BSC and CODATA Co-organised Computational Social Science Conference

28-29 October 2024
Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain

 

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, 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. 

Programme Outline

28 October, Monday

Arrivals, welcome, opening remarks

Session 1: Data Science and AI for Social Science

• Keynote
• Presentations/panel discussion

Session 2: Complexity Science for Social Science 

• Keynote
• Presentations/panel discussion

Discussion with attendees: bringing in diverse perspectives

 

29 October, Tuesday

Session 3: Policies and Technical Factors to Maximise Access

Session 4: Data Description for Machine Analysis

Session 5: Provenance/lineage and reproducibility

Discussion and agreement on conference outputs and actions

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.