Project Overview
As a Senior Data Scientist and statistician for President Obama’s re-election campaign, I helped create an innovative web app used by senior staff to visualize and analyze the campaign’s most sensitive data, including all data on advertising, polling, and voter contact.
I also helped with optimization efforts overseeing the spending of our $600m TV advertising budget, including development of the media market “Optimizer.” To quote The New York Times’s profile of this work, “It was called ‘the Optimizer,’ and strategists for President Obama say it is how he beat a better-financed Republican opposition in the advertising war.”
Technical Work
As the lead data scientist, I designed and implemented our ETL methods for extracting data from numerous vendors and internal sources, mostly through a PostgreSQL interface with a Vertica, column-oriented relational database. Given massive streams of noisy data, I developed abstraction techniques for finding statistically significant changes in polling, media, or voter contact trends. I also helped implement an intuitive user interface for visualizing and accessing the information in Ruby on Rails. Further, I rewrote optimization techniques used to buy $600m of television advertising.
Stakeholders
Our software-as-a-service was frequently accessed for live data by top campaign staff, and was also used to export visualizations and reports for daily email briefings and PowerPoint presentations to top stakeholders, which sometimes included the President.
Gallery
Unfortunately, the software interfaces we developed are confidential and cannot be shared publicly. The user interface for our software started with a heatmap of the country and its battleground states, and clicking into each state or media market brought up graphs and tables of all of our sensitive data for the region visualized in a single, intuitive interface.
The software automatically highlighted statistically significant trends, correlated across diverse data sources, while de-emphasizing changes in the data that were likely due to noisy sampling.
However, I do have these photos from the President borrowing some sunglasses I’d picked up for free in Millennium Park. He still hasn’t given them back.
