Summer Institute in Computational Social Science

2025

2023

People

Faculty

Zixi Chen

Zixi Chen (陳梓曦) is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Computational Social Science at NYU Shanghai, affiliated with the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER). She is passionate about fostering interdisciplinary collaboration to address societal challenges through computational methods. Trained as a methodologist, her research integrates text-as-data approaches, social network analysis, and quantitative methods to examine human behavior in technology-mediated education and social contexts. She is also dedicated to developing big-and-rich data frameworks that combines the advantages of digital big data and design-based survey data to advance equity in data-driven social science research. Her work has been published in leading journals such as the American Journal of Education and the Journal of Research on Technology in Education.

Jia Miao

Jia Miao is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at NYU Shanghai. Her research examines the impact of urbanization, urban redevelopment, and neighborhoods on social cohesion, health inequality, and subjective well-being in Asia. She also explores the social consequences of homeownership in major Chinese cities using experimental designs. Additionally, she studies the interplay between family and neighborhood dynamics in shaping the well-being of older adults amid rapid population aging in Chinese societies. Her work has been published in Social Forces, Chinese Sociological Review, Social Science & Medicine, Health & Places, Cities, and other journals.

Yongjun Zhang

Dr. Yongjun Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, the AI Innovation Institute, and the Center for Changing Systems of Power.As a computational social scientist, Dr. Zhang leverages large-scale data, natural language processing, and computer vision to investigate social, political, and organizational behavior, focusing on topics such as racial segregation, political polarization, and organizational inequality.His research has been published in leading journals, including American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Scientific Reports, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. He is also the co-editor of Computational Social Science: Applications in China Studies and serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Nature Scientific Data, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Socius, Social Science Computer Review, and The Sociological Quarterly.

Speakers

Yang Chen

Yang Chen is a Professor within the College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Fudan University, and leads the Big Data and Networking (DataNET) group at Fudan. From April 2011 to September 2014, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Department of Computer Science, Duke University, USA, where he served as Senior Personnel in the NSF Mobility First project. From September 2009 to April 2011, he has been a research associate and the deputy head of Computer Networks Group, Institute of Computer Science, University of Goettingen, Germany. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University in 2004 and 2009, respectively. He visited Stanford University (in 2007) and Microsoft Research Asia (2006-2008) as a visiting student. He was a Nokia Visiting Professor at Aalto University in 2019. His research interests include online social networks, Internet architecture and urban computing. He serves as a Senior Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Social Computing, an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Social Computing, and an Editorial Board Member of Elsevier Computer Communications. He served as a OC / SPC / PC Member for many international conferences, including SOSP, SIGCOMM, WWW, IMC, IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, DASFAA, IWQoS, ICCCN, GLOBECOM and ICC. He is a senior member of ACM/IEEE, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.