Potential Computational Social Science Speakers

[bhavyapan]

We ask you to:

• Propose 1 or more computational social scientists we can invite for our seminar series this year, including a 1-2 sentence defense of why others might want to hear from them
• Uprank ("thumbs up") 5 other proposals

Professor Evans will invite the top-most upranked people for the seminar over the course of the year.

[natashacarpcast]

I would like if Prof. Clipperton can speak to us about her research in Taylor Swift's lyrics and tour. I find everything that has happened with Taylor's tour (excessively high-demand for tickets, resales tickets' expensive prices and people buying them, airlines scheduling additional flights in Australia, etc.) to be very interesting from a sociological point of view. I think Prof. Clipperton's text analysis can bring us new information about why her music is having such an impact in society and creating this huge phenomena.

[secorey]

Dr. Grant Blank is a lecturer at the Oxford Internet Institute and received his Ph.D. in sociology from UChicago. His work focuses on the sociology of the Internet, including digital inequality and social media. He has recently been involved in research that examines how the platform economy contributes to socioeconomic equality/inequality.

[alejandro-sarria-morales]

Xuechunzi Bai (https://www.xuechunzibai.com/)

Her research on stereotype formation and group theory provides and interesting perspective not currently present on the lighting talks on psychology (which are mainly focused on neuroscience). Her research could comfortably fit in the sociology lighting talks. I’m a fan of her recent work and I’m sure that other participants in the workshop (particularly those with a sociology or social psychology background)

Leor Zmigrod (https://www.leorzmigrod.com/)

Probably harder to achieve logistically as is currently based at Cambridge. Her current work is on creating models that compliment behavioral experiments in order to identify the cognitive and emotional processes that underlie political behavior. She is probably the lead researcher in computational political psychology.

[Dededon]

Yingdan Lu https://yingdanlu.com/
Yingdan is a communications researcher at Northwestern who has been applying multimodal analysis with the video data from TikTok. I believe her research experience could let we rethink about what are coming trends of social media analysis, and how to ask good research questions on after the Twitter API has been closed.
Also, I'm also interested in the methodology question of how to discover good RQs from the data. If possible, can we invite Prof Timmermans from UCLA to give a lecture about abductive analysis?

[lbitsiko]

Matthew J. Salganik

https://sociology.princeton.edu/people/matthew-j-salganik

Cause I liked his "Bit by bit" book.

[zihua-uc]

Susan Athey

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/susan-athey

She was part of the group of researchers to develop causal trees, which is a technique extremely useful for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects for causal inference.

[yuy123337]

Daniel Alabi is a computer scientist and a data scientist, aiming to build a bridge between social science and computer science. After realizing how social scientists were challenged to leverage the opportunities of big data, he decided to build tools for social scientists to analyze big data. His experience is an excellent match for the MACSS program which may help us to better grasp the process of conducting computational social science researches

[ksheng-UChicago]

Sarah Elwood is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. Elwood received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota. Her research contributes to relational poverty studies, critical GIScience and digital geographies, visual politics and mixed methods, and urban geography: https://geography.washington.edu/people/sarah-elwood

[muhua-h]

• Dr. Nilam Ram: he is a computational psychologist at Stanford University who is specialized in time series analysis. He takes a person-specific approach to analyze small-scale temporal changes, which has an extraordinary data mining potential for knowledge discovery in social and behavioral sciences. His well-known Screenome Project takes screenshots from participants' smart phones every few seconds, allowing researchers to access cross-platform interaction information.

• Dr. David Stillwell: he is a computational psychologist at Cambridge University, UK. He is one of the pioneer that bring computational social science to the field of Psychometrics. His work includes predicting people's personality using their Facebook profile. The infamous Cambridge analytica scandal was likely inspired by research findings from his lab. His recent work is in NLP, digital footprint, psychological assessments.

• Dr. Michal Kosinski: he is a computational behavioral scientist at Stanford Business School. His work centers on examining the psychological processes in Large Language Models, and leveraging AI, ML, Big Data, and computational techniques to model and predict human behavior. One of his recent work that studies the emergence of theory of mind in LLMs became very popular and controversial on Twitter. I personally find it interesting that Dr. Michal Kosinski tends to study ethically controversial topics in computational social science, and their implications are often thought-provoking.

• Dr. David Rand: he is a behavioral scientist from MIT. His research combines large-scale online field experiments with mathematical and computational models with to understand people’s attitudes, beliefs, and choices. Some of his recent work investigates the psychology of misinformation, how misinformation and disinformation spread in social networks and ways to fight misinformation using nudge interventions.

[anzhichen1999]

I would recommend Jane Maienschein, who specializes in the history and philosophy of biology and the way biology, bioethics, and bio-policy play out in society. She is the author of Computational History of Knowledge: Challenges and Opportunities, a paper I read back in the undergraduate.

[cty20010831]

I would first recommend Jacqueline Gottlieb (https://www.gottlieblab.com/) as she has done some cool works on the mechanisms of information sampling, active learning and curiosity using computational modeling.

I would also recommend Seonjoo Lee (https://sites.google.com/site/seonjool/home) for her expertise in computational methods (e.g., Longitudinal High-dimensional Data Analysis and Color Independent Component Analysis) to advance research in psychiatry.

[shaangao]

Richard Futrell: https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~rfutrell/ (does cool work on computational linguistics)
Uri Hasson: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=VRw8v4kAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate (neuroscientist with a recent focus on the intersection of large language models and narrative processing in the human brain)

[HamsterradYC]

Alex 'Sandy' Pentland
https://www-prod.media.mit.edu/people/sandy/overview/
He is the director of MIT Connection Science and one of the founders of the MIT Media Lab and Media Lab Asia, specializing in Human Dynamics. He is one of the most cited computational scientists in the world and was named one of the 7 most powerful data scientists in the world by Forbes. Together Sandy and his students have pioneered computational social science and some related areas. Professor Pentland not only has a strong academic background and a wide range of practical experience, he has also delivered keynote speeches at major global forums, including the annual meetings of the OECD, G20, World Bank, and JP Morgan. He has also been involved in founding and incubating a number of companies that have achieved remarkable success around the world. For example, his lab has incubated companies involved in the world's largest rural healthcare delivery system, Alibaba's news and advertising arm, and the authentication technology that powers Aadahar, India's digital identity system.

[Brian-W00]

Jake Hofman: http://jakehofman.com/
Jake Hofman's work in the area of computational social science involves applications of novel computational tools and statistical methods to large-scale social data.

[naivetoad]

Dr. John Wixted
His research mainly focuses on episodic memory, recognition memory, and eyewitness memory.