From Monday, June 14 to Friday, June 25, 2021, the UCL School of Management will sponsor the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, to be hosted virtually by UCL in partnership with London School of Economics, Imperial College London, Greenwich University, and City, University of London. The purpose of the Summer Institute is to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and beginning faculty interested in computational social science. The Summer Institute is for both social scientists (broadly conceived) and data scientists (broadly conceived). There is no cost to participate in SICSS-London.
The instructional program will involve lectures, group problem sets, and participant-led research projects. There will also be outside speakers who conduct computational social science research in a variety of settings, such as academia, industry, and government. Topics covered include text as data, website scraping, digital field experiments, machine learning, and ethics. There will be ample opportunities for students to discuss their ideas and research with the organizers, other participants, and visiting speakers. Because we are committed to open and reproducible research, all materials created by faculty and students for the Summer Institute will be released open source.
Limited funding will be available on a “mini grant” basis to seed/pilot one or more projects developed during the institute.
While our primary mission is to build community and support research within London and the UK, participation is open to all early career researchers. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and fields of study, especially applicants from groups currently under-represented in computational social science. Participants are expected to fully attend and participate in the entire program.
Participants with less experience in social science research will be expected to complete additional readings in advance of the Institute, and participants with less experience coding will be expected to complete a set of online learning modules on the R or Python programming language. Students doing this preparatory work will be supported by a teaching assistant who will hold online office hours before the Institute.
Application materials are due Friday, March 19, 2021.
