Rex W. Douglass is the director of the Machine Learning for Social Science Lab (MSSL) at the Center for Peace and Security Studies, University of California San Diego. His research focuses on applying advanced technologies to research problems in the social sciences and policy world, particularly on issues of human conflict. Some of his research investigates how to use existing sources in novel ways, like cell phone data for creating a population census, historical news and archival documents for global measures of human violence, or historical military maps and satellite imagery as a measure of global infrastructure. Other projects focus on automating and reducing the cost of getting unstructured raw information into usable big data, like graphical user interfaces for human labeling of text sources, natural language processing pipelines for automated knowledge extraction, and machine vision pipelines for optical character recognition on old historical documents. He has worked at UCSD since 2012 after completing his Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton University
