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.

[alejandrosarria0296]

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

[h-karyn]

• 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.

[aliceluo1]

-Chizuko Ueno: Chizuko Ueno's work covers sociological issues including semiotics, capitalism, and feminism in Japan. Chizuko Ueno's research often has practical implications for policymakers and social activists. Her talk could shed light on policy recommendations and strategies for addressing social issues like gender inequality and family dynamics. Her work is not limited to a specific region or country, making her a valuable speaker for a global audience.

[jialeCharloote]

Richard H. Thaler Richard H. Thaler is the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences recipient for his contributions to behavioral economics. Thaler studies behavioral economics and finance as well as the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. I would recommend his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow"to anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of human decision-making processes, cognitive biases, and the complexities of thinking.

[ecg1331]

I think Alexandra Olteanu would be a wonderful guest speaker. She is a principal researcher at Microsoft in their Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics department.

I read one of her publications, “Responsible Computing during COVID-19 and Beyond” while I researching for my capstone project last year and it was an informative read. Upon looking her up again, I have found she has a lot of great publications revolving around technology and ethics.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/aloltea/

[ethanjkoz]

Dr. Daniel A. McFarland Dr. McFarland is a Professor of Education at Stanford University. His research interests include the "social and institutional dynamics of educational systems." McFarland's work often involves the use of computational social science methods like network analysis and language modeling; I found his article on social networks among adolescents in the classroom setting particularly interesting and I think others might as well.

[XiaotongCui]

Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the [Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and Director of the [Stanford Digital Economy Lab]. He is one of the most-cited authors on the digital economy (AI, IT etc.), Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure the productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles. He has done pioneering research on digital commerce, the Long Tail, bundling and pricing models, intangible assets, and the effects of IT on business strategy, productivity, and performance.

https://economics.stanford.edu/people/erik-brynjolfsson

[yuzhouw313]

Professor Kazuo Yamaguchi Professor Yamaguchi's research interests encompass statistical models for social data, mathematical models for various social phenomena, and diverse topics such as life course, rational choice theory, stratification and mobility, demography of family and employment, the process of drug use progression, and Japanese society. His current research primarily centers on methodological aspects, including causal models for categorical data, decomposition analysis, and panel data analysis. Additionally, he explores gender inequality and work-life balance, with a specific focus on Japan and Korea.

[PaulaTepkham]

I would recommend to invite Prof. Fabio Caccioli who is Professor of Complex Systems, University College London for the workshop for these following reasons. 1) His paper named 'Network models of financial systemic risk: a review' is published in Journal of Computational Social Science, and also be one of the paper that have the most cited in the Journal. 2) According to his paper, he reviewed many tools. Therefore, we will learn a lot of tools from him.

[nourabdelbaki]

I would like to nominate Prof. Jason Hartline, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University, for his work on mechanism design. In his work, he brings design and analysis methodologies from computer science to understand and improve economic outcomes. He also teaches interesting classes at the intersection of computer science and economics (such as a topics seminar class that looks at work that merges methods/perspectives from computer science and economics and game theory to understand how outcomes in systems arise and what are the controls by which these outcomes can be globally optimized).*

More info for those who are interested: His CV His textbook [under preparation]: Mechanism Design and Approximation

*Description of his work and interests are taken from his bio, CV, and/or course descriptions.

[Weiranz926]

I would like to recommend Dr. Sandra González-Bailón, whose research focuses on the structure and dynamics of online social networks, as well as the role of information flow in shaping public opinion. Her work combines network science and social science, which provides us with valuable insights into the behavior of users on digital platforms. I think her work makes her a compelling and suitable speaker for those interested in understanding the impact of online interactions on society.

[Cosmo280]

I would recommend Dr. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who is the author of the book "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are".

Dr. Stephens-Davidowitz used to worked for Google as a Data Scientist, where he is in touch with data, such as personal search history and user profile, that is impossible or extremely difficult for social scientists to collect. I believe his perspectives on newly emerged readymade data available for social scientists and possible ethics problems for using them would be invaluable.

[YucanLei]

Professor Sir Angus Deaton

https://deaton.scholar.princeton.edu/

I read his book "The Great Escape" and I loved it.

[yutongj315]

I would recommend Professor Yuan Chang Leong because he does interesting work on linking machine learning and AI with the brain

[Yunrui11]

I recommend Professor Joshua Conrad Jackson from UChicago. He specializes in how culture shapes human minds, and his research goes into depth about using computational methods to study the influence of culture and the co-evolution of psychology.

[jinyz1220]

Dr. Willian J. Brady His research examines the dynamics of emotion at the social network level and their consequences for group behavior. His recent work studies how human psychology and technology-mediated social contexts interact to shape our emotions and intergroup attitudes. “ How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe5641

[nalinbhatt]

I want to invite Dr. Melanie Mitchell, I enjoyed her Complexity podcast appearance with Michael Garfield and I would like to know more about the state of machine cognition and projects related to machine intelligence.

Other people I would love to hear from would be Rajiv Sethi and Cris Moore on their work on biases, algorithmic justice or variety of other topics.

[wenyizhaomacss]

Allyson Ettinger Ettinger's interdisciplinary expertise in linguistics, NLP, and cognitive neuroscience uniquely positions her to bridge these domains, and her active roles in related communities highlight her commitment to fostering cross-field collaboration, making her an ideal speaker for the workshop.

[zhuoqingli526]

I would recommend Professor Marc Berman.

https://psychology.uchicago.edu/directory/marc-g-berman

I have read the paper "Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations with Physical Pain”. I’m really interested in the relationship between individual psychological and neural processing and environmental factors. I think that we could learn some useful research methods about how to use computational neuroscience and statistical models to quantify the person, the environment and their interactions.

[yuanninghuang]

I would recommend Professor Sandra Wachter and basically any professor at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Professor Wachter is Professor of Technology and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she researches the legal and ethical implications of AI, Big Data, and robotics as well as Internet and platform regulation. I think she does a good job in navigating the intersection of sociology, law, internet, and AI.

[yunfeiavawang]

I would recommend Prof. Dashun Wang. https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/wang_dashun.aspx

Dashun is a professor at Northwestern University. He leads a group of highly interdisciplinary researchers who are extremely passionate about data. His current research focus is on Science of Science, a quest to turn the scientific methods and curiosities upon ourselves, hoping to use and develop tools from complexity sciences and artificial intelligence to broadly explore the opportunities and promises offered by the recent data explosion in science.

I think Dashun is a good representative of CSS scholars. His work would inspire not only students in the science of science, but also a broader range of students seeking ways to utilize big data and better understand the society.

[AnniiiinnA]

(If allowed), I would like to recommend Professor Yu Xie from Princeton University. His main contributions centered on quantitative studies in demography and social stratification and he is experienced in social science data collection.

https://yuxie.scholar.princeton.edu/

[Kevin2330]

Professor Yixiao Sun.

https://css.ucsd.edu/people/profiles/ysun%20%20.html

He is an economics professor at UC San Diego and his research focuses on econometric inference in nonparametric and semiparametric models in connection with causal inference. I would like to hear his take on AI and how causal inference cam potentially enhance and optimize the development of AI.

[boki2924]

Professor Ágnes Horvát. http://agneshorvat.info/ "Her research lies at the intersection of human-centered computing, computational social science and communication. Using interdisciplinary approaches to investigate how networks induce biased information production, sharing, and processing on digital platforms." (Horvát)

[Jessieliao2001]

Professor David Lazer, https://cssh.northeastern.edu/faculty/david-lazer/ He is among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation and computational social science and has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science, numerous other editorial boards and program committees. He is a great representative of computational social scientists.

[erikaz1]

Prof. Duncan J Watts, sociologist and professor at Penn with a diverse academic and professional background. Known for his work on social networks, small world networks, and social media analysis. https://www.asc.upenn.edu/people/faculty/duncan-j-watts-phd

[MaoYingrong]

I recommend Professor Matthew Salganik. Since we have already read his Bit by Bit on the perspective course, which is very inspiring and clear. It's very exciting to meet him in person after reading his work. And I believe he could inspire us on the relationship between technology and policy.

[beilrz]

Professor Luc Anselin, for his innovative techniques and contribution on spatial economic. Further, it is interesting to hear his option on the future of GIS.

[schen115]

I would love to recommend assistant professor Jessie Chin from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, whose research area mainly focuses on computational social science. I was pretty interested in two aspects of her research focus which are cognitive systems (AI-human collaboration) as well as health informatics. Additionally, I think health informatics is a controversial topic in recent due to the impact of aging society and environmental issue (e.g. Fukushima waste water). Therefore, I think it will be excited to learn more about her research.

[QichangZheng]

Duncan J. Watts: Defense: A principal researcher at Microsoft Research and formerly a professor at Columbia University, Watts has been influential in the areas of network theory, complex systems, and social contagion. His work on small-world networks and the spread of information can offer valuable insights into understanding social systems and phenomena.

Sandra González-Bailón: Defense: An Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, González-Bailón has made significant contributions to the study of digital communication, political engagement, and network science. Her research provides crucial understandings of how online networks influence collective behavior and social change.

[ymuhannah]

I would like to suggest inviting Professor Marc Berman as a speaker for the seminar. Professor Berman, a professor of the Department of Psychology and co-director of the MACSS program, would be an excellent choice for this workshop. His expertise in computational social science, particularly within the field of psychology, would provide valuable perspectives.

[QIXIN-ACT]

Dr. Nathan Wilmers. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/nathan-wilmers

Wilmers researches wage and earnings inequality, economic sociology, and the sociology of labor. In his empirical research, he studies how wage stagnation and rising earnings inequality result from weakening labor market institutions, changing market power, and job restructuring. More broadly, he is interested in bringing insights from economic sociology to the study of labor markets and the wage structure.

Recently, Dr. Wilmers conducted a research about how generative AI influence workers in the society, which reflects concerns in this social computing society. Also, it shows the intention to make this society better.

[Caojie2001]

I would like to recommend Professor Scott E Page from the University of Michigan and Santa Fe Institute. https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/bio/ Professor Page's research interest focuses on the influence of diversity in complex systems, and the topics he has studied spans many fields of social science, such as computational research methods, economy and political science.

[kiddosso]

I would recommend Professor Andrew Abbott. I'm particularly interested in how he might combine computational methods with his somewhat radical view on the future of sociology or social science as a whole. I believe his grandiose view of social science and his expertise in computational methods would benefit macss students.

[lim1an]

Dr. Sendhil Mullainathan: I'm interested in his work on behavioral economics and decision making with interdisciplinary approaches, which may attract students from economics, psychology and even sociology to come.

[zhian21]

Professor Bursztyn (Leonardo Bursztyn) from the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago

Professor Bursztyn's recent research on misperception presents an interesting phenomenon in humans. More importantly, his discussion of methods that could be applied to obtain data on human perception is crucial for attitudinal studies across different fields in social science.

[MaxwelllzZ]

Professor Dacheng Xiu in Booth: https://dachxiu.chicagobooth.edu/ Prof. Xiu has experience in doing research using computational tools, like Machine Learning, to solve applied issues related to big data. It would be beneficial for students to view different applications and explore different fields of the world.

Professor Steve Lavitt: https://economics.uchicago.edu/directory/Steve-Levitt Prof. Lavitt has experience in doing research on Economic models of crime and corruption; the criminal justice system; and abortion legalization. Students from varied backgrounds may be interested.