Computational Social Science Seminar

851-0585-41 S Computational Social Science Seminar
Autumn Semester 2024
Dozierende: D. Helbing, C. I. Hausladen, J. C.‑Y. Yang

Place: LEE D 101
Time: Tuesdays 18.15 - 20.00

This seminar will present speakers who discuss the challenges and opportunities arising for our cities and societies with the digital revolution. Besides discussing questions of automation using Big Data, AI and other digital technologies, we will also reflect on the question of how democracy could be digitally upgraded, and how citizen participation could contribute to innovation, sustainability, resilience, and quality of life. This includes questions around collective intelligence and digital platforms that support creativity, engagement, coordination and cooperation.

Computational Social Science allows one to better understand the emerging digital society with its close co-evolution of information and communication technology (ICT) and society. It offers theories of crises and disasters applicable to the solution of global-scale problems, taking a data-based approach that builds on a serious collaboration between the natural, engineering, and social sciences, i.e. an interdisciplinary integration of knowledge.

Learning Goals:

The seminar aims at three-fold integration: (1) bringing modeling and computer simulation of techno-socio-economic processes and phenomena together with related empirical, experimental, and data-driven work, (2) combining perspectives of different scientific disciplines (e.g. sociology, computer science, physics, complexity science, engineering), (3) bridging between fundamental and applied work.

Participants of the seminar should understand how tightly connected systems lead to networked risks, and why this can imply systems we do not understand and cannot control well, thereby causing systemic risks and extreme events.
They should also be able to explain how systemic instabilities can be understood by changing the perspective from a component-oriented to an interaction- and network-oriented view, and what fundamental implications this has for the proper design and management of complex dynamical systems.

Presentations and Grading:

Students have to actively contribute to the Seminar and give a presentation on a subject agreed with the lecturer.

The presentation should be of about 15 minutes minimum and about 30 minutes maximum, depending on the overall number of presentations in a 90-minute time slot, considering time for discussion.

For the student presentations, please choose a publication from:
- an internationally established, peer-reviewed journal with a reasonably high impact factor (say, >2),
- a publication with a reasonably high number of citations (say, >50),
- a publication by an established scientists with a good track record (say, an h-index >30).

Non-scientific papers or preprints (except those of well established scientists) are to be avoided.