By Jong Hee Park
On January 11 and 12, 2018, the fifth Asian Political Methodology Meeting was held at Seoul National University, Republic of Korea. The meeting was co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Seoul National University and Program for Quantitative and Analytical Political Science of Princeton University.
This year’s program, available at https://asiapolmeth.princeton.edu/online-program, had eight sessions including two keynote speeches and two poster sessions. In total, 14 papers and 30 posters were presented. In total, 95 registered participants (25 foreign and 70 local) attended the entire conference and many unregistered participants also joined the conference. Nationalities of participants were from Australia, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Republic of Korea, Singapore, United Kingdom, and United States.
The invited keynote speaker was Prof. Michael D. Ward from Duke University. Prof. Michael D. Ward gave a talk about how to analyze relational (network) data using statistical methods. Another keynote speaker was from KAIST, Republic of Korea: Prof. Meeyoung Cha. Prof. Meeyoung Cha presented a method of detecting fake news in online social media using machine learning techniques. After the keynote speech by Prof. Ward, the conference moved to a session of “Big Data in Political Methodology,” “Experimental Methods,” and “Bayesian Analysis.” The first day of the conference ended with the first poster session, consisting of faculty and post-doc participants.
The second day of the conference started with a theme of “Political Methodology for Lobby,” and then moved to a session of “Statistical Methods for Representation.” After the second poster session by graduate students, Prof. Cha gave a keynote speech and the conference finalized the program with a session of “Analyzing Congress using Statistical Methods.”
To make this conference successful, six graduate students at Seoul National University voluntarily contributed their time and resources for two months. Their names are Soonhong Cho, Suji Kang, Doeun Kim, Sunyoung Park, Sooahn Shin, Hyein Yang in alphabetical order. On behalf of the program committee, we sincerely appreciated their help and contribution.
The program committee for this conference included Jong Hee Park (committee chair and local host: Seoul National University, Republic of Korea), Fang-Yi Chiou (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), Kentaro Fukumoto (Gakushuin University, Japan), Benjamin Goldsmith (University of Sydney, Australia), Kosuke Imai (Princeton University, USA), and Xun Pang (Tsinghua University, China).
The 2019 Annual Meeting will be held in Kyoto, Japan. We look forward to seeing you in Kyoto next year!
Jong Hee Park is Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea.