The two-week-long Winter (Summer) Institute in Computational Social Science brings together 20 higher-degree research students and early-career scholars, who will spend the first week learning from leading academic researchers and industry practitioners in the field and the second week applying this knowledge to their own projects.
We started the institute by inviting Olga Boichak and Daniel Angus, two leading computational social science (CSS) scholars working in HASS, to discuss the present and future of CSS with Svetha Venkatesh, one of Australia’s most accomplished computer scientists. It was inspiring and hopeful to hear the speakers’ stories of overcoming barriers to working across disciplines, and to witness the importance they all place on the potential of human-centric research in the age of AI. On day 1, we also had the immense pleasure of welcoming Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam, who delivered an online keynote on detecting and mitigating bias in and with CSS.
To acknowledge the centrality of ethical considerations in any CSS project, we continued the institute with a panel discussion on this topic, bringing together the expertise that Dominique Carlon, Ehsan Dehghan, and Olga Boichak have in ensuring that cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional CSS projects reflect the ethics of care for diverse communities. We then had the pleasure of discussing practical aspects of designing and publishing from CSS projects with the participants.
On both days 2 and 3, the wonderful Kellie Vella, Lauren Hayden, Michael Esteban, and Dan Tran introduced the participants to the possibilities that data donation offers for CSS, drawing on the expertise and resources of the Australian Internet Observatory. Participants also enjoyed the productive tension of the two sessions on day 3 – Richard Sinnott’s comprehensive showcase of the endless possibilities social media data repositories like AIReD present for a wide range of research questions, and Ehsan Dehghan’s session on theory in CSS, prompting us to use theory to know “where to look when the data goes quiet”. We will finish day 3 by learning about the state-of-the-art text analytics methods from Kim Doyle and Daniel Russo-Batterham.
This event was made possible by Olga Boichak’s trailblazing effort in bringing the Winter (Summer) Institute in Computational Social Science to Australia back in 2022 and ensuring the initiative lives on, and by the support from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, the Australian Internet Observatory, Deakin Arts and Education, and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). Excited for the remaining 9 days!
Original post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kat-kasian_this-monday-we-kicked-off-sicss-melbourne-ugcPost-7475411249279844352-VLjv/
