Social Science and Computer Science [^1]

Alexander Kurz

Presentation given at the Computational Social Science Seminar, June 6, 2016.

Overview

Why now?

What is the state of the art?

Opportunities?

Thanks

[^1] I also thought of Social Computer Science or Social Informatics as the title of the talk. Maybe Computational Social Science is better known, but Computer Science studies much more than just "computation" (accordingly, what we intend here is much wider than what is sometimes understood by Computational Social Science). Of course, there is a theory of comuptability and (computational) complexity, but important as it is, it is only a small part of Computer Science. For example, how to engineer reliable and predictable systems in a scalable and compositional way plays an important role. This often allows us to abstract from computations and study systems from a logical perspective. Consequently, Computer Science developed a plethora of theories of systems (with associated algorithms and software tools) that may have applications in areas outside of Computer Science.