June 16 to June 27, 2025 | Rotterdam, the Netherlands
The SICSS-ODISSEI will show participants all the possibilities that ODISSEI has to offer in terms of facilities, tools and research support. SICSS-ODISSEI will not only focus on teaching participants relevant methodologies, theories and techniques for computational social science, but also allow participants to apply this knowledge using ODISSEI facilities, including executing a specific research project using the FIRMBACKBONE data infrastructure for analyzing company data and the Secure Ananlytical Environment (SANE).
Participants will be able to develop research ideas with other computational social scientists and turn these into exciting new projects that can be executed within ODISSEI. Participants will be supported by experts in the field and projects could be developed into further long-term research, a grant application or scientific publication.
Participants will get an introduction to working with FIRMBACKBONE data, where they’ll be able to see the full potential of administrative data, high performance computing and intensively linked data. Participants will also be guided on how to develop their ideas into large projects and learn how ODISSEI infrastructure can be adapted to their own needs. During the SICSS-ODISSEI programme, participants will get lectures from colleagues at ODISSEI member organisations on topics such as Large Language Models, Machine Learning, and Causal Analysis and apply these in hands-on workshops.
Participants will need to develop their knowledge and skills in a relatively short period, so in preparation for the summer school participants are able to follow online workshops in Python data carpentry to enhance their skills prior to SICSS-ODISSEI.
SICSS-ODISSEI will run from Monday 16 June to Friday 27 June 2025. Both weeks, from Monday to Friday, participants will learn about computational social science in-person in the Netherlands. The regular days of teaching will be at the campus of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50.
During the first week, the following topics will be covered: Introduction to ODISSEI, Machine learning, Large Language Models, and Causal Analysis. In the second week of the summer school, participants will be able to make full use of the ODISSEI infrastructure using the FIRMBACKBONE. They will be put into teams and challenged to develop research projects using the full scope and scale of the infrastructure.
ODISSEI’s Social Data Science Team and eScience engineers will help participants overcome practical obstacles they may encounter while working on their project. Towards the end of the workshop the teams will get the chance to present their project and ways in which it can be developed further. The solutions will be assessed by a committee, which will take into account, among other things, the effectiveness of the analysis, the narrative explanation of the approach, and its innovativeness.
You can host a partner location of the Summer Institutes of Computational Social Science (SICSS) at your university, company, NGO, or government agency.