Doug Bond

Doug Bond conducted research at Harvard University since 1988, and currently serves as an International Relations Research Advisor in the Extension School. He is also a Lecturer in Extension, teaching regularly since 1994. He teaches graduate and undergraduate classes on international relations and social science research, and a course on Preventive Measures with a focus on conflict early warning systems in Africa.

For eighteen years, initially as a Visiting Scholar and later as an administrative staff member, he led the development of a Protocol for the Assessment of Nonviolent Direct Action (PANDA) at Harvard to assess nonviolent direct action globally. Bond’s research involved the monitoring of global news wire and other reports using automated event-coding and extraction technology. The effort was guided by the project’s initial PANDA events data protocol that later came to be called IDEA, for Integrated Events Data Analysis. The protocol facilitates the identification and tracking of conflict situations before they erupt into violence. His research also included the design, development, deployment and operational support of several field based security incident and peace monitoring systems used by International Governmental and Nongovernmental Organizations throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America.

In need of automated tools to advance his research at Harvard Dr. Bond founded Virtual Research Associates, Inc. (VRA) in March 1996 to design and build an advanced automated natural language, parsing system. He has served as President since the company’s founding. VRA’s patented, frame-parsing system supports the development of data required to analyze news and other reports on volatile conflict situations throughout the world. VRA engages in the analysis of news and other reports with a focus on identifying, tracking and assessing the risks posed by evolving situations of social, political and economic conflict. The system also supports cognitive mapping, operational code, sentiment and other analyses that utilize machine coding and extraction from text-based communications and documents.