Social media, search engines, and other internet technologies provide information about social human behavior that is unprecedented both in richness and granularity. This information enables reexamination of old and new questions from the social sciences around consumption of information by individuals, social interactions, political communication and more.

At the same time, the scale and heterogeneity of data from these sources present new methodological challenges that hinder principled analysis and robust inference about social human behavior.

The course will introduce computational students to old and new questions and theories from the social sciences, and familiarize social science students with computational approaches from computer and engineering science.