February 2019

Project Updates: SURF is a data cleaning tool that the Trivedi Center built to map out trajectories of politicians – how they contest, and when they win. The challenge in analyzing this is that there are variations in the names of contestants across elections – for example, Mr. L.K. Advani has run under several different variations of the spellings (Lal Krishna Advani, Advani Lalkrushna, etc). This problem is overcome by implementing a name matching algorithm that is customized to the task of matching Indian names.