Title: Computational Social Sciences: Opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration

Alex Bentley, Head of Anthropology, UTK

Abstract: Computational social science is a very rapidly growing field, ideal for the collaboration between social scientists and statisticians, mathematicians and data scientists. In this talk I will review some of the exciting developments in this field, followed by a more focused presentation of some recent modelling of “rapid online cultural transmission” such as the spread of false and true information online. The purpose is to explore opportunities for collaboration with this group. In some cases, more powerful models are needed, whereas in other aspects we are beginning to use new computational methods for probabilistically estimating the parameters of our models against real data by approximate Bayesian computation. Lastly, I have some thoughts about analysis of time series—data that are suddenly abundant in the digital age--that might be another shared interest between computational social scientists and statisticians.