Principal Investigators
David Sylvan
PROFESSOR, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS/
POLITICAL SCIENCE
PhD, Yale University
Faculty member since 1991, Dr Sylvan previously taught at the University of Minnesota and at Syracuse University. He works on international political economy issues (notably on world cities); on international relations theory (particularly on the rules of the Westphalian system); on foreign policy analysis (writings on the continuity of US policy toward client states and enemies); and on methodology (qualitative methods; computational models). He recently co-authored US Foreign Policy in Perspective (2009).
Jean-Louis Arcand
PROFESSOR, INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jean-Louis Arcand is Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, which he joined in 2008. From 2012 until 2016 he was Director of the Centre for Finance and Development and from 2009 to 2012 he was chair of Development Studies. He is a Founding Fellow of the European Union Development Network (EUDN) and Senior Fellow at the Fondation pour les études et recherches en développement international (FERDI). He was assistant and then Associate Professor at the University of Montréal, and Professor at the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches en Développement International (CERDI). His research focuses on the microeconomics of development, with a current focus on impact evaluation of social programme in West Africa and the Maghreb. He has been a consultant to the World Bank, the FAO, the UNDP, the Gates Foundation and several national governments. He is currently leading multi-year impact evaluations in Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, The Gambia, Mali, Morocco, and Senegal, with the topics being investigated ranging from peer mentoring to fight HIV-AIDS, to capacity-building in rural producer organisations to foster food security.
James Henderson
SENIOR RESEARCHER
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
James Henderson is a Senior Researcher at the Idiap Research Institute, where he heads the Natural Language Understanding group. He is currently an Action Editor for the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). Until recently he was a Chargé de Cours in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Geneva, where he participated in running the interdisciplinary research group Computational Learning and Computational Linguistics. Before moving to Idiap, Dr Henderson was the Principal Scientist of the Parsing and Semantics group at Xerox Research Centre Europe, in Grenoble, which is now Naver Labs Europe. Before that he was a Maître d'Enseignement et de Recherche (MER) in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Geneva. Earlier he was a Research Fellow in the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems at the University of Edinburgh , a Maître-Assistant in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Geneva, and a Lecturer in the then Department of Computer Science at the University of Exeter, UK. Dr Henderson investigates machine learning methods for natural language processing tasks. He is well known for his pioneering work on recurrent neural networks (deep learning) for syntactic and semantic-role parsing. Current research topics include representation learning for the semantics of language, and vector-space representations of entailment rather than similarity.
Research staff
Ashley Thornton
SENIOR RESEARCHER
PhD, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Ashley Thornton is senior researcher on the Intrepid Project. Her doctoral dissertation developed text-analytical techniques to examine the arguments parliamentarians in New Zealand and France put forth in support of or against proposed welfare reforms over 40 years ("How Does Ideology Influence Welfare Retrenchment Proposals?" Party Politics). Her teaching specialties include an introductory course on political psychology, and an introductory course on qualitative methods. Within the Intrepid Project, she works primarily on hand-annotating the news articles used for machine learning.
Andreas Marfurt
RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Andreas Marfurt is a lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, and a postdoc at Idiap. He teaches and does research in NLP, specializing in summarization, hallucination detection, and evaluation. He holds a PhD from EPFL for his thesis on "Interpretable Representation Learning and Evaluation for Abstractive Summarization." Within the Intrepid Project, he is using deep learning techniques to process the annotated news articles, facilitating automated interpretation of political and economic policy documents.
Julia Greene
RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Julia Greene is a PhD Student in the International Relations/Political Science department at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Her research interests include the politics of immigrant integration and comparative migration studies. As part of the Intrepid Project, she is working on the annotation of foreign policy news articles.