People
Organizers
Ridhi Kashyap
Ridhi Kashyap is associate professor of social demography and fellow of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She completed her DPhil in Sociology jointly affiliated with the University of Oxford and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Her research spans a number of substantive areas in demography and sociology, including gender, mortality and health, the diversification of family forms, and ethnicity and migration. Her work has sought to adopt computational innovations both in terms of modelling approaches such as agent-based models and digital trace data from web and social media platforms to study social and demographic processes. She is currently leading a Data2X and UN Foundation supported project that uses big data from the web, in particular large-scale online advertising data that provide information on the aggregate numbers of users of online platforms by demographic characteristics, to measure sustainable development and gender inequality indicators.
Nicolo Cavalli
Nicolò is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He holds a BA in Politics from University of Bologna and a MSc in Economics from Bocconi University, Milan. Before joining Nuffield College, Nicolò worked as journalist, reporting on social issues and political movements from Italy, Greece, Catalunya, California and Peru. His Doctoral Thesis focuses on how intergroup emotional stratification emerged in Europe in times of economic recession.
Taylor Brown
Though a visiting scholar at NYU, Taylor Brown is a doctoral candidate in the Duke Sociology department, with association at the Duke Network Analysis Center. She has broad interests in computational methods and social media studies. Her dissertation explores gender inequality in creative professions. Taylor holds an MA in sociology from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MSc in evidence-based social intervention from the University of Oxford. Prior to beginning her PhD, Taylor fulfilled an appointment at the National Science Foundation in the division of Social and Economic Sciences.Local Speakers
Pablo Barbera
Pablo Barberá is an Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the London School of Economics. His research develops text and network analysis methods that improve our understanding of how exposure to political information through social media sites affects political behavior. He is also the authors of several R packages that allow scholars to collect and analyze social media data.
David Cox
Sir David Cox is a statistician known in particular for the proportional hazards model. This is widely used in the analysis of survival data and has been applied in the medical, physical, life, earth, and social sciences, as well as engineering fields. His 1972 paper introducing the model and its analysis is one of the 100 most-cited papers of all time for all fields. Cox’s career has included research positions in government supported research organizations, as well as academic appointments at Cambridge, University of North Carolina, Birkbeck College, Imperial College, and Nuffield College, where he was Warden, 1988-1994. He earned his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1949, after first studying mathematics at St. Johns College, Cambridge. Knighted in 1985, Cox is a fellow of the Royal Society, an honorary fellow of the British Academy and a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He has served as president of the Bernoulli Society, Royal Statistical Society and International Statistical Institute. In 2010, Cox received the Copley Medal, the Royal Society’s highest award, and in 2016, the International Prize in Statistics and shared the BBVA Foundation Prize for research in the physical sciences.
Xiaowen Dong
Xiaowen Dong is a Departmental Lecturer in the Department of Engineering Science, a faculty member of the Oxford-Man Institute, and a research fellow of Somerville College, all at the University of Oxford. He is primarily interested in utilising graphs to model relational structure within the data, and developing novel techniques that lie at the intersection of machine learning, signal processing, and complex networks to study questions across social and economic sciences, with a particular focus on understanding human behaviour, decision making and societal changes.
Ray Duch
Ray is an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and the Director of the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS), which has centres in Oxford, Santiago (Chile), Tianjin (China) and Pune (India). Previously, he was the Senator Don Henderson Scholar in Political Science at the University of Houston. He received his PhD from the University of Rochester. He is currently the Long-Term Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Toulouse School of Economics. Ray’s research uses experiments, digital trace and public opinion analysis to explain individual decision making. He has published extensively, including an award-winning book (The Economic Vote) on how economic outcomes affect democratic accountability. His work has appeared in forty leading journals in political science and economics. Ray’s current research agenda investigates the role of information acquisition in decision-making. In 2015, Ray was selected as a member of the UK Cabinet Office Cross-Whitehall Trial Advice Panel to assist Whitehall departments in designing and implementing experiments to assess policy effectiveness. He is a member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network.
Scott Hale
Dr Scott A. Hale is a Senior Data Scientist and Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford, UK, and a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He develops and applies techniques from computer science to research questions in both computer science and the social sciences and puts the results into practice with industry partners. He is particularly interested in mobilization/collective action, agenda setting, and antisocial behaviour (e.g., hate speech) and has a strong track record in building tools and teaching programmes that enable social science researchers to access new methods and forms of data. At Oxford, he directs the Social Data Science programme, supervises postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and teaches postgraduate students.
Melinda Mills
Melinda Mills (MBE, FBA) is the Nuffield Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College and the Director of the new Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science in Oxford She completed her PhD in Demography at the University of Groningen (Netherlands), and has further studied bioinformatics and genetics. She was the Editor of the European Sociological Review (2012-2016). Mills’ research spans a range of interdisciplinary topics at the intersection of demography, sociology, molecular genetics and statistics. Her substantive research specializes in fertility and human reproductive behaviour, assortative mating, labour market, nonstandard employment and chronotypes, life course and inequality. She currently leads the ERC funded programme SOCIOGENOME (www.sociogenome.com). Mills has published various statistics textbooks in R on survival and event history analysis (2011, Sage) and has a forthcoming book on applied quantitative genetics statistical analysis (2019, MIT Press). She serves on various national science Boards such as the Executive Council of the Ecnomic and Social Research Council RCUK, the non-Executive Supervisory Board of the Dutch Science Council (NWO) and the NHS Digital Research Advisory Group.
Neave O'Clery
Originally from Dublin, Dr Neave O'Clery is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford where she leads a research group focused on data-driven models for economic development and the emergence of complexity for urban systems. Neave was previously a Fulbright Scholar and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School following her PhD (mathematics) at Imperial College. She is also founder and Editor in Chief of Angle – a journal based at Imperial College focusing on the intersection of policy, politics and science – since 2009.
Nick Ruktanonchai
Nick Ruktanonchai is an infectious disease epidemiologist, currently working as a senior research fellow in the WorldPop Project at the University of Southampton. He is interested in understanding how vectorborne diseases move on complex landscapes of transmission, particularly when carried by human hosts. This has involved using human mobility data from a variety of sources, including from Android smartphones, feature phones, satellite imagery, and microcensus data. Through collaborations with organisations such as the Clinton Health Access Initiative, he works to ensure his research helps inform malaria elimination strategy worldwide.
Mariarosaria Taddeo
Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo is Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where she is the Deputy Director of the Digital Ethics Lab, and is Faculty Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Her recent work focuses mainly on the ethical analysis of Artificial Intelligence, cyber security , cyber conflicts, and ethics of digital innovation. Her area of expertise is Philosophy and Ethics of Information, although she has worked on issues concerning Epistemology, Logic, and Philosophy of AI. She has been listed among the top 50 most inspiring Italian women working in AI in 2018. Dr Taddeo has been awarded The Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She also received the World Technology Award for Ethics acknowledging the originality and her research on the ethics of cyber conflicts, and the social impact of the work that she developed in this area. Since 2016, Taddeo serves as editor-in-chief of Minds & Machines (SpringerNature) and of Philosophical Studies Series (SpringerNature).
Sonja Vogt
Sonja Vogt received her PhD at the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS) at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. She was then a senior research associate in the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. From Zurich she moved to Oxford, where she was a senior postdoctoral officer at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences in Oxford. Currently, Sonja is associate professor for sustainable social development at the University of Bern, and she is affiliated with Nuffield College and the Sociology Department at the University of Oxford. Sonja has published in Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Her research focuses on social development, with a particular emphasis on culturally sensitive topics where attitudes and behavior are hard to measure. Examples include female genital cutting, prenatal sex-selection, corruption, and various types of discrimination. Sonja has projects in Sudan, Armenia, Columbia, Brazil, Kenya, and Nigeria.Workshop Leaders
Roberto Cerina
Roberto Cerina is a third-year DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, with an interest in Election Forecasting, Bayesian Statistics and non-representative surveys. His recent work has focused on making inference on electoral preferences from revealed behaviour on social-media; in particular, together with Professor Raymond Duch, he has forecasted the 2018 mid-term elections in Texas using likes from pages of public candidates on Facebook, leveraging the latest technology in prediction and post-stratification, and achieving results comparable to state-of-the-art surveys, at a fraction of the cost (see here from more: http://raymondduch.com/forecasts/). Currently he is working on forecasting the 2019 Indian Lok Sabha Elections using a convenience sample and Mechanical Turks. He is also working on finalising a Machine Learning pipeline to produce fully automated Opinion Polling from Twitter.
Charles Rahal
Charles Rahal is a social science methodologist and applied social data scientist with a background in high-dimensional econometrics, having completed his PhD in 2016. He currently holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship entitled 'The Social Data Science of Healthcare Supply' which develops data driven tools for analysing healthcare procurement processes. He is particularly interested in unique data origination processes, be they unstructured or otherwise, and is an advocate for open source and reproducible academic research, particularly in the forms of Python, LaTeX and Linux. He was a co-recipient (with Aaron Reeves, Sam Friedman and Magne Flemmen) of the 2018 European Academy of Sociology Best Paper award, and he presently teaches 'Python for Sociologists' in Michaelmas Term. Other current areas of interest include civic technology, applied econometrics (predominantly spatial and time series), scientometrics, data wrangling, software development, and social stratification and social mobility. He is increasingly interested in sociological applications of text mining algorithms. Follow his projects on [github](https://github.com/crahal) and [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=8bd7KNgAAAAJ&hl=en)!Participants
Chris Barrie
Chris is currently a DPhil Candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. From September 2019, he will be Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield. His research interests include protest, conflict, and nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa. In the realm of computational methods, he is particularly interested in historical GIS techniques and the use of social media data.
Samira Barzin
Samira Barzin is an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). She holds a MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has recently completed her PhD (Civil Eng.) at Imperial College London. Samira’s research particularly focuses on various topics of economic and international development, particularly its spatial and dynamic components, and transport economics. She is passionate about interdisciplinary work and curious about exploring the novel options big data and computational methods offer for research, particularly for research on data sparse developing countries.
Pablo Beytía
Pablo Beytía is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Sciences of Humboldt University of Berlin and a DAAD-CONICYT scholarship holder. He is specializing in what might be called ‘digital sociology of knowledge’, with a thesis on how biographical information is being globally structured in multilingual Wikipedia. Pablo was a lecturer at the Catholic University of Chile, director of the Social Research Centre of the international NGO ‘TECHO’, advisor to the Government of Chile, and visiting researcher at the University of Warwick and the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences. He is a sociologist and holds a master's degree in both sociology and philosophy.
Jorge Cimentada
Jorge Cimentada is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Pompeu Fabra University and soon to be Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Demography. He's involved in projects at the RECSM institute where he builds scientific software to analyze survey data with measurement error as well as on ERC funded projects from Bocconi University on trust and fertility. His research is focused on combining ideas from computer science and statistics to the study of achievement inequality, population dynamics and inequality in spatial/social mobility. To check out some of his work, you can visit his website or follow him on Twitter under @cimentadaj.
Aidan Combs
Aidan is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Duke University, where she is associated with the Polarization Lab and Duke Network Analysis Center. Her research interests are in the application of computational methods to questions in political sociology, social psychology, and the sociology of gender. She holds a BS in Engineering Physics and Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Emmanuelle Afaribea Dankwa
Emmanuelle is a DPhil candidate in Statistical Science at the University of Oxford, where she studies as a Rhodes Scholar. Before moving to Oxford, she worked as a teaching assistant in the statistics department of the University of Ghana where she had earlier obtained a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Statistics. Emmanuelle’s research interests lie in experimental design and statistical epidemiology and her current research explores the links between branching processes and the mechanisms of infectious disease spread in a stochastic environment. She is also interested in applying statistical methods to increase the impacts of environmental campaigns.
Arran Davis
Arran recently finished his DPhil (PhD) at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar. He is now teaching quantitative methods at both the undergraduate and graduate level at Oxford, as well as working part time as a data scientist at TextureAI. Using evolutionary theory to understand human behaviour, he has studied the cultural activities that lead to bonded, cooperative relationships among humans. Arran's DPhil focused on the effects of social relationships on human health and wellbeing. Specifically, he used experimental, observational, and 'big data' approaches to understand how social support and cohesion can enhance the performance of physical exercise through reducing perceptions of pain and fatigue. Particularly relevant to the SICSS, he built social networks using data from over 10 million runs at parkrun (a free, weekly, community based 5 km run that happens at over 600 locations around the world) to demonstrate how the presence of close social relationships can improve run times and exercise adherence. Arran is excited to advance his (largely self taught) knowledge of the network sciences, web scrapping, Python, and R, especially with regard to how these methods and tools can be successfully applied to answering the challenges we face as a society.
Xuejie Ding
Xuejie Ding is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, and a research fellow at Nuffield College. She receives her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2018. Her research interests are primarily directed towards adopting a sociogenomic approach to bridge the knowledge on contextual, social and biological influences on health and behaviour outcomes. She is particularly interested in applying computational methods to large-scale genetic and behavioural data to understand gene-environment interaction and correlation.
Arun Frey
Arun Frey is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Oxford. His research examines the ecologies of ethnic conflict and discrimination during the “European refugee crisis”, studying how threatening events shape patterns of violence, discrimination, and political polarisation. Methodologically, he is very interested in high-frequency data and text analysis, and uses computational social science approaches to identify novel data sources and quantify local anti-immigrant sentiment. Prior to commencing his doctoral research, Arun worked as a social affairs consultant at the United Nations Secretariat in Bangkok, Thailand.
Clemens Jarnach
Clemens is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. His recent research focuses on the application of social network analysis to political sociology topics. His thesis focuses on investigating digital media usage by voters and politicians in British politics. His research addresses topics such as political polarization, echo chambers, Brexit, and media diversity.
Adam Kenny
Adam Kenny is a DPhil candidate in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His doctoral research focuses on the effects of group identity and intergroup competition on human prosociality. He mostly analyses quantitative data generated through field experiments employing behavioural economic games. He also holds a BA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Human Evolution and Behaviour from University College London.
Rishemjit Kaur
Rishemjit Kaur recently completed her PhD in utilizing the optimization capabilities of human decision making process by understanding their conflicting integrative and individualisation tendencies. She is currently working as a Scientist at CSIR-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, India. Her research interests include the study of human behaviour, particularly moral behaviour and understanding the inter-cultural differences or similarities using social media data. She is also interested in studying the effects of policy decisions on specific groups, e.g. farmers using big data sources such as "Farmers Call Centre queries" and provide solutions in order to alleviate some of the problems they face.
Judith Koops
Judith Koops is a PhD candidate at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague (The Netherlands). Her research focusses on cross-national differences in the link between childhood disadvantage and family formation of young adults. Judith also works as a researcher for the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP). The GGP is a social science research infrastructure that provides open access micro- and macro-level data with the aim to improve the knowledge base for social science and policymaking in developed, low-fertility, countries. GGP is currently examining the outcomes of a Push-to-Web experiment in three European countries and they will soon conduct a Social Media experiment using the Facebook advertising platform. In 2019, the team will develop infrastructure needed to collect voice recordings during CAPI or CAWI administered interviews of the Generations and Gender Survey.
Kan Li
Kan Li is a DPhil candidate in international relations at University of Oxford. Her research focuses on applications of agent-based model to international crises and conflicts; her current project studies how challengers alter international status quo through asymmetric military build-up and how this shapes unique dynamics of asymmetric conflicts. Prior to Oxford, she received her Master's degree in political science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and her Bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Hong Kong.
Timothy Monteath
Timothy Monteath is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics and is also Researcher in the Department of Law. His doctoral research is focused on the high end of London’s residential property market, and looks at questions of value, ownership and property relations. He maintains a broad interest in broad area housing studies, wealth, inequality and the application of computational methods to research in this area.
Julia Mikolai
Julia Mikolai is a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. Her background is in sociology and demography. Her research interests include partnerships, families, and fertility; residential mobility and housing; life course research; and cross-national comparisons. She uses individual-level longitudinal data and longitudinal methods to study these topics. Previously, she has been a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool. She holds a PhD in social statistics and demography from the University of Southampton and has studied at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), Utrecht University, and the European Doctoral School of Demography (hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Centre for Economic Demography at Lund University).
Tobias Rüttenauer
Tobias Rüttenauer completed his PhD in sociology at the University of Kaiserslautern, where he is currently working as a postdoctoral research assistant. In his research, he uses large-scale register-based data to analyse the connection between socio-demographic characteristics and the exposure to environmental pollution, with a particular focus on selective migration processes. He is also working on econometric models for spatial and longitudinal data analysis, and recently published the R package feisr to estimate fixed effects individual slope models.
Florian Schaffner
Florian Schaffner is a doctoral student in Politics at Balliol College, University of Oxford. His research interests include political psychology, direct democracy, elections, research methods and data science. In his doctoral research he uses surveys, experiments and quantitative text analysis to study the determinants and consequences of citizens’ perceptions of the integrity and legitimacy of referendums and elections. He holds an MSc in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BA in Social Sciences from the University of Zurich.
Kayla Schulte
Kayla Schulte is a PGS with the Department of Sociology and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on air pollution exposure, inequality, health-protective behaviours and open-access air quality data. Kayla worked previously with the U.S. EPA on air quality and citizen science research, and is now involved with DEFRA-funded research on air quality management in Oxford city. Kayla has a background in social science, politics, human geography and graphic design. She received her BA from Franklin & Marshall College and her MSc from the University of Oxford.
Giacomo Vagni
Giacomo is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford and a member of the Centre for Time Use Research, University College London. His PhD thesis focuses on the structure of daily life, collective rhythms and the social stratification of time use. His research interests include causal inference, sequence analysis and visual sociology. He holds a BA in Anthropology and Sociology from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and a MA in Sociology from the University of Geneva.
Fjinanda van Klingeren
I am DPhil student in Sociology at Nuffield College, researching heterogeneity, trust and cooperation in common pool resource settings. I use laboratory and artefactual field experiments with common pool resource games to analyse human behaviour under different treatments. I'm also interested in agent-based models to analyse behaviour, and hope to apply this to my research.
Mark Verhagen
Mark Verhagen is an incoming PhD student in Sociology at Nuffield college. He holds Masters in Econometrics (University of Amsterdam) and Sociology (University of Oxford) and is interested in incorporating exciting new quantitative techniques into social science research. Mark has been active in the past years as a data scientist through his companies Delph and Apadana.io, working for municipalities, SME's, research institutes and large corporations to make data an intrinsic part of their business strategy. Academically, his more recent work has focused on law, building large databases of court cases through web scraping and using Machine Learning and NLP techniques to identify determinants of court rulings.