For 18 years, the Institute has seeded the young eld of computational social science with alumni of its Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science Modeling and Complexity. Summer 2012 marks the first time SFI will offer an advanced workshop for past participants who wish to further develop their research.
The advanced group will spend two weeks in Santa Fe, where they will share living quarters and pursue computational techniques to investigate complex social questions. By housing the students together, coordinators John Miller and Scott Page (both SFI External Professors) hope to encourage “an atmosphere where the students live their science,” John says.
One participant plans to investigate whether the rules and social structures of institutions can influence people’s behaviors even after the institutions themselves have died out. Another will model influence processes that have appeared in political science literature in recent years. A third will examine cooperation and strife between ethnic groups, using data from a network of Zambian roads that have brought Chinese immigrants in contact with native populations.
“We gather a high quality group of students and create a sup- portive research environment where this amazing group of colleagues is working hard on novel scienti c ideas all the time,” John says. “The social sciences have seen a rapid assimilation of the core ideas of complexity and computational modeling, often driven by contributions from our former students.”