Computational sociology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_sociology

by eekthecat • 9 years ago

97 22 9 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

programLyrique• 9 years ago

The "impact on society" paragrapg is quite short. Has any work of computational sociology inspired a real policy?

Could it replace economy as the main driver of politics and policies?

jboynyc2• 9 years ago

Depending on how you classify him (as an economist or a sociologist), Thomas Schelling's work on residential segregation has likely informed policy over the last decades.

Recently a nice animation of his dynamic models of segregation processes was posted here: http://ncase.me/polygons/

shrimp_emoji• 9 years ago

Was the CS department at Evergreen College involved in the protest?

neuromantik80863• 9 years ago

I mean, the field has inspired how Facebook determines to serve up news feed content so, in a way, it has driven policy by way of influencing democracy.

jk49302• 9 years ago

Re policy, it's used e.g. in environmental resource management (regional level), anti-terrorism (networks, opinion dynamics), urban planning, disease control. Policy isn't based alone on it, of course. But it's used as an ingredient. Often the models aren't good enough (lack of data and quantifiable causal relationships) to gain an exact image of the modeled system, but they provide a general system understanding (system behavior under different [intervention] scenarios) that is often educational and gives insights that then need to be empirically validated.

A barrier to increase its use in policy-making is the "science-policy gap" between researchers and decision-makers. Either they don't understand the utility of model results and dismiss them or they trust them too much--both is not good. So researchers had to come up with ways to communicate results, often include decision-makers (and other stakeholders) in the modeling process.

eduren• 9 years ago

Snark aside, I'm definitely interested in whether or not this field will have impacts on future policy. In order to be useful I feel it would have to actively avoid simplifying assumptions that have trapped similar fields.

creaghpatr• 9 years ago

Regarding academic study, sociology is so partisan you need not worry about them using computer science and/or logic to uncover hidden truths in the near future.

In the private sector however, companies such as Premise and Palantir are already eons ahead of academia, but their insights and data are proprietary.

neuromantik80863• 9 years ago

The non-fictional equivalent.

rollinDyno• 9 years ago

How can I get into this field? I'm a senior CS student.

jboynyc2• 9 years ago

If it's repeated in coming years, you should go to this summer school: https://www.russellsage.org/summer-institute-computational-s...

jk49302• 9 years ago

Since you're in the UK, look at [1] and perhaps check topics that interest you and follow the names at [2]. Then we have the European Social Simulation Association [3] with Summer Schools and annual conferences.

[1] http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/web/home

[2] http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html

[3] http://www.essa.eu.org/

tchalla• 9 years ago

There's another field closely related to Computational Sociology called "Computational Social Science" - an area/community which I was a part of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_social_science

There are many universities like Stanford, Cornell and Columbia which have dedicated working groups for Computational Social Science.

https://iriss.stanford.edu/css

http://as.cornell.edu/block/computational-social-sciences

http://datascience.columbia.edu/computational-social-science

pathdependent3• 9 years ago

This is my field, too. I am a Ph.D. candidate in computational social science, working on a computational model of social belief systems.

I'm quite happy to see this on HN. Like many other disciplines, our field is blossoming with the rise of cheap, high performance computing!

If your involved in this field and on HN, please reach out to me at @generativist on twitter. I'm in the process of setting up a community for CSS work, and will be soliciting feedback soon!

harlanji• 9 years ago

Can you talk about what software packages, perhaps data structures and algorithms you use? Any shortcomings / low hanging fruit? I see the domain as an invaluable tool for a few applications... any particularly strong ones you can see?

anatoly• 9 years ago

a computational model of social belief systems.

Can you give more details (accessible to programmers rather than social scientists) how that'd work, what do you actually model and aim to find out? Sounds pretty interesting.

mazr• 9 years ago

Come say Hi in Berlin if you're interested in this field ! http://cmb.huma-num.fr/

pavement• 9 years ago

Pretty interesting tangent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocybernetics

Computational sociology

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