CSS4P Seminars
After the publication of the "Handbook of Computational Social Science for Policy", the CSS4P Team is launching its first seminar series, in order to dig into some of the most inspiring and promising applications of CSS that are showcased in the book.
Speaker: Prof. Johannes Stroebel
Wednesday, March 15, 2023 from 15:00 to 16:00 (CET)
The increasing availability of digital trace data presents substantial opportunities for researchers and policy makers to better understand the importance of social networks and social interactions in fostering economic opportunity and resilience. The tangible and intangible resources that individuals can access through their social networks—that is, the social capital available to them—are central to fostering their resilience to a range of economic shocks, from recessions to health emergencies to environmental disasters. Understanding the relationships between social interactions and economic outcomes is therefore of central importance to policy makers.
In his presentation, Prof. Stroebel will review recent research efforts that have studied these questions using data from a wide range of sources, in particular, using online social networking platform such as Facebook.
The presentation will focus on two research applications of computational social science, one on the ground-breaking work of Chetty et al. (2022a) and Chetty et al. (2022b) published on Nature on Social Capital and Social Connectedness, and one on an ongoing work of Bailey et al. (2022) on the social integration of Syrian migrants in Germany.
Speaker: Prof. Ridhi Kashyap
Wednesday, April 5, 2023 from 15:00 to 16:00 (CEST)
Situated at the intersection of the computational and demographic sciences, digital and computational demography explores how new digital data streams and computational methods advance the understanding of population dynamics, along with the impacts of digital technologies on population outcomes, e.g. linked to health, fertility and migration.
Encompassing the data, methodological and social impacts of digital technologies, Prof. Kashyap will outline key opportunities provided by digital and computational demography for generating policy insights.
Speaker: Prof. Caroline Rizza
Wednesday, May 24, 2023 from 15:00 to 16:00 (CEST)
Crisis management institutions are increasingly challenged by citizen-generated content and citizen-led initiatives. In her talk, Prof. Rizza will present the state of the art on citizen-generated content and citizen-led initiatives for crisis management and response and will suggest directions for policy interventions. She will explore the extent to which mutual trust between institutions and citizens is a key issue in a hybrid world where mediated communication and interactions with citizens require new and adapted practices from professionals of crisis management.
Speaker: Stefaan Verhulst, PhD
Wednesday, June 14, 2023 from 15:00 to 16:00 (CEST)
Computational Social Science (CSS) has grown exponentially as the process of datafication and computation has increased. This expansion, however, is yet to translate into effective actions to strengthen public good in the form of policy insights and interventions. The priority, therefore, is not simply to find ways to leverage data in the pursuit of research but, equally or more importantly, to innovate in how we govern the use of data for the social sciences. In his talk, Dr. Verhulst will present a series of limiting factors in how data is accessed and analyzed in the field of CSS and will introduce a taxonomy of CSS governance and policy challenges.
Speaker: Prof. Kristof De Witte
Wednesday, June 28, 2023 from 15:00 to 16:00 (CEST)
Education stakeholders are currently working within an environment where vast quantities of data can be leveraged to improve the educational attainment of learners. In his talk, Prof. De Witte will discuss the increasing emergence of 'big data' in education and the associated growth in expertise in educational data collection and analysis. He will expand on how learning analytics may also contribute to the improvement in the quality of education through e.g., fraud detection and student performance prediction. Finally, he will present some tools of growing popularity and potential for learning analytics.
Speaker: Zhijing Jin
Wednesday, July 5, 2023 from 15:00 to 16:00 (CEST)
Language is the medium for many political activities, from campaigns to news reports. Natural language processing (NLP) uses computational tools to parse text into key information that is needed for policymaking. Common methods of NLP include text classification, topic modelling, event extraction, and text scaling which can be used for policymaking through four major applications including data collection for evidence-based policymaking, interpretation of political decisions, policy communication, and investigation of policy effects. In her talk, Zhijing Jin, will present her latest CSS for Policy research update from the NLP perspective through an overview of applied studies such as (a) NLP to mine the causality behind policy trends, (b) NLP to check censorship patterns across countries, and (c) querying ChatGPT and GPT-4 about the causes behind social and political events.