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Computational Social Science Conference: innovative methods, research workflows and data stewardship

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Computational Social Science Conference: innovative methods, research workflows and data stewardship

28-29 October 2024, Barcelona

Organised by BSC, CODATA and Fundació La Caixa

 

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. Registration closed on 23 October, 07:00 UTC. 

Organisers

Barcelona Supercomputing Center: https://www.bsc.es/

CODATA: https://codata.org/

Fundació La Caixa: https://lacaixafoundation.org/

Other Sponsors

 

Venue

Sala d’Actes, Vèrtex (VX), Campus Nord de la UPC, Plaça d’Eusebi Güell, 6, Les Corts, 08034 Barcelona, Spain

Programme

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. Slides.  

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. Slides. 
  • Complexity Science for Social Science: Unpacking the Dynamics of Social Systems, Chico Camargo, University of Exeter. Slides. 
  • Chasing the Unicorn: Reflections on the Training of Computational Social Scientists, Marga Torre, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Slides. 

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. Slides. 
  • Enhancing Disaster Response with Social Media Analytics, Shaily Gandhi, University of Salzburg. Slides. 
  • Economic Modelling with High-Performance Computing, Sebastian Poledna, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Slides. 

15:30-16:00 Coffee break

16:00-17:00 Lightning talks

Chair: Maria Gutiérrez, Fundació La Caixa

  • Living Arrangements Project – Unravelling Household Composition and Change through the implementation of the first World-Scale Multilevel Analysis, presented by Paolo Marangio (BSC),  Nienke Visscher (BSC).
  • Ideological Polarization on Constitutional Courts – Evidence from Spain, presented by Andreu Rodilla (BSC).
  • Media Myopia: How Media Outlets Cover Events Beyond their Home Base, presented by Egor Kotov (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research), Lukas Chenghan Huan (Technical University of Munich), Cedric Legrand (STORM research center), Kate Bjorklund (Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm University).
  • The Drivers of Press-covered Evictions, presented by Eugenia Cardello (BSC), Martí Fernàndez (UAB), Víctor Ginesta (University of Barcelona), Albert Valls (Portacabot).
  • Evolution of Toxicity in Influencer Political Discourse: The Impact of Political Events, presented by David García García (IBEI, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals), Paula Checchia Adell (BSC), Berfin Çakın (Scuola Normale Superiore), Pablo Pizarro (University of Barcelona).

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. Slides. 
  • Putting the A back in FAIR: Approaches to finally solving the Access problem, Darren Bell, UK Data Service. Slides. 

11:00-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-13:00 Session 4: Data description for AI and machine analysis

Chair: Simon Hodson, CODATA

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. Slides. 
  • FAIR Digital Objects for Reproducible Computational Processing, Carole Goble, University of Manchester. Slides. 
  • Workflow programming support for Computational Sciences, Rosa Badia, Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Slides.   

15:30-16:00 Coffee break

16:00-17:00 Closing panel

  • Mercè Crosas, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
  • David Lazer, Northeastern University
  • Carole Goble, University of Manchester

Chair: Christine Kirkpatrick

17:00 Adjourn


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