Social science is more critical than ever before to address today’s complex local and global problems. With the generation of vast amounts of data and the recent growth of computational methods and computational capacity, social science is undergoing a transformation similar to the one that physics and biology underwent years ago. In the social sciences, however, the inherent complexity of human subjects makes objectivity, repeatability and universality more difficult, compared to many of the natural sciences. Additionally, much data is sensitive, proprietary or insufficiently curated and remains difficult to access and reuse. It has now been about 15 years since the paper on Computational Social Science (Life in the Network: the coming age of computational social science, Lazer et al 2009) was published. How has the field evolved since then? What are the opportunities and challenges? This conference will focus on two important aspects of computational social sciences: (1) new research in the field and 2) enabling data policies and access.
The conference brings together the communities involved: the domain and the data experts. The first day will be dedicated to new methods at the cutting edge of advanced computational social science (CSS). The second day will explore enablers for CSS, focussing on data policies, data access, data stewardship, and the attendant technologies and standards. An important topic throughout the conference will be the issue of transparency and reproducibility and how this can be demonstrated in CSS. Possible outcomes of the conference will be a policy paper and a research paper collection to sustain conversations between researchers in CSS and the technologies that enable this research.
The event is planned as an in-person participation only.
Organisers
Barcelona Supercomputing Center: https://www.bsc.es/
CODATA: https://codata.org/
Fundació La Caixa: https://lacaixafoundation.org/
Registration
https://bit.ly/RegistrationCSSconference2024
Venue
Sala d’Actes, Vèrtex (VX), Campus Nord de la UPC, Plaça d’Eusebi Güell, 6, Les Corts, 08034 Barcelona, Spain
Programme Outline
Note: All times CEST – local time on Barcelona. Abstracts and information about the speakers.
28 October, Monday
09:30-09:45 Welcome, opening remarks – Mercè Crosas, Barcelona Supercomputing Center; CODATA President
09:45-10:45 Keynote: Building a trans-Atlantic coalition for studying the giants of the internet,David Lazer, Northeastern University
Chair: Mercè Crosas
10:45-11:15 Coffee break
11:15-12:45 Session 1: Complexity Science for Social Science
Chair: Laia Castro Herrero, University of Barcelona
- Language Understanding as a Constraint on Consensus Size in LLM Societies, David Garcia, University of Konstanz
- Complexity Science for Social Science: Unpacking the Dynamics of Social Systems, Chico Camargo, University of Exeter
- Chasing the Unicorn: Reflections on the Training of Computational Social Scientists, Marga Torre, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
12:45-14:00 Networking Lunch
14:00-15:30 Session 2: Data Science and AI for Social Science
Chair: Ana Sofia Cardenal, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
- Prediction Policy Problems Require us to Integrate Ethics, Machine Learning and Causal Inference, Hannes Mueller, IAE (CSIC) and the Barcelona School of Economics
- Enhancing Disaster Response with AI-Powered Social Media Analytics: Insights from the TEMA Project, Shaily Gandhi, University of Salzburg
- Economic Modelling with High-Performance Computing, Sebastian Poledna, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
15:30-16:00 Coffee break
16:00-17:00 Lightning talks
Chair: Maria Gutiérrez, Fundació La Caixa
Speakers: TBC
17:00 Wrap-up Day 1 – Mercè Crosas
17:15-19:00 Reception
Option – 18:00 Visits to Mare Nostrum, TBC, registration only
29 October, Tuesday
09:30-11:00 Session 3: Policies and technical advances to maximise access
Chair: Elena Rovenskaya, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
- Enhancing FAIRness in Harvard Dataverse with Variable-Level Metadata and Differential Privacy, Stefano Iacus, Harvard University
- Putting the A back in FAIR: Approaches to finally solving the Access problem, Darren Bell, UK Data Service
11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-13:00 Session 4: Data description for AI and machine analysis
Chair: Simon Hodson, CODATA
- SDMX as an enabler for AI applications, Gyorgy Gyomai, OECD
- Croissant: A metadata format for AI-ready datasets, Elena Simperl, King’s College London
- Dimensions of AI Readiness – New Methods and Architectures, Christine Kirkpatrick, San Diego Supercomputer Center
13:00-14:00 Networking Lunch
14:00-15:30 Session 5: Provenance, lineage and reproducibility
Chair: Steven McEachern, UK Data Service
- Reproducibility challenges in Computational Social Science: Insights from the TIER2 Project, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Know Center Austria
- FAIR Digital Objects for Reproducible Computational Processing, Carole Goble, University of Manchester
- Workflow programming support for Computational Sciences, Rosa Badia, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
15:30-16:00 Coffee break
16:00-17:00 Closing panel
Chair: Christine Kirkpatrick
17:00 Adjourn
Note that the programme outline will continue changing; kindly revisit this page for an up-to-date agenda for the conference, including information about confirmed speakers.
