Kris Shaffer, PhD

About Kris

Kris Shaffer, PhD (Yale University, 2011), is Principal Data Scientist at MK Analytics and an Adjunct Instructor of Information Science at the University of Colorado–Boulder.

Artificial Intelligence Featured

Making Bilingual Books with AI and the Classics

There aren't enough bilingual books to support language learning. AI automation and classic literature can help.

Artificial Intelligence

AI FAQ: Why Does AI Hallucinate?

We all know that AI can "hallucinate." But why does it make up false facts and present them so confidently?

Artificial Intelligence

Comparing AI Summarization Models: Bruce Lee Edition

What happens when competing models try to summarize the esoteric philosophy of Bruce Lee?

Artificial Intelligence

Prompt Injection: An Unsolved AI Vulnerability

How secure is generative AI? Are the rewards worth the risks?

Artificial Intelligence

A.I. Glossary

A glossary of common AI terms for non-AI professionals.

News

A cluster analysis of pop/rock harmony

I am happy to announce that that article, "A cluster analysis of harmony in the McGill Billboard dataset", has been published in Empirical Musicology Review.

News

Data versus Democracy is out!

Data versus Democracy: How Big Data Algorithms Shape Opinions and Alter the Course of History — available now!

Privacy

Cryptoparty Resources

Here are some guides for secure browsing, communicating, website hosting, and life online.

Propagandalytics

Truth in an age of truthiness: when bot-fueled PsyOps meet internet spam

I don't think there's a single conspiracy behind it all. Rather, there are several conspiracies that, for a time at least, had overlapping goals and tactics.

Propagandalytics

When my identity is your slur — what deep learning can tell us about online political discourse

While algorithms and machine learning can reinscribe human biases and prejudices, we can also use machine learning to uncover biases in our discourse, some of which we might not even be aware of.

Academia

The other side of the tenure tracks

Music theorists with PhDs have some incredible, important, in-demand skills to offer outside of music faculty jobs. Bringing those skills to those jobs is a success, not a failure, especially if it helps you improve your or your family's life.

Sysadmin

Navigating the WordPress Multisite database labyrinth

Surely there's a table in the database that lists the administrators for each blog... Or so I thought.

Propagandalytics

#MacronLeaks - how disinformation spreads

It's the combination of catalyst accounts and the army of signal boosters that allows the disinformation to spread quickly and reach the mainstream.

Propagandalytics

Trump, Russia, bots, and Breitbart: tl;dr edition

There are multiple, powerful forces waging a psychological information war against the American people. The Trump campaign (and administration) has made use of it and contributed to it, but they don't control it, and possibly don't fully understand it.

Propagandalytics

Visualizing the network that connects mainstream and extremist news

What does this misinformation network look like? Here's what it looks like...

Propagandalytics

Fake news, adtech, and the spread of misinformation

The most polarizing claims are the most repeated by these bots, and as readers see them in aggregate over time, they become more plausible in our unconscious mind.

Data Science

Data mining the New York Philharmonic performance history

Mini tutorial on data mining in R with the New York Philharmonic performance history dataset.

Education

From blended learning to hybrid pedagogy

If we don't constantly re-evaluate our educational purposes and our technological choices, we'll end up tools and technologies lined up with someone else's educational goals rather than our own.

Computational Musicology

Exploring musical data with R: An introduction to computational music analysis

A series of tutorials for my Computational Music Analysis students, introducing basic analysis and visualization of musical data in RStudio.

Data Science

Psychographic profiling and Cambridge Analytica

Cambridge Analytica doesn't give the recipe for their secret sauce. No one does. But knowing the data they have and the science that exists means we can piece things together.

Academia

So you want to be a music theory professor...

We tend to think of getting a PhD in a field, but not landing a tenure-track gig in that field, as a failure. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Education

Dr. Seuss, statistics, and the science of learning to read

the optimal way to form a new, resilient long-term memory is to practice recall just before you are about to forget. What does this look like in practice?

Data Science

What Is Computational Musicology?

Computational musicology

Ear Training

Promoting musical fluency -or- Why I de-emphasize sight-singing and dictation in class

Sight-singing and dictation are staples of university-level musical training. While it is a worthy ambition to "see what you hear and hear what you see," as many state on their aural skills syllabus, I believe that there is a better goal to pursue: musical fluency. And while the