Summer Course in Computational Models of Political and Social Events

From the Polmeth listserv:

 

Summer Course in Computational Models of Political and Social Events

Claudio Cioffi-Revilla <ccioffi@GMU.EDU>
April 03, 2009 @ 02:24:20

Message

Kindly circulate among colleagues and students interested in computational
social science and/or social simulation:

http://lipari.cs.unict.it/LipariSchool/SocialScience/

The Lipari International School on Computational Social Sciences will take
place this summer, July 18 - 25, 2009, on the Mediterranean island of Lipari
just north of the coast of Sicily, Italy. Researchers interested in the
emerging field of computational social science, especially but not
exclusively computational political science theory and simulation models,
are encouraged to consider this as an opportunity to learn more and become
acquainted with a variety of research frontiers.


--
Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Ph.D.

Professor of Computational Social Science
NAS Jefferson Science Fellow
Director, Center for Social Complexity
Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University
Research-1 Bldg MS 6B2, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030 U.S.A.
tel (703) 993-1402, fax (703) 993-1399, ccioffi@gmu.edu
Research & Teaching http://socialcomplexity.gmu.edu
http://gazette.gmu.edu/articles/11458/
 MASON Project http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the difficulty
is to discover them."--Galileo Galilei

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Synonyms for "computational social science"

The other day, a friend asked me how to find other "computational social scientists."  Good question.  I wish I had a good answer -- I might be less bored at conferences.

The big data movement is pulling people together from many different backgrounds, and they're still working out a common language to explain what they do.  If I had to guess, either "data science" or "big data" is going to be the label that sticks, but I'm sure there will be plenty of offshoots, like "computational social science."


To get some new ideas, I took a few of my favorite near-synonyms and ran them through google's keyword tool for adwords.  Then I branched out and searched a little by hand.  Low-tech, but it works.  Here are some of the terms that popped to the top.

• computational social science
• data scientist
• analytics
• data mining
• business intelligence
• visualization
• big data
• knowledge discovery
• text mining
• network analysis
• social media analytics
• social network mining
• predictive analytics
• social analytics
• business analytics
• ecommerce analytics
• machine learning
• statistical programming
• predictive modeling

I also found a bunch of articles hyping the emergence of a new data-oriented field.  This stuff makes me feel good about job prospects, so I'll pass a couple along here:

What is Data Science?
Jobs For Data Scientists Explode across the Market