Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) was organized at Duke University by Matthew Salganik and Chris Bail. However, around the globe, at New York, Chicago, Cape Town, Seattle and Boulder – and Helsinki – alumna of the previous SICSS organized satellite locations: places for their local community to support learning and increase skills for both social scientists and computer scientists in this new emerging multidisciplinary field.
During the first week, the SICSS Helsinki partner site, we have discussed and worked on research ethics, automated data collection and machine learning techniques for social science research. The instruction included materials developed by Matthew and Chris as well as materials developed by the SICSS Helsinki organizer team: Matti Nelimarkka, Juho Pääkkönen and Pihla Toivanen. Furthermore, they followed and discussed video lectures from other SICSS sites, including David Lazer and Duncan Watts.
“The goal of this first week is to get everyone up to speed with skills like coding and data-analysis, but also think how these novel methods and approaches relate and extend the existing theories and background of social sciences. This problem demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of computational social science as a field.” says Matti.
The SICSS Helsinki continues also next week with students’ individual projects. We invite everyone to see the students’ final presentations on Friday 29th 10 to 16:30 in Tiedekulma. We also organize guest lectures by Finnish researchers next week in Tiedekulma and stream these to benefit the international SICSS community. The event details are on Facebook.
We thank the generous financial support from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as well as from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, which allowed organization of this event.
Rajapinta 