The Berkeley Computational Social Science Forum was launched in Fall 2020, as part of the Computational Social Science Training Program, to provide an informal setting for the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and scholarship at the intersection of social science and data science. Our goal is to improve computational social science research, support the development and research of our members, and foster new collaborations. Weekly meetings are hosted by researchers from BIDS and D-Lab, and participants engage in a variety of activities such as presentations of work in progress, discussions and critiques of recent papers, introductions to new tools and methods, discussions around ethics, fairness, inequality, and responsible conduct of research, as well as professional development. We welcome social scientists researchers with interests in data science methods and tools, and data scientists with interests in public policy and the social, behavioral, and health sciences. Our participants include graduate students, postdocs, staff, and faculty, and members are encouraged to attend regularly in order to foster community.
This series is currently being organized by Dave Harding, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of D-Lab at UC Berkeley; Douglas Guilbeault, Assistant Professor of Management of Organizations at the Berkeley Haas School of Business; Heather Haveman, Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley; and Tim Thomas, BIDS Research Training Lead for the Computational Social Science Training Program, and Research Director of Urban Displacement Project at IGS & CCI.
Interested UC Berkeley community members are invited to sign up for the group mailing to receive information about upcoming sessions, and visit the CSS Training Program Video Archive to view previous sessions. Contact css-t32@berkeley.edu for more information or if you are interested in presenting current research for an upcoming session.
Spring 2022 Sessions
Berkeley Computational Social Science Forum - Spring 2022
Date: Weekly on Tuesdays, February 1 through April 19, 2021
Time: 4:00-5:00 PM Pacific Time
Location: Virtual Participation – Register to attend via Zoom
- Feb 1: Partial Perspectives and Situated Knowledges: Radical Objectivity using Computational Methods, Laura K. Nelson, University of British Columbia
- Feb 8: Pandemic Evictions in California: Racial Disparities and Spatial Patterns before and during COVID-19, Tim Thomas, UC Berkeley
- Feb 15: Improving Human Decision-Making with Machine Learning, Park Sinchaisri, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business
- Feb 22: Applying Data Science Approaches to Understand Residential Mobility Patterns Before and After Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage, Mahader Tamene, UC Berkeley; and colleagues from the University of Washington: Jennie Romich, Jose Hernandez, Valentina Staneva, James Lamar Foster, Delaney Glass, and Christopher Salazar
- Mar 1: Privacy as Privilege, Rebecca Wexler, UC Berkeley School of Law
- Mar 8: Disinformation: Is it who said it, or what it says? An update on European policy, and more, Anni Hellman, BIDS Visiting Fellow, EU Commission Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology
- Mar 15: Racialized Representations of Neighborhood Quality Across 16 US Metro Areas, Ian Kennedy, University of Washington
- Mar 22: Spring Break
- Mar 29: Session Cancelled
- Apr 5: Harnessing Google Health Trends API Data: A How-to Guide for Epidemiologic Research, Krista Neumann, UC Berkeley
- Apr 12: Some Progress In Policing Data, Jack Glaser, UC Berkeley
- Apr 19: Academic Publishing Roundtable with David Harding (Sociology and D-Lab), Heather Haveman (Sociology and Haas), and Doug Guilbeault (Haas), UC Berkeley
Sessions Archive
2021
- Jan 21: TADA-BSSR Webinar: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Selection Bias, Carl T. Bergstrom, Professor of Biology, University of Washington
- Feb 1: CSS Forum: Digital Health Equity and Access Lab, Adrian Aguilera and Caroline Figueroa, Berkeley School of Social Welfare
- Feb 8: CSS Forum: Serving Like an Organization: How Food-Service and Retail Workers Interpret Their Interactions With Customers, Adam Storer, UC Berkeley Sociology
- Feb 22: CSS Forum: Loops, Ladders and Links: The Recursivity of Social and Machine Learning, Marion Fourcade, UC Berkeley Sociology; and Fleur Johns, UNSW Law
- March 1: CSS Forum: Outercity Policing: Drivers of Police Spending in a Changing Metropolis, Ángel Ross, UC Berkeley Sociology
- March 8: CSS Forum: Strong ties and network search, Mathijs De Vaan, Berkeley Haas School of Business
- March 15: CSS Forum: Social network analysis and the missing data challenge, Martin Eiermann, UC Berkeley Sociology
- March 18: TADA-BSSR Webinar: Translating Domain Knowledge into Mechanistic Process Models: Illustrating the Need with a Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention, Eric Hekler, UC San Diego; Misha Pavel, Northeastern University; and Donna Spruijt-Metz, University of Southern California
- March 29: Pushing for Police Transparency by Tracking Police Misconduct, Julie Ciccolini, Director of Law Enforcement Accountability, NACDL
- April 5: CSS Forum: Using an online sample to estimate the size of an offline population, Dennis Feehan, Assistant Professor, Demography, UC Berkeley
- April 12: CSS Forum: Decoding the Digital Gender Gap: Online Gender Bias is Stronger in Images than Text, Douglas Guilbeault and Solène Delecourt, Berkeley Haas School of Business
- April 19: CSS Forum: Moving Beyond the Model: Pretrial Risk Assessments in Practice, Alissa Skog, Senior Research Associate, California Policy Lab
- April 26: CSS Forum: A Relational View on Ethics and Technology, Bogdana Rakova, Data Scientist, Accenture Responsible AI
- May 20: TADA-BSSR Webinar: Integrating Data Analytics into the Social and Behavioral Science Research Lifecycle, Hannah L. F. Cooper, Sc.D. and Lance Waller, Ph.D., Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University
- September 14: Fall 2021 orientation/planning meeting
- September 21: Using Machine Learning to Code Immigrant-Serving Organizations, Cheng Ren and Irene Bloemraad, UC Berkeley
- September 28: Ethics and Empathy in Using Imputation to Disaggregate Data for Racial Equity, Alena Stern and Ajjit Narayanan, Urban Institute
- October 5: The Power of Empathy: Experimental Evidence of Perspective-Focused Interventions’ Impact on Support for Prison Reform, Jessie Harney, UC Berkeley
- October 12: Privacy Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Martin Eiermann, UC Berkeley
- October 19: From Ivory Tower to Ivory Bridge: Applications and Lessons Learned in Public Computational Social Science, Tim Thomas, UC Berkeley
- October 26: An Empirical Social Science Approach to Auditing a Hate Speech Model, Renata Barreto, Berkeley Law, and Pratik Sachdeva, D-Lab
- November 2: How Status Seeking and Social Learning Shape Political Polarization on Social Media: Evidence from a Mixed-Method Field Experiment on Twitter, Christopher Bail, Duke University
- November 9: Large-scale Spatial Network Models for modeling disease and information passing for people experiencing homelessness in metropolitan areas, Zack Almquist, University of Washington
- November 16: The Impact of Behavioral and Economic Drivers on Gig Economy Workers, Park Sinchaisri, UC Berkeley
- November 23: Diversity, Peer Effects, and Police Officer Behavior, Samuel Donahue and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, Columbia University
- November 30: Optimal Dynamic Treatment Rule Estimation and Evaluation with Application to Criminal Justice Interventions in the United States, Lina Montoya, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and UC Berkeley
2020
- Sept 14: CSS Forum: How Do Threats Induce Information Seeking?: When Natural Experiments Meet Text Data, Jae Yeon Kim, UC Berkeley
- Sept 21: CSS Forum: The Emergence of Insight at the California Board of Parole Hearings, Isaac Dalke, UC Berkeley Sociology Department
- Sept 28: CSS Forum: A Supercomputer Reviews the Literature on Organizations: Combining Supervised and Unsupervised Text-Analysis Methods, Jaren Haber (Georgetown University), Heather A. Haveman (UC Berkeley), and Yoon Sung Hong (Wayfair)
- Oct 5: CSS Forum: Is being an only child harmful to psychological health?: Evidence from an instrumental variable analysis of China's One-Child Policy, Peng Ding, Statistics, UC Berkeley
- Oct 12: CSS Forum: Accelerating Computational Reproducibility in Economics (ACRE), Katie Hoeberling and Fernando Hoces de la Guardia, Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS)
- Oct 15: TADA-BSSR Webinar: Analyzing Complex Behavioral, Social and Population Health Data for COVID-19 & New Opportunities for Behavioral and Social Science Research (BSSR) Data Science Training, Elizabeth M. Ginexi, PhD, NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research
- Oct 19: CSS Forum: Online education platforms scale college STEM instruction with equivalent learning outcomes at lower cost, Igor Chirikov, Center for Studies in Higher Education, Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley
- Oct 26: CSS Forum: A university map of course knowledge, Zachary Pardos, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley
- Nov 2: CSS Forum: The Accuracy, Equity, and Jurisprudence of Criminal Risk Assessme, Jennifer Skeem (UC Berkeley) and Christopher Slobogin (Vanderbilt Law School)
- Nov 9: CSS Forum: Eviction, Displacement, Unemployment, and COVID-19 Infection Risk: Measuring Neighborhood Level Housing Precarity During the Pandemic, Tim Thomas, UC Berkeley Urban Displacement Project
- Nov 16: CSS Forum: Constructing interval variables via faceted Rasch measurement and multitask deep learning: a hate speech application, Chris J. Kennedy (UC Berkeley and Harvard Medical School), Geoff Bacon (UC Berkeley), Alexander Sahn (UC Berkeley), and Claudia von Vacano (UC Berkeley)
- Nov 30: CSS Forum: Experiments on the Sociological Origins of Categories, Douglas Guilbeault, Assistant Professor, Management of Organizations, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
