PhD
website
Dr. Brummitt a researcher at the Bonds Lab studying poverty, complex systems, and machine learning. He is building models of economic development using large datasets on economic activity, in collaboration with researchers at the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School. The goal is to find new stylized facts in datasets too high-dimensional for humans to grasp on their own.
He is also collaborating on an ongoing randomized controlled trial on social networks and entrepreneurship in Africa, in collaboration with economists at Bocconi University. He is testing whether making entrepreneurs’ social networks more diverse leads to more innovative business plans. In that project, he has built a chat bot that implements an incentive for people to interact and to give feedback, and he is analyzing large amounts of text data generated by a chatting application to find signals predictive of successful business ideas (including, topics, sentiments, and social network measures).
Previously, he was a postdoc at Columbia University’s Center for the Management of Systemic Risk, and he completed my PhD in applied math at UC Davis, where his thesis adviser was Prof. Raissa D’Souza.
You can find him on Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Twitter, StackOverflow, and GitHub.