Year: 2024-2025
Research Team Type: Faculty-led
Organizers: David Harding, Professor of Sociology; Philip Stark, Professor of Statistics
The Computational Social Science Research Team brings together faculty, graduate students, and other researchers from both social science and data science disciplines (e.g. Statistics, Computer Science) to explore potential strategies for further developing computational social science research and graduate training at UC Berkeley. The nascent field of computational social science encompasses research on social science research questions that leverages computational methods and resources, from machine learning to natural language processing to network analysis to “big data” and beyond. Computational social science also involves the consideration of the ethical and social implications of the use of artificial intelligence and big data for research, policy, and commerce.
Our Matrix Research Team has the following three interrelated goals that will create lasting impact at UC Berkeley and beyond: (1) Build a multidisciplinary community with the capacity to communicate and collaborate across fields; (2) Identify collaborative research projects for development of external funding applications; and (3) Design a “Designated Emphasis” (DE) in Computational Social Science for PhD students at Berkeley. We will accomplish these goals through weekly team meetings, informed by a regular external speaker series.