Jay Jennings

Cline Center for Advanced Social Research

The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign equips and empowers social scientists, humanists, and decision-makers with tools to address key challenges that threaten human flourishing—climate change, civil unrest, inequality, and injustice, to name a few—by applying advanced computational techniques to extract structured insights out of millions of news stories from around the world. Since 2004, the Cline Center has been connecting data science and engineering experts with researchers in the social sciences and humanities to improve lives around the world. Key to this effort is the Cline Center's network of faculty and research affiliates hailing from universities across five continents, including on-campus affiliates from more than a dozen departments in six colleges at the University of Illinois. By creating structured data out of unstructured news text and building software to analyze data at extreme scales, the Cline Center aims to foster transformative research with potential to improve societies around the globe. The Cline Center also supports a wide range of teaching and outreach activities, from fellowship programs for faculty and graduate students to undergraduate internships, public lectures and topical symposia. These activities have positioned the Cline Center within our campus's data science ecosystem as a data provider supporting a wide range of Illinois research on unstructured data analytics, a bridge-builder connecting the engineering campus with researchers in the social sciences and humanities, and as a translational site for connecting research expertise on campus to both private and public-sector partners with capacity to advance human flourishing around the world.