Kenneth BENOIT

Kenneth BENOIT is the Dean and Full-time Professor of Computational Social Science at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University (SMU). Previously, he served as Director of the Data Science Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 2020 to 2024. He holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, specializing in statistical methodology.

His research focuses on computational methods for analyzing textual data, particularly political texts and social media. Key areas include text-as-data techniques, natural language processing, and the application of large language models in social sciences. He has pioneered methods combining machine learning with crowd-sourced coding to improve the accuracy of political text analysis.

Ken’s work emphasizes the analysis of big data, electoral systems, and comparative party competition, with notable contributions to the European Parliament and policy positioning studies. His expertise extends to software development, including R packages like quanteda and spacyr, which are widely used in text analysis.

His articles and publications span methodological innovations, policy analysis, and interdisciplinary applications. Notable projects include scaling political party positions and examining the role of AI in public policy. He is actively involved in academic leadership, having served on editorial boards and organized collaborative research initiatives like the CIVICA research hackathon.

Beyond SMU, he maintains professional profiles on LinkedIn and GitHub, reflecting his commitment to open-source tools and scholarly collaboration.