Computational Social Science Workshop at Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science in January 2010.

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There is a new and rapidly emerging method of inquiry regarding human behavior, which we label ?computational social science.? As with other computational sciences, computational social science is driven by the availability of massive data sets and the computational power to analyze those data. These data sources include ?massive, passive? sources such as call logs, e-mail data, transportation data, corpuses of text, as well as active instrumentation of humans. Computational social science offers great opportunities to produce truly novel insights into collective human behavior. Intellectual Merit:The objective of this workshop is to pull together many of the scattered researchers involved in the emergence of computational social science to address two questions: (1) what is the scientific potential of CSS? And (2) what are the institutional barriers to the forward motion of this area? The first day will therefore be devoted to discussing applications in network science, natural language processing, as well as the value and issues raised in analyzing massive data sets. The second day will be focused on how to build the field?what infrastructure is necessary? What incentives are required? How to facilitate access to data, and how to manage the deep issues around privacy and security? Broader Impacts:Computational social science offers great potential in terms of adding to the collective knowledge of humanity about humanity, and to improve collective well being. The borader impact of this workshop is that it will accelerate forward motion of this emerging field, and help avoid the very substantial potential pitfalls, such as around the area of privacy, that could cause harm to individuals and impede the development of the field.This workshop has the potential to affect policies in academia around the country as to how to foster computational social science. Successful forward movement in this field offers substantial value to the broader public, through improved insights in everything from the spread of pathogens in the population, to collaboration within organizations.