Funding the next generation of researchers
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SICSS was co-founded in 2017 by Chris Bail and Matt Salganik.
SICSS is a 501c3 non-profit organization. We are funded through grants, corporate sponsorships and personal philanthropic donations.
The return on your investment will be impacting and equipping the next generation of researchers in computational social science.
At SICSS, our mission has been to train the next generation of researchers at the intersection of social science and data science to advance research about human behavior in the digital era.
Our method of accomplishing this mission is to provide open, high-quality training to researchers around the world in order to accelerate the growth of the field and ensure that it develops practices that are in the long-term interests of science and society. Each year, researchers from around the world gather at our annual festival.
The digital age has created novel opportunities for online field experiments, new types of public opinion surveys, and mass collaboration.
The explosion of data from social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, and the digitization of massive governmental administrative records.
These opportunities hold enormous potential to help understand and address some of the world’s most pressing problems—from COVID-19 to economic recession and social unrest.
This raises important new questions about privacy and ethics.The vast majority of people do not yet have access to training in the methods necessary to collect, analyze, and interpret these data.
The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Sciences (SICSS) were created to provide free training to the next generation of researchers at the intersection of social science and data science, and to incubate cutting-edge research across disciplinary boundaries.
Now, the college student in rural Tanzania can watch the same lecture as the student at UCSB, granting educational equity with a scope beyond what traditional educational outreaches could ever accomplish.
SICSS participants hear lectures by leading scholars in the field on a range of subjects from automated text analysis to experiments on social media platforms; participate in group training exercises; and launch interdisciplinary research projects.
Lectures are live-streamed to all SICSS sites from a central location and supported via a vibrant online community that includes open-source education materials that can be used for further self-study or as a model for computational social science courses within other organizations.
Educational content from the festivals, other events and lectures are added to our video library online, where they can be accessed free of charge. This functionally serves as an incredible resource for researchers on a global scale.
As SICSS grows, participants from around the world have begun hosting satellite institutes, ranging from small gatherings, to larger festivals. SICSS offers organizational support to those participants, further accelerating the growth of the field and ensuring that it develops practices that are in the long-term interests of science and society.
More than 150,000 unique visitors viewed our website from 198 countries during this period.
We have almost made considerable progress towards expanding access to training among traditional under-represented groups in the field, including an alumni-led initiative called Varycss.org.
Since 2017, the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science have raised over $1.5 million (USD) to sponsor sites at fifty-three locations around the world, bringing together more than 2,200 participants from 500 universities and 150 academic fields.
Research incubated at SICSS events has appeared in leading journals and received coverage from major media outlets.
SICSS participants have created over 100 projects born out of past SICSS, ranging from papers to software to community building initiatives. Click here to see a non-comprehensive list of some past projects.
In September 2021, with support from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the SSRC awarded 25 research grants to teams of participants in SICSS-2021. Projects spanned a wide number of disciplines and geographic focus areas, and comprise a small sample of the growing body of work that has emerged from SICSS. Click here to view the 2021 SICSS Research Grantees.
Many of our participants have gone on to do great things. Here is a recent story…
Dear all,
Good morning and hope this finds you well.
My colleagues and I recently published our study of the online trade in the bat Kerivoula picta to US-based consumers on Amazon, eBay and Etsy. Although I had the idea for the project before attending SICSS, without this training, I would not have been able to imagine the full scope of what was possible or to oversee an immensely rewarding endeavour.
This project has resulted in a petition now before the US Fish & Wildlife Service to add this species to the US Endangered Species Act—if you want to support it, you can do so by writing to the USFWS (instructions here). We secured a follow-up grant for an on-the-ground study of the trade in Vietnam (now being done) and will work with South and Southeast Asian parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora & Fauna (CITES) to add K. picta to the treaty at COP 2025. Our work has been covered by National Geographic, the Verge, Newsweek and other media outlets—it even made the cover of the NYT this weekend (pdf attached). And we have been interviewed by radio stations in Canada and the US (mp4 of my interview on CJAD800 Montreal).
While these various outcomes will likely benefit my tenure case and career, the greater benefit (hopefully) will be the complete shutdown of the online ornamental bat trade, which is frivolous, cruel and, at least in the case of K. picta, illegal and unsustainable. Indeed, we are seeking funding to repeat our study in other consuming countries and for several other big projects to attack the ornamental bat trade from multiple angles.
So, I just wanted to express my deep gratitude for my incredible SICSS 2022 learning experience at Rutgers. And to encourage you to keep offering this useful and inspiring training and to keep welcoming participants from “other” disciplines.
Sincerely,
Joanna
Joanna Coleman, MSc, PhD (she/her)
Assistant Professor
Department of Biology, Queens College at the City University of New York
www.urban-ecologist.com
Co-Chair of the Human Dimensions and Bat Trade Working Groups, IUCN SSC Bat Specialist Group | www.iucnbsg.org
If you’d like to participate in one of our institutes, check out the 2023 locations.
If you’d like to see what we’ve learned about the best-practices of running a SICSS site, check out our crowd-sourced post-mortems here.
If you’d like to learn more about hosting your own SICSS location during a future year, please visit this link.
If you’d like to learn more about sponsoring SICSS in any capacity, send us an email.