Computational Social Science D
Aalto University
<p>Computational techniques have revolutionised social sciences leading to the fast-growing field of computational social science. While until recently it was only possible to use small-scale questionnaires studies and aggregated statistics to probe peoples lives, we can now have access to detailed logs of behavior of millions of people via the digital traces they leave in social media, mobile phones and other electronic means. Similarly, instead of theoretising how the different micro-scale behavioral patterns we observe in the data affects the macro-scale society using thought experiments and simplified models, we can now perform massive computer simulations to search for such emergent phenomena. In recent years, such techniques have been both used to test long-standing theories in social science but also to come up with completely new kinds of understanding of societies and individual behavior patterns. In addition to scientific research, social media platforms, game companies, online retailers and many other types of companies are using these techniques more and more to gain insight on their users behavior and competitive advantage. These analyses require a combination of techniques and ideas from computer science, applied mathematics and social sciences.</p><p>In this course you will learn basic techniques and ideas of computational social science with the emphasis on computation. You will learn how to analyse data on detailed behavior of millions of people and draw conclusions on the system level behavior that emerges from it. You will build simulations of artificial societies, and see how various societal phenomena, such as segregation, inequality and polarisation, can emerge from individual behavior patterns that might seem relatively insignificant at first sight. Finally, as the ideas and techniques you learn are extremely powerful, we will discuss issues related to ethics and privacy in relation to computational social science research and practices.</p><p>Topics covered in this course include 1. agent-based simulations & artificial societes, 2. digital footprints and social data, 3. structure and dynamics of social networks, 4. experiments, and 5. ethics & reproducibility & privacy.</p>
Back
|
Course dates
23 February 2026 - 29 May 2026
|
Course organizer
Mikko Kivelä, Juhi Kulshrestha
|
Place/Venue
School of Science / Department of Computer Science
|
City
|
Country
Finland
|
Workload
5
|
Link
https://mycourses.aalto.fi/course/search.php?...
|
|
