Workshop Archives | Masters in Computational Social Science

Spring 2022

May 26: Enhancing the Wisdom of Crowds - Jack Soll, Professor of Management and Organizations at Fuqua School of Business, Duke University
May 19: How Information Flows from the World to China - Jennifer Pan, Associate Professor of Communication and, by courtesy, of Political Science and of Sociology, Stanford University
May 05: Deplatforming Right-Wing Extreamists on Twitter Following the January 6th Insurrection - David Lazer, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Science, Northeastern University
April 28:Unbiased AI in a Biased World: Mission (IM) Possible? - Sandra Wachter, Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
April 21: Out of Scope, Out of Mind: Expanding Fronteirs for Fair ML in Social Decision Making - Serena Wang, PhD Student in Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
April 14: What Do We Mean By 'Non- Discrimiatory' In Statistical Predition Tasks? - Nathan Srebro, Professor at the Toyota Technical Institute at Chicago,with cross- appointments at the University of Chicago's Department of Computer Science, and Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics
April 7: Deep Learning for Individual Heterogeneity: An Automatic Inference Framework - Max Farrell, Associate Professor of Econometrics and Statistics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
March 31: The Social and Biographical Locus of Innovation- James Evans, Director, Knowledge Lab; Max Palevsky Professor, Sociology, University of Chicago; Fellow, Computation Institute; Co-Director, Masters in Computational Social Science Program

Winter 2022

March 10: A Computational Theory of Socially-Embedded Decision Making - Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT
March 3: Agent_Zero and Generative Social Science - Joshua Epstein, Professor of Epidemiology, New York University
February 24: Polarized Brains on Polarizing Media: Divergent Neural and Semantic Representations of Political Content - Yuan Chang Leong, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, UChicago
February 17: The Dynamics of U.S. Business Firms: Data, Theories, and Models - Robert Axtell, Professor of Computational Science at George Mason University, External Faculty Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute; Visiting Scientist at Google Research, and currently Visiting Professor at the Sloan School at MIT
February 10: Sampling from Memory to Guide Decisions - Akram Bakkour, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago
February 3: Language, Perception, and Causal Inference in Online Communication - Zhao Wang, Assistant Instructional Professor in the MACSS program at the University of Chicago
January 27: Subject Data Access Rights: Measurements of and Targeting Practices and Lessons for Future Transparency Mechanisms - Blase Ur, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago
January 20: Reporting from the Front Lines of Social Media Research: From Quick and Dirty to Ideal - Dr. Sherry Emery, Senior Fellow in Public Health and the Director of the Social Data Collaboratory at NORC at the University of Chicago
January 13: The Fractal Brain and Cognitive Effort - Marc Berman, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, Co-Director for the Masters in Computational Social Science Program, and Director of the Environmental Neuroscience Lab

Autumn 2021

December 16: Combating Disinformation on Social Media and its Challenges - Kai Shu, Gladwin Development Chair Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology
December 2: Detection and Description of Change in Visual Streams - Greg Shakhnarovich, Professor, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago; CS Department, University of Chicago
November 18: Only 3 Left at this Price: A Tale of Misleading Online Content and Consumer Protections - Marshini Chetty, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer of Computer Science; Director, Amyoli Internet Research Laboratory (AIR Lab), University of Chicago
November 11: Integrating Interactive Devices with the User's Body - Pedro Lopes, Assistant Professor in Computer Science, University of Chicago
October 28: In Search of Synergy in the Task Space using High- Throughput Experiment Design - Abdullah Almaatouq, Douglas Drane Career Professor; Assistant Professor - Sloan School of Management, and Affiliated Faculty at the Center for Computational Engineering and Connection Science Research Initiative, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
October 21: What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s Books - Anjali Adukia, Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the College
October 14: Algorithmic Behavioral Science: Automated Discovery of Human Biases - Sendhil Mullainathan, Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at Chicago Booth
October 7: Tapping into Talent: Coupling Education and Innovation Policies for Economic Growth - Ufuk Akcigit, Arnold C. Harberger Professor of Economics; Senior Research Fellow, Brookings Institute; Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, Center for Economic Policy Research, and the Center for Economic Studies; and a Distinguished Research Fellow, Koc University
September 30: Social Computing and Computational Social Science - James Evans, Director of the Knowledge Lab; Founder/Faculty Chair of the Computational Social Science Program; Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago

Spring 2021

May 27: The Many Markets Impacted By Left-Digit Bias - Devin Pope, Professor of Behavioral Science at Economics, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago
May 20: 'Understanding' and Prediction: Controlled Examinations of Meaning Sensitivity in Pre-Trained NLP Models - Alluson Ettinger, Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, Univeristy of Chicago
May 13: Developing Robot Teammates That Enhance Social Dynamics in Human-Robot Teams - Sarah Sebo, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago
May 6: Psychological Profiling in the Digital Environment: Risks and Opportunities - Michal Kosinski, Associate Professor, Organizational Behavior, Stanford University Graduate School of Business
April 29: How to Trust a Machine? - Iyad Rahwan, Director, Center for Humans and Machines, Max Planck Institute for Human Development
April 22: Network Structure And Diversity In The Eco-Evolutionary Assembly Of Host-Pathogen Systems - Mercedes Pascual, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, and an external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute
April 15: Accelerating Science with Human Versus Alien Artificial Intelligence - James Evans, Director of the Knowledge Lab; Founder/Faculty Chair of the Computational Social Science Program; Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago
April 8: Efficient Experimental Design With Adaptive Experimentation - Eytan Bakshy, Facebook Core Data Science Team, Facebook
April 1: Diversity and Inequality in Social Networks: From Recommendation to Information Diffusion - Ana-Andrea Stoica, PhD Candidate, Columbia University

Winter 2021

March 4: Mis- and Disinformation Dynamics in Critical Conversations - Renee Diresta, Research Manager, Stanford Internet Observatory
February 25: (In)citing Action to Realize an Equitable Future - Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor, University of Pennsylvania, Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry
February 18: Resilience to Online Censorship - Margaret (Molly) Roberts, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California San Diego
February 11: Online Rumors, Misinformation and Disinformation: The Perfect Storm of COVID-19 - Kate Starbird, Associate Professor, Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington
February 4: Chinese Online Discussion Around Democracy in the 2010s - Yinxian Zhang, Assistant Professor of Sociology, CUNY Queens College.
January 28: #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice - Brooke Foucault Welles, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University
January 21: The Curse of Abundance: Understanding and Managing Personal Effects in the Digital Age - Chris Kanich, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
January 14: Artificial Intelligence for Social Good: When Machines Learn Human-Like Biases from Data - Aylin Caliskan, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, School of Engineering & Applied Science, George Washington University

Autumn 2020

November 19: Pandemic Policymaking - Philip Waggoner, Assistant Instructional Professor in the Masters in the Computational Social Science program and a Political Scientist
November 12: Clustering Countries-Improving Measurement in Comparative Political Research - Brooke Luetgert, Computational Scientist - SSD Research & Computing Center; Lecturer in Digital Studies, University of Chicago
November 5: Children as a Solution to Explore Exploitations - Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley
October 29: Why We Don't Click: Interrogating the Relationship Between Viewing and Clicking in Social Media Contexts by Exploring the 'Non-Click' - Nicole B. Ellison, Karl E. Weick Collegiate Professor of Information in the School of Information, University of Michigan
October 22: Experimentation and Incrementalism: The Impact of the Adoption of A/B Testing - Berk Can Deniz, Doctoral Student, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Macro Organizational Behavior Goup, Stanford University
October 15: Rethinking Depression in Cities: Evidence and Theory for Lower Rates in Larger Urban Areas - Andrew J. Stier, Doctoral Student in the Integrative Neuroscience Program, University of Chicago and Marc G. Berman, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology; Co-Director, Master’s in computational social science Program; and Director of the Environmental Neuroscience Lab
October 8 - The Inka Writing System: An Exploration of Khipu Sign Conventions (Recording) - Jon Clindaniel, Assistant Instructional Professor in Computational Social Science, University of Chicago

Spring 2020

May 28 - Social Bootstrapping of Economic Value - Lynette Shaw, Assistant Professor of Complex Systems, Post-Doctoral Scholar, Michigan Society of Fellows, University of Michigan
May 21 - Gender Stereotypes Reflected in the Distributional Structure of 25 Languages - Molly Lewis, Research Scientist - Psychology and Social Decision Sciences Departments, Carnegie Mellon University
May 14 - Protecting Privacy in a World Filled with Smart Devices - Heather Zheng, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science, University of Chicago
May 7 - The Structure of U.S. College Networks on Facebook - Bogdan State, Data Scientist Facebook
April 30 - Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning - Robert Munro, Author, "Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning"
April 9 - Drawings of Real-World Scenes during Free Recall Reveal Detailed Object and Spatial Information in Memory - Wilma Bainbridge, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago

Winter 2020

March 6 - How Exploitation and Exploration Shape the Knowledge Space - Hyejin Youn, Assistant Professor of Management & Organizations, Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management
February 27 - Modeling Context-Dependent Latent Effect Heterogeneity with Applications to Study Public Political Polarization - Diogo Ferrari, Assistant Instructional Professor in Computational Social Science, University of Chicago
February 6 - School, Studying, And Smarts: The Gender of Education Across 80 Years of American Print Media, 1930-2009 - Andrei Boutyline, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan
January 30th - Network Structures of Collective Intelligence: The Contingent Benefits of Group Discussion - Joshua Becker, Postdoctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University
January 23rd - Toward a Science of Failure - Dashun Wang, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations - Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
January 16th - Designing for Trust: A Behavioral Framework For Sharing Economy Platforms - Paolo Parigi - Lead Trust Scientist – Airbnb and Natã Barbosa - Phd Candidate - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Information Sciences
January 9th - Network Science or Applied Graph Theory? Examining the Network of Indirect Collaboration in a Department of Mathematic - Moses Boudourides, Visiting Professor of Mathematics - New York University Abu Dhabi; Faculty - Northwestern University School of Professional Studies Data Science Program

Autumn 2019

November 14th - Islamophobia and Media Portrayals of Muslim Women: A Computational Text Analysis of US News Coverage - Rochelle Terman, Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science, University of Chicago
November 7th - How to Measure Legislative District Compactness If You only Know it When You See it - Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University
October 31st - Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World - Jevin West, Associate Professor - Information School, University of Washington & Carl Bergstrom, Professor of Computational Biology and Behavior, University of Washington
October 24th - Machine Politics: A Roundtable - Fred Turner, Professor of Communication (Stanford University), Adrian Johns, Professor of History (UChicago) & Joel Isaac, Professor of Social Thought (UChicago)
October 17th - Science and Technology Advance through Surprise - James Evans, Professor of Sociology, Director of the Knowledge Lab, Faculty Director of the Master’s Program in Computational Social Science, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, University of Chicago
October 10th - Big Data in Medicine: A panel of distinguished University of Chicago faculty - Chaired by Jeremy Greene, a renowned historian of medicine (John Hopkins School of Medicine)

Spring 2019

May 23rd - Understanding Vision through the Lens of Prediction - Stephanie Palmer, Assistant Professor, Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago
May 16th - Adventures in Scaling Psychology - Tom Griffiths, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Princeton University
May 2nd - Teachers in Social Media: Social Science Research in the Fifth Estate - Sihua (Adrienne) Hu, Post-doctoral Fellow, School of Education and Policy, Northwestern University
April 25th - Computational Adventures with Large Datasets - Andrey Rzhetsky, Professor, Department of Medicine; Professor, Department of Human Genetics; Senior Fellow, Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology, University of Chicago
April 11th - The Wisdom of the Network - Abdullah Almaatouq, PhD Student and Research Assistant, Computational Science & Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
April 4th - Information, Modeling, and Inference: The Info-Metrics Framework - Amos Golan (Event Co-sponsored by the Quantitative Methods Committee), Professor of Economics, Director of the Info-Metrics Institute, American University

Winter 2019

February 28th - Some Economics of Social Interactions - Steven Durlauf, Steans Professor of Educational Policy at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago
February 21st - Neuroimaging of Pain and Emotion: Computation, Representation, and Regulation - Tor Wager, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, University of Colorado Boulder
February 14th - Predicting Attention and Working Memory from Functional Brain Activity across Development - Monica Rosenberg, Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Psychology, Yale University
January 24th - Forecasting Congressional Election Outcomes and Legislative Voting Behavior Using Campaign Finance Data - Adam Bonica, Associate Professor of Political Science, Stanford University
January 17th - Two Stories at the Intersection Between Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence - Nicolas Masse, Postdoctoral Scholar and Staff Scientist, Department of Neurobiology, University of Chicago
January 10th - Rhythmic Brain Activity Tracks the timing and Content of Online Spatial Representations - Ed Awh, Professor, Department of Psychology, The Institute for Mind and Biology, and the Grossman Institute for Neuroscience, Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior, University of Chicago

Autumn 2018

November 29th - Influence: Watch your Language? Analyzing Phrasing Effects in Movies, Twitter and Changemyview - Lillian Lee, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Department of Information Science, Cornell University
November 8th - Understanding Cities through Measurement and Embedded Intelligence- Charlie Catlett, Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy
October 18th - Affective Publics: News Storytelling, Sentiment and Technology - Zizi Papacharissi, Professor and Department Head of Communication, Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
October 11th - The Fractal Brain and Cognitive Effort - Marc Berman, Faculty Director of the Master’s in Computational Social Science Program; Assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Chicago

Spring 2018

May 24: Embedding Relational Data Using Pytorch - Bogdan State, Data Scientist, Facebook
April 5: Exposure to Opposing Views Can Increase Political Polarization: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment on Social Media - Chris Bail, Douglas and Ellen Lowey Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, Duke University
May 17: Cities, Collective Knowhow, and Economic Development - Andres Gomez, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Growth Lab, Center for International Development, Harvard University
May 10: Activity Space and Neighborhood Social Context - Kathleen Cagney, Professor of Sociology and the College; Director, Population Research Center, University of Chicago
May 4: Radical markets & Democracy in the Information Age - Authors: Eric Posner & Glen Weyl Discussants: Karin Knorr , Steve Levitt, Jennifer Pitts, and Andrew Chien
April 26: Online Field Experiments: Studying Social Interactions in Context - Paolo Parigi, Lead Trust Scientist, Airbnb
April 12: When Less is More: Experimental Evidence on Information Delivery During India's Demonetization - Ben Golub, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Harvard University

Winter 2018

February 22: Cycles of Conflict, A Century of Continuity: Using Computational Methods to Measure Why Some Ideas Succeed and Others Fail - Laura Nelson, Assistant Professor of Sociology, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University
February 15: How the Questions We Ask Affect the Answers We Get: A Lesson from Asking Rats How They Smell - Leslie Kay, Professor, Department of Psychology and the College, University of Chicago
February 1: Open-Source Modeling for Policy Analysis and Research - Richard Evans, Senior Lecturer in Computational Social Science; Director, Open-Source Macroeconomics Laboratory; Fellow, Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago
January 26: The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds - James Evans, Director, Knowledge Lab; Professor, Sociology, University of Chicago; Senior Fellow, Computation Institute; Faculty Director, Master’s Program in Computational Social Sciences, University of Chicago
January 19: Why Networks Matter to Suicide: Examining the Cultural Underpinnings of Suicide Diffusion in Adolescence - Anna Mueller, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development and the College, University of Chicago
January 11: Trade, Merchants, and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age - Ali Hortaçsu, Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Economics at The University of Chicago

Fall 2017

November 16: Causal Analysis - Guanglei Hong, Associate Professor, Comparative Human Development, Executive Committee for Computational Social Science at The University of Chicago
November 9: Damon Centola, Associate Professor, Annenberg School for Communication, Director of the Network Dynamics Group at the University of Pennsylvania
October 26: Science of Science: University, Reputation, Attention, Inflation, and Novelty - Santo Fortunato, Professor, School of Informatics and Computing, Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University - Bloomington
October 12: Gender Bias in the Job Market: A Longitudinal Analysis - Ben Zhao, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science, Co-Director at the Systems, Algorithms, Networking, And Data Lab at The University of Chicago
October 5: Information, Spatial Selection, and the Statistics of Neighborhoods - Luís M. A. Bettencourt , Professor of Ecology and Evolution, Pritzker Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at The University of Chicago

Spring 2017

May 25: Can We Trust Online Employer Reviews - Ioana Marinescu, Assistant Professor at University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy
May 11: Exploratory and Confirmatory Causal Inference with High Dimensional Interventions - Justin Grimmer, Associate Professor of Political Science, Stanford University
May 4: Network Anomalies - Michael Macy, Goldwin Smith Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology and Director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory, Cornell University
April 27: Neural and Environmental Factors Related to Self-Control - Marc Berman, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Chicago
April 20: How Segregated is Urban Consumption? - Jonathan Dingel, Professor, Chicago Booth School of Business (PhD, Economics)
April 13: Exploring the Ecology of Human Stories - Peter Sheridan Dodds, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at University of Vermont
April 6: The Causes and Consequences of Self-Employment over the Life Cycle - John Eric Humphries, PhD Candidate in Economics, University of Chicago