Summer Institute in Computational Social Science
From June 20 to June 30, 2023, the Constance and Martin Silver Center on Data Science and Social Equity (C+M Silver Center) at the New York University Silver School of Social Work will sponsor and host the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, in partnership with New York University Silver School of Social Work. The purpose of the Summer Institute is to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and beginning faculty interested in computational social science, with a focus on social equity and social good. The Summer Institute is for both social scientists (broadly conceived) and data scientists (broadly conceived).
The instructional program will involve lectures, group problem sets, and participant-led research projects. There will also be presentations from computational social science researchers working in a variety of settings, such as academia, industry, and government. The site-specific focus of SICSS-NYU Silver is data science for social equity. Topics covered include (but are not limited to):
- Social impact of data science: challenges, opportunities, and ethics
- Data collection
- Application Programming Interface (API)
- Social media as research tools for social sciences
- Web scraping
- Government’s open data
- Data analysis
- Natural Language Processing
- Machine Learning
The first week of the program will focus on training and group exercises, and the second week will provide participants with opportunities to launch collaborative research projects. There will be ample opportunities for students to discuss their ideas and research with the organizers, other participants, and visiting speakers. Because we are committed to open and reproducible research, all materials created by faculty and students for the Summer Institute will be released via open source.
Participation is restricted to early career researchers who are able to attend the program in-person in New York City. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and fields of study, especially applicants from groups currently under-represented in computational social science. Participants with less experience in social science research will be provided with additional readings in advance of the Institute, and participants with less experience coding and computational applications will be provided with a set of online learning modules. Students doing this preparatory work will be supported by a teaching assistant who will hold online office hours before the Institute.
About 20 participants will be invited, and participants are expected to fully attend and participate in the entire 9-day program. Participation is free - the NYU C+M Silver Center will cover the costs of tuition, projects, activities, and lunch. However, participants are responsible for bringing a laptop to the program (WiFi access will be provided), and arranging their own accommodation and travel for the program. We are currently unable to provide travel and lodging funds for institute participants.
Application materials are due due March 31, 2023 at 11:59pm. Inquiries may be sent to silver.cmscenter@nyu.edu.
Speakers
Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning / NYU Marron Institute
Constantine E. Kontokosta, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning and Director of the Civic Analytics program at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. He also directs the Urban Intelligence Lab and holds cross-appointments at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and is affiliated faculty at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. Constantine recently held positions as a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at the University of Warwick and a Senior Scholar at the New York Academy of Medicine. Previously, he served as the inaugural CUSP Deputy Director and Assistant Professor of Urban Informatics at CUSP and Tandon. At CUSP, he was part of the Center’s founding leadership team and designed and launched one of the first graduate programs in urban science and informatics. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his research in urban informatics for sustainable cities, and was awarded grants from NSF to study data bias and fairness in city predictive analytics and to develop computational models for COVID-19 exposure risk and disease spread.
Constantine’s work has been published in leading peer-reviewed academic journals – in fields ranging from urban planning to signal processing – and has a forthcoming book on urban analytics and data-driven climate action. In addition to NSF, Constantine’s research is supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Department of Transportation, among others. His work has been featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, FastCompany, CityLab, Wired, CNN, and NPR and has been recognized with awards from IBM, the Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange, and UN Global Pulse. He holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.S. from Columbia University, where he received the HUD Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Lincoln Institute’s C. Lowell Harriss Fellowship, a M.S. from New York University, and a B.S.E. from the University of Pennsylvania.
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