Francis Smith is President of a Cambridge, Massachusetts consulting firm specializing in election and non-profit law, political advocacy and campaigns and policy work. A graduate of Georgetown University and Boston College Law School, he is member of the Massachusetts Bar. A veteran of a number of political campaigns including two Presidential and a US Senate race, he now writes a monthly newsletter on American politics. He serves on a number of non governmental organization boards. His current work includes as the political director of the Democracy Alliance an organization of over 100 Democratic donors and institutions and as co-founder of Committee on States, a state donor network. He also serves as Executive Director of the Streisand Foundation.

Stephen was Deputy Campaign Manager for Senator Edward Kennedy during his Presidential and Senatorial campaigns, Youth Coordinator for the campaign of Mario Cuomo, served on the New England Steering Committee for the Obama presidential campaign and continues to be active in Democratic politics.
He has served on the staff of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees. He has taught in the advanced negotiation program at Harvard Law School and is a three-time recipient of the Danforth Award for excellence in teaching at Harvard University. He is also a recipient of the Lyndehurst Foundation Prize for social and artistic achievement.
Stephen is currently a lecturer at the Sloan School of Management in the visionary investing program, as well as a fellow at the Connection Science Group at MIT. He holds an M.A. from Harvard University, a J.D. from Columbia University, and an M.A. Ed. from Harvard’s School for Education.
Stephen is a board member of the John F. Kennedy Library and The Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation. He also serves on the advisory board at INCAE Business School. He is co-founder and vice president of the World Leadership Alliance, an organization of business and political leaders that promotes democracy, international understanding, and trade.
Stephen is also a principal at Park Agency – Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises, the Kennedy family office, and an Investor and Entrepreneur. He has served as a director or advisor to several companies, including Gridline Communications Holdings, Pear Therapeutics, Owl Biomedical, and LocoMobi.
His Current investment and business focus is scaling innovative healthcare and neuroscience companies. He is a
co-founder of New Frontier Bio, a multi-asset holding company, which leverages long-term involvement of the Kennedy family in healthcare, to identify, finance, and develop novel medical technologies from inception through clinical proof and concept

PRINCIPALS

Andy served as Co-Director of Senator Edward M. Kennedy's 1976 Massachusetts Senate reelection campaign and again worked with Senator Kennedy as Director of Issues and Media for his 1980 Presidential campaign. In 2008 working with Rock the Vote, he conceived and organized the largest youth voter registration drive to date, optimizing new online platforms to register 2.6 million first time voters principally between the ages of 18 and 35. In 2012 working with The Culture Project, Karsch produced and co-wrote the critically acclaimed Blueprint For Accountability, which was presented at the NYU Skirball Center and broadcast live online around the world by FORA. Directly following the 2016 election, Andy worked to reconfigure the board of Run For America, helping to find people in the private sector to run for office.Andy continues to consult for numerous foundations, organizations and institutions while serving as a Senior Advisor to the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial.
Andy’s film producing credits include Academy Award-nominated The Prince of Tides, The Emperor’s Club, Princess Caraboo, The Rachel Papers, Conviction, and the 2012 Academy Award-nominated Moneyball. Andy was executive producer on the film Moynihan, released in 2018. He attended The American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies, where, as a Conservatory Fellow, he produced the highly acclaimed Nights at O’Rear's, which premiered at The New York Film Festival in 1981. He subsequently founded Longfellow Pictures while working as both a producer and executive with United Artists from 1985 to 1994. He left United Artists to run companies and continue producing under his Longfellow Pictures banner first with William Randolph Hearst III and then Sidney Kimmel. In 2010, Andy founded the company Insurgent Media, which has produced several documentaries including the SXSW award-winning Beware of Mr. Baker; Blank City, about underground film, music and art in 1970s New York; the Emmy nominated American Masters Woody Allen: A Documentary; PBS' Before the Spring, After The Fall; and the Netflix Original Mission Blue. He also executive produced the Berlin Film Festival Cinema Fairbindet prize-winning film Art/Violence.

Tauhid is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Yale School of Management. He received his BS, MEng, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on solving operational problems involving social network data using probabilistic models, network algorithms, and modern statistical methods. Some of the topics he studies in the social network space include predicting the popularity of content, finding online extremists, and geo-locating users.
His broader interests cover data-driven approaches to investing in startup companies, non-traditional choice modeling, algorithmic sports betting, and biometric data.His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Mashable, the LA Times, and Time Magazine.
Education
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011
MEng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005
BS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004
Articles
Detecting Bots and Assessing Their Impact in Social Networks
D. Mesnards, N. G. Hunter, D. S. Hjouji, and Zaman, T.
Operations Research, issue 2022
2022
Optimizing Opinions with Stubborn Agents
Hunter, D. Scott, and T. Zaman
Operations Research, issue 2022
2022
Building a Location-Based Set of Social Media Users
Marks, C. Edward, and T. Zaman
Operations Research, issue 2022
2022
Finding Online Extremists in Social Networks
J. Klausen, C. Marks, and T. Zaman
Operations Research
2018
Finding Rumor Sources on Random Trees
D. Shah and T. Zaman
Operations Research, issue 3, vol. 64
2016
Working Papers
Mitigating the Backfire Effect Using Pacing and Leading
Q. Yang, K. Qureshi and T. Zaman
2020
Opinion Dynamics with Stubborn Agents
D.S. Hunter and T. Zaman
2018
Penetrating a Social Network: The Follow-back Problem
F. Que, K. Rajagopalan, and T. Zaman
2018

Stephen has created award winning political ads for organizations such as Rock The Vote and Center for American Progress. He has created ads for Democratic politicians such as Julian Castro, Joe Kennedy III and Eric Garcetti. Stephen created over 150 unique ads over the four months leading up to the 2020 presidential election in support of Joe Biden. Nebraska’s 2nd District (NE2) had only voted Democratic once since 1964. Two months into deploying Stephen’s unprecedented, high volume, data-targeted, persuadable voters campaign, the polls had swung from ”Leans Trump” to Biden up 11 points. On election night, NE2 was the first electoral vote to flip from red to blue, and by a larger percentage than any other state that flipped. Stephen’s ground-breaking NE2 campaign for DPI PAC won the prestigous Pollie Award for Best New and Unusual Tactic, and helped earn Biden his initial path to 270 and the presidency.
Stephen was honored by the New York Film Society's New Films New Directors series at the Museum of Modern Art. He has been a writer, director & producer on feature motion picture and television works for various Hollywood studios and production companies. He recently created and penned the pilot script for a limited series about the life of famed author Ernest Hemingway for Phoenix Pictures and Image Movers, with legendary director Robert Zemeckis set to direct and Mike Medavoy to produce. Past works include scripts for Disney, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and others. Additionaly, Stephen has created, produced and directed over seventy-five national commercial campaigns for TV and the web.
Stephen has a B.A. in writing from U.C.L.A. and an M.F.A. in film studies from Columbia University. His graduate thesis film won Best Picture at the Columbia University / New Line Cinema Festival of New Works. Spin Magazine called it "an urban opus" and esteemed director Milos Foreman called it "truly a wonderful film." It won Best Picture at six international film festivals and was awarded Filmmaker Magazine's Audience Choice Award. NYU Tisch School of Dramatic Writing founder Dan Kleinman placed the film on his list of the 10 best shorts of all time.

AI TEAM

Mike is a data scientist and software engineer. He has worked as a polling data analyst for a winning US Presidential campaign, an analytics director for a Silicon Valley startup, and a technology consultant for the US Government. He conducts research in machine learning, and teaches courses in Data Science, Computer Science, Information Management and Information Systems at Georgetown and NYU. He was a visiting researcher at Yale.
Mike’s research subjects include Machine Learning, Sentiment Analysis, Public Opinion Polling, Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval, Cognitive Neuroscience, Data Science, Database Management, Management of Information Systems, and Natural Language Processing.
Mike’s reserarch project (along with Tauhid at Yale) studied bots, disinformation, and the First Trump Impeachment.
Automated social media accounts, known as bots, had been shown to spread disinformation and manipulate online discussions. Their research looked at the behavior of retweet bots on Twitter during the first impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump, collecting impeachment related tweets from 3.6 million users, along with their 53.6 million edge follower network. They found that although bots represented 1% of all users, they generated over 31% of all impeachment related tweets. They also found that bots shared more disinformation, but used less toxic language than other users. Among supporters of the Qanon conspiracy theory, a popular disinformation campaign, bots had a prevalence near 10%. The follower network of Qanon supporters exhibited a hierarchical structure, with bots acting as central hubs surrounded by isolated humans. They quantifyied bot impact using the generalized harmonic influence centrality measure, finding there were a greater number of pro-Trump bots, but on a per bot basis, anti-Trump and pro-Trump bots had a similar impact, while Qanon bots had less impact. This lower impact was due to the homophily of the Qanon follower network, suggesting this disinformation was spread mostly within online echo-chambers.