zhang, Noopur Raval, Sunandan Chakravarty, Mugdha Mohapatra, Joyojeet Pal. Microsoft Research India.
    ICTD2020: Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development [ACM Digital Library]

  • From Greetings to Corruption: Politicians, Political Parties, and Tweeting in India.
    Lia Bozarth, Anmol Panda, Ceren Budak, Joyojeet Pal
    ICTD2020: Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development [ACM Digital Library]

Other Publications

  • Twitter in the 2019 Indian General Elections: Trends of Use Across States and Parties. Joyojeet Pal, Anmol Panda.
    Economics and Political Weekly. Vol. 54, Issue No. 51, 28 Dec, 2019. [Online].

  • Chor or Chowkidar: who won the ‘chowkidar’ battle on Twitter during the 2019 Indian elections. Anmol Panda, Joyojeet Pal.
    Abstract accepted for oral presentation at Workshop on Bias, Disinformation, Misinformation, and Propaganda in Online News and Social Media at SocInfo 2019, Qatar.

  • Typological analysis of extreme speech related tweets in the context of Indian electoral politics. Anmol Panda, Ramgopal Chandrashekaran, Shubi Agarwal, Joyojeet Pal. Microsoft Research India.
    Presented at the International workshop on Global Perspectives on Extreme Speech Online, 10-11 December 2018, Ludwig-Maxmilan University, Munich, Germany.
    [ Workshop website ]

  • The use of social media in the 2019 General Elections. Joyojeet Pal, Azhagu Meena, Drupa Dinnie Charles, Anmol Panda. Published in the Seminar Magazine.
    [ Link ]

  • How #BJP fused with #StrongIndia in #2019. Joyojeet Pal, Anmol Panda, Faisal Lalani. Full page story for the Mint newspaper.
    [ Article on livemint.com ]

  • Narendra Modi matinee show: Inside India's celeb Twitter. Joyojeet Pal,Anmol Panda. Full page story for the Mint newspaper.
    [ Article on livemint.com ]

  • Elections 2019: What tweet for tat tells you about Rahul Gandhi. Joyojeet Pal. Contributions by Andre Gonawela, Anmol Panda, Ramarvind K.M. and Ajai Sreevatsan. Full page story for the Mint newspaper.
    [ Article on livemint.com ]

  • On Twitter, Sachin Pilot is CM and Shivraj trumps Modi in MP. Joyojeet Pal, Anmol Panda, Ramgopal Chandrashekaran Article on the 2018 state assembly elections for Livemint.com.
    [ Article on livemint.com ]

    • Past publications

  • COP: Compiler Optimizations to Reduce Memory Stalls for Network Pipelines Written in P4. Shailja Pandey, Ankit Bhardwaj, Anmol Panda and Sorav Bansal. Poster in 15th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), April 2018.
    [ Poster abstract ]
    We are also presenting our poster at the NetApp University day in Bengaluru. [ NetApp poster ]

  • A Comparative study of GPUVerify and GKLEE. Anmol Panda, Phillip Ruemmer, Neena Goveas 4th International IEEE conference on Parallel and Distributed Grid Computing, JUIT, Waknaghat, HP, India, December 2016.
    [ Paper ] [ Undergraduate thesis ] [ Slides ]

Exchange studies

  • I received a scholarship from Erasmus Mundus (now Erasmus+) NAMASTE program to visit Uppsala University in Sweden as an exchange student during the Autumn 2015 semester. At the Department of Information Technology there, I completed four courses: Combinatorial optimisation using constraint programming, Real time systems, Graph Theory and Human Computer Interaction. During one of the assignments of the Real time systems course, we built a path following bot. A video is attached here.

Instructor at the Center for Technical Education

  • Spring 2015, Introduction to Programming in Java

    Taught Object Oriented Programming in Java to a class of 20 students at the Center for Technical Education (CTE). Worked with two other instructors.

  • Fall 2014, Application Programming in C#

    Taught OOP concepts in C#

Teaching Assistantship

  • Spring 2015, Microporcessors - Programming and Interfacing

    As a TA for MPI, I worked with three more TAs for a tutorial section of 120 students for two hours once every week. We prepared solutions for tutorial questions, aided the students in solving them and resolved the queries. Lastly, we invigilated during the lab exam of the course.

  • Fall 2014, Effective Public Speaking

    As the TA for EPS, I was present in every lecture and each of the five activities (story telling, impromptu speech, self-intro/prop, debate and persuasive speech) of the course. I prepared topics for each activity, group lists for group activities, assisted the instructor in grading and recorded the scores. Moreover, I presented a sample debate along with eight other students and a sample persuasive speech. Lastly, I mentored students to improve their English proficiency, content structure and delivery. We considered factors like voice modulation, expressions, gestures, pace and pauses, and eye contact.

  • Fall 2013 and Spring 2014, Technical Report Writing

    As the sole TA for one section (ninety students) of TRW, I graded quizzes, assignments and reports. I also set the topics for the students' assignments and reports.

Past Projects

  • At IIT Delhi, I worked with Ankit Bhardwaj and Shailja Pandey to design an implement compiler optimisations for packet processing applications. These optimizations source their gains from memory level parallelism through batching, efficient scheduling, and cross-producting of lookup tables. Our poster on the same was accepted at NSDI 2018. It has also been submitted as a full paper at OSDI 2018.
    The MLP benchmarks and experiments are detailed in this document MLP

  • During my final semester at BITS Pilani Goa, I worked on a comparative study of two GPU verification tools to assess the programming bugs (data races and divergent barriers) that they reported, benefits and disadvantages of each, and their recommended usage in software development.

    A Survey of verification tools for GPU software [Undergraduate thesis]

  • As a Mitacs Globalink research intern at the University of Northern British Columbia in Canada, I worked under the supervision of Alex Aravind on a project to automatically seed farms. During the twelve week project, along with one more intern, I evaluated four GPS free localisation algorithms for wireless sensor nodes and simulated two in Java