Brandon Derr
Projects
"Terrorist Responses to Verbal Threats"
In progress political science paper.
Research Assistant @ USM | 2024-2025
- Developed an R-based pipeline to integrate and code ICEWS events for ISIS-related conflicts, delivering daily conflict indicators by actor and target group.
- Reviewed existing literature on organizational psychology and ISIS behavior, synthesizing findings to inform our empirical models.
ICEWSnet R Package
R package for researchers to transform raw ICEWS data into aggregations for network analysis.
Research Assistant @ USM | 2024
- Developed a core function to convert ICEWS data into date-indexed interstate networks.
- Optimized code from other developers and documentation for users.
- Prepared the package for CRAN publication, ensuring compliance with standards and testing.
"Interstate Competition and Transnational Threats"
Political science paper under review.
Research Assistant @ USM | 2024
- Contributed to literature review.
Obsidian Daily Notes Rainmeter
A plugin for Rainmeter that displays the current daily note from your Obsidian folder on the desktop.
Personal | 2024 | GitHub Repository
- Developed a Rainmeter skin that dynamically displays Markdown-formatted daily notes directly on desktop.
- Published plugin online; 350 downloads in its first year.
"Large Language Models for Sentiment Analysis on Political Tweets: A Case Study on Environmental Issues"
Senior Capstone Paper.
Political Science @ USM | 2024 | PDF
- Conducted sentiment analysis on a sample of 2,000 Tweets, comparing manually coded values to values assigned by 5 LLMs.
- Evaluated model accuracy, speed, cost, and inter-coder reliability metrics.
"Climate Change Policy Preferences and Senatorial Tweets"
Undergraduate Thesis.
Honors College @ USM | 2023-2024
- Developed a Python web-scraping application for Twitter data from selected accounts.
- Trained an NLP model for automated topic assignment on climate-related tweets.
- Created statistical models incorporating topic assignment outputs to measure impacts on public opinion variables.
© Brandon Derr. All rights reserved.