Brendan O'Connor (http://brenocon.com/) is an assistant professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. What can statistical text analysis tell us about society? Prof. O'Connor works in computational social science, developing natural language processing, machine learning, and user interfaces to help scientific investigation about political and social trends; for example, analyzing opinions and slang in Twitter, censorship in Chinese microblogs, and and political events reported in the news. His work has been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He received his PhD in 2014 from Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department, advised by Noah Smith, and has previously been a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and an intern with the Facebook Data Science team. Before graduate school, he worked on crowdsourcing at CrowdFlower / Dolores Labs, and natural language search at Powerset. He holds a BS/MS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.