1. Could you tell us about People Analytics and its latest projects? In an era of increasing misinformation and fake news, why is your work more important than ever today?

We have a niche focus on demystifying complex societies and contexts. The science of conducting representative and generalizable opinion polls is a relatively well established part of social science, and the polity of most countries have for long benefited from them. However, when it comes to difficult environments and challenging countries, we face a polling desert with an acute lack of scientifically conducted opinion polls. 

In such contexts, every power player can claim that people think and believe the same way that they prefer, and no science driven challenge could be made to fact-check such claims. In addition, within this darkness, even well intentioned efforts could be misguided or lack a lasting impact. Our hope is that we can help fill this void by facilitating the availability of high-quality opinion polling data in such complex societies.

2. In April 2020, IranPoll published its latest survey, Iranian Public Opinion Four Decades After the Revolution. Could you highlight some of the key findings? Were there any surprises?

Our latest published survey is a joint coordinated study between IranPoll and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. It is a unique study, as it studies similar questions from both the Iranian and American public on key international issues. 

The study found that the Iranians say their government should develop a peaceful nuclear energy program (90%), but not nuclear weapons (59% say it should not). At the same time, a majority of Americans say they would favor rejoining the agreement, if Iran restarts its nuclear weapons program. Study shed some ray of hope, as it found a level of common ground on the nuclear issues between the two people. Full results of the study are available here: www.IranPoll.com/publications/ccga

3. How does IranPoll support academic opinion polling in Iran?

Our focus in IranPoll has been to expand opportunities for researchers across social science disciplines to conduct their opinion polling research in Iran. To achieve this goal, IranPoll has launched a $250,000 fund in support of opinion research projects with policy or academic impact. “IranPoll Opinion Research Support Fund in Memory of Professor Thomas Schelling” is a support fund that aims to promote and facilitate impactful and methodologically sound opinion research of the Iranian population that are made available in the public domain. 

We hope that this fund, which is launched to honor the memory of Prof. Schelling, Nobel laureate in economics and one of my doctoral advisors, will remove some of the hindrances social scientists face in demystifying complex societies. To this date, University of Maryland and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs have published their results utilizing this fund. A number of other projects are underway benefiting from this fund, including in Princeton University, NYU, Ritsumeikan, and Osaka universities. Full details about the fund are available here: www.IranPoll.com/fund

4. People Analytics aims to fill a long-standing void on global knowledge of people’s opinions in societies, such as Iran. Do you think you are slowly but surely closing the void? What do you hope to achieve in 5-10 years’ time with People Analytics?

For years, we have been focusing on another aspect of demystifying complex societies, and that is a platform to ensure the availability of already gathered data to the public. There is no secure, central and easy solution for owners of proprietary data to offer their results to the public, to the degree and price they want, in a governed fashion. As a result, there is an extensive amount of opinion polling studies and proprietary data across the world that has been collected, but is not accessible to the public. We have developed a new platform called VoxDash to solve this problem. 

VoxDash is a data governance and exchange platform for sharing and visualization of proprietary data without necessarily allowing access to the raw data itself. Available in 22 languages, it allows data owners to provide governed data access to users through defining price or access level configuration per data point. Slated for release by late 2020 on www.VoxDash.com, we hope it would offer a solution for data owners and the public to easily access proprietary data, which are now locked away with limited usage. 

The plan is that, in 5-10 years’ time, VoxDash would unveil much of the data that has been collected, but has not found a governed outlet for becoming publicly available. As an example, IranPoll will be making its proprietary opinion polls of Iran available there, which would become the single most comprehensive databank of reliable polls and surveys of the Iranian people.