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How can I get into this field? I'm a senior CS student.
[1] http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/web/home
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) Snark aside, I'm definitely interested in whether or not this field will have impacts on future policy. In order to be useful I feel it would have to actively avoid simplifying assumptions that have trapped similar fields.
Regarding academic study, sociology is so partisan you need not worry about them using computer science and/or logic to uncover hidden truths in the near future. In the private sector however, companies such as Premise and Palantir are already eons ahead of academia, but their insights and data are proprietary.
"and/or logic to uncover hidden truths" Since when do you use logic to uncover 'truths'? With logic you can only operate in a given world of discourse to make meaningful inferences.
"Premise and Palantir are already eons ahead of academia" Ahead in which sense?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my field, too. I am a Ph.D. candidate in computational social science, working on a computational model of social belief systems. I'm quite happy to see this on HN. Like many other disciplines, our field is blossoming with the rise of cheap, high performance computing! If your involved in this field and on HN, please reach out to me at @generativist on twitter. I'm in the process of setting up a community for…
Can you talk about what software packages, perhaps data structures and algorithms you use? Any shortcomings / low hanging fruit? I see the domain as an invaluable tool for a few applications... any particularly strong ones you can see?
Primarily, the objective of Computational Social Science is to understand human behavior but with computational methods. Traditionally, social science was done offline with surveys. But, with the increase in social information on the Internet could we use that data to know more about humans?
How? There are various methods on how one could do so - network theory, statistics, text mining etc. are some tools that are useful to achieve the objective.
Great, soon we'll have robots demanding gender fluidity rights