Stanford Center for Computational Social Science
A quick look at the IRiSS Center for Computational Social Science
Today I discovered that Stanford has a center computational social science. Additionally, they were having a conference on Educational Data Science the 18th of September, and that means I just missed it!
IRiSS Center for Computational Social Science (CSS) supports research in the overlapping areas of the social sciences and computer science.
It says on their website:
“The field of computational social science exists because advances in technology mean that there are huge amounts of digital information available that can be used for research.”
According to the center traditional social science topics like democracy, security, economic growth, and inequality are being analyzed in complex ways using methods like:
- Data mining
- Natural language processing
- Text analysis
- Web scraping
- Data Visualization
- Machine Learning
It hosts a yearly conference to discuss the application of computational social science and it holds workshops in programming languages. It holds summer workshops to train students in Python, R, web scraping, machine learning and data visualisation.
Their center seems to have a variety of academics from sociology, management, psychology and linguistics.
I saw they had an annual report for 2019–2020.
In this I saw they had several centers combined into different fields.
“Growing access to novel data sources, the development of powerful computing tools, and innovation in quantitative and qualitative research methods are opening a new frontier for social scientists to explore bold, inventive research questions. In this burgeoning era for social science research, the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS) facilitates first-rate interdisciplinary research, trains the next generation of scholars, and incubates research projects to address critical societal challenges. IRiSS ensures that world-class evidence-based research is produced to meet evolving problems in areas of governance and democracy, economic inequality, immigration policy, effective philanthropy, and other social issues that affect communities across the globe.”
There were five CSS fellows 2019–2020:
- Yiming He (Economics), The Effects of Slum Clearance on Displaced Residents: Evidence From Victorian London.
- Mufan Luo (Communication), Understanding Live Broadcasting Media Events and Intensified Emotions.
- Katariina Mueller-Gastell and Austin Van Loon (Sociology), Formal Inclusion, Informal Exclusion: The Gender Differences In Social Interaction At Work.
- Franklin Qian and Rose Tan (Economics), The Effect of High-Skilled Firm Entry on Gentrification.
- Michael Webb (Economics), The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Labor Market.
However, as can be seen from this graph in the report CSS still has the lowest funding overall.
That is what I got to learn about CSS so far!
Hope you found this article interesting.
This is #500daysofAI and you are reading article 474. I am writing one new article about or related to artificial intelligence every day for 500 days.
