经济学人:政治选举 科技助推
Summary: Scientists play an indispensable role in the Obama campaign.
总结：奥巴马竞选总统，科学家也得加把劲。
HINTS:
Barack Obama
Chicago
Rayid Ghani
Accenture Technology Labs
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In a presidential election the incumbent enjoys many advantages. One of the less obvious may be the leisure to recruit a strong team of boffins. Team Obama has long been scouring the nation for scientists. It has sought out computing experts, mathematicians, programmers and statisticians. Many are already hard at work at the campaign's headquarters in Chicago.
The campaign is not willing to say anything about this aspect of its work, but Barack Obama's new chief scientist is Rayid Ghani, previously the head of analytics research at Accenture Technology Labs. He is a leading light in an area of applied science called knowledge discovery and data mining - techniques that are frequently used by corporations wishing to crunch vast quantities of data in the search for interesting patterns about customers.
Last year Mr Ghani gave a revealing talk about using such tools for political campaigns. He said that the challenge was to make best use of the vast amounts of data available to campaigns on the actions, behaviour and preferences of voters.换届选举对于现任总统来说总是占尽先机的。其中比较隐蔽的优势就是可以有时间召集一批实力强大的科学家。奥巴马的团队长期在全国网罗科学人才。目前已经搜寻了计算机专家、数学专家、编程人员以及数据专家等。很多都在竞选大本营芝加哥忙碌工作。
竞选团队并不愿吐露他们正在着手做的这方面工作，不过奥巴马总统手下新上任的首席科学家Rayid Ghani此前是埃森哲技术实验室分析研究部的负责人。他在知识发现和数据挖掘领域是先驱。这些应用技术被企业广泛使用，希望通过快速处理大量数据找出有价值的消费者模式。
Ghani去年做了一次发人深省的演讲，谈到如何将这类工具用于政治竞选。他当时说此举的难度在于如何能充分利用关于选民行为举止以及喜好的大量数据。
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