About

Hyein Ko (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University whose research lies at the intersection of political communication, computational social science, and visual politics. She develops and applies artificial intelligence and machine learning methods, including computer vision, text analysis, and multimodal modeling, to understand how images convey subtle information and thereby influence politics. Her work bridges disciplinary boundaries, offering new insights into how visual cues influence public opinions, how media depict political leaders and political events such as protests, and how elites signal their relationships within authoritarian regimes. She is also engaged in advancing methodological tools for political science, with ongoing projects that propose ways to evaluate AI-generated data in social science research, automate multimodal data pipelines, and improve the extraction of information from historical archives. In addition to her role as a professor in the Department of Political Science, Dr. Ko joins a cluster of new CWRU faculty with expertise in AI.

Before joining the department, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she led a multidisciplinary group of scholars and graduate students as part of the Minerva Research Initiative on elites in authoritarian regimes. She also contributed to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) project, helping develop a structured dataset of historical news segments sourced from microfilm and microfiche archives. Her research has been published in journals including American Politics Research, International Journal of Forecasting, Nature Scientific Data, Research & Politics, and Social Science Quarterly.

Dr. Ko received her PhD from the University of Iowa, and her MA and BA from Ewha Womans University. Across her teaching, research, and collaboration, she brings a commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry and methodological innovation.