Professor
PGH 447F
713-743-1663
rkennedy@uh.edu

Research Interests

Artificial Intelligence and Public Policy
Computational Social Science
Deliberation and Democracy
Energy and the Environment
Democracy and Democratization

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Biographical Summary

Ryan Kennedy is a professor in the department of political science at the University of Houston (UH), principal investigator for the NSF-funded Community Responsive Algorithms for Social Accountability (CRASA) project, director of the Machine-Assisted Human Decision-making (MAHD) Lab (UH), founding associate director of analytics for the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy, editor of Research & Politics, and a research associate at the Hobby Center for Public Policy.

His research spans a number of areas in comparative politics, international relations and American politics, including: computational social science, technology and public policy, democratization, deliberation, energy and the environment, and prediction models.

​His publications have appeared in outlets like Science, The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and International Studies Quarterly among others. His book, Introduction to R for Social Scientists: A Tidy Programming Approach, based on his ICPSR workshop, introduces students to statistical modeling and programming in R using the Tidyverse set of tools. His work has generated over 5,000 citations (i10-index of 35 over the past 5 years).

He has received several awards for my research, including the Heinz I. Eulau Award for best paper published in the American Political Science Review and the University of Houston Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity. I was also awarded the Ross M. Lence Teaching Excellence Award for the social sciences at the University of Houston.

He has also received support for my research from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the Templeton Foundation, the Kettering Foundation and the Democracy Fund, among others.

Education

Selected Publications

Kennedy, R. and Waggoner, P.D. 2021. Introduction to R for social scientists: A tidy programming approach. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
 
Kennedy, R, Waggoner, P.D. and Ward, M.M. 2022. Trust in public policy algorithms. Journal of Politics, 84(2): 1132-1148.
 
Kennedy, R., Clifford, S., Burleigh, T., Waggoner, P.D., Jewell, R., and Winter, N.J. 2020. The shape of and solutions to the MTurk quality crisis. Political Science Research and Methods, 8(4): 614-629.
 
Lazer, D., Kennedy, R., King, G., and Vespignani, A. 2014. The parable of Google Flu: Traps in big data analysis. Science, 343(6176): 1203-1205.
 
Neblo, M.A., Esterling, K.M., Kennedy, R., Lazer, D.M., and Sokhey, A.E. 2010. Who wants to deliberate - and why? American Political Science Review, 104(3): 566-583.