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Computational Social Science Studying Human Behavior At Scale

Abstract: With the increasing availability of network and behavioral data--from what we buy, to where we travel, to whom we know--we are now able to observe and quantify social processes to a degree that would have seemed impossible just a decade ago. These new microscopes into human activity not only have substantive implications for the social sciences, including economics, sociology, and psychology, but also raise challenging computational questions in large-scale data analysis. In this talk I will discuss several illustrative examples from this emerging discipline of computational social science, including the so-called viral diffusion of information, and the dynamics of long tail markets.

Bio: Sharad Goel works in the Microeconomics and Social Systems group in New York. He is interested in empirical and theoretical problems at the intersection of computer science and the social sciences, particularly questions motivated by sociology and economics.

Sharad holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics and an MS in Computer Science from Cornell. Prior to joining Yahoo! Research, he was a research fellow in the math departments at Stanford and the University of Southern California.