class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide # Computational Social Systems ## English language masters programme ### David Garcia <br> <em>Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science, TU Graz</em> ### Slides vailable at: dgarcia.eu/CSSmasters-2022 --- layout: true <div class="my-footer"><span>David Garcia - Computational Social Systems Master's Programme - ISDS, TU Graz</span></div> --- class:center # About me .pull-left[ <img src="figures/Profile.jpg" width="300" /> ] .pull-right[ <br> Website: [dgarcia.eu](https://dgarcia.eu) Twitter: [@dgarcia_eu](https://twitter.com/dgarcia_eu) Github: [dgarcia-eu](https://github.com/dgarcia-eu) Email: dgarcia@tugraz.at ] Professor for Computational Behavioral and Social Sciences at TU Graz Faculty member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna Group leader at the Medical University of Vienna --- # Overarching aim **Acquire skills to understand the digital society and to seize the opportunities brought by the digital transformation.** <img src="figures/topics.png" width="1100" style="display: block; margin: auto;" /> --- ## Foundations of Computational Social Systems - Mandatory course in the first semester: 5 ECTS - In-person teaching with online materials: streaming, videos, **web handouts**, teach center discussions, and discord real-time chat - Exercises in R (from scratch) to analyze digital traces of human behavior - Main aim: Learning the fundamentals of computational methods and data science to study human behavior and technological phenomena in the digital society. - Focus on opportunities, limitations, and interdisciplinarity - Not just theory: substantial **hands on experience** --- # Course topics - **Introduction to Computational Social Systems** - Google trends to study culture and development - **Social impact theory** - Testing the division of impact hypothesis with Twitter data - **Measuring emotions and sentiment analysis** - Evaluating sentiment analysis methods - **Social network analysis** - Analyzing a Twitter politician network - **Complex phenomena in social networks** - Centrality, resilience, communities... - **Emerging issues in computational social systems** - Privacy and ethics of digital trace research - Misinformation and polarization - Scientific issues: representation, bias, measurement error --- # Multidisciplinary student projects - Main evaluation of Foundations of Computational Social Systems - Extra individual points for optional exercises - Groups of four students with at least two different backgrounds - Presentation + short report with codes and data (e.g. github) - Data analysis motivated by a research question that can be documented in *Introduction to Computational Social Systems* - Coding and project practice warm up for other courses: summer school, data science seminars, master thesis, etc --- ## Student project examples: stack overflow badges <img src="figures/StackOverflow.png" width="900" style="display: block; margin: auto;" /> "Impact of Badges as a Gamification Element on User Engagement in Stack Overflow", by K. Aschbacher, F. Hofer, S. Ober, D. Trenzinger https://github.com/hofaflo/fcss_stackoverflow --- ## Student project examples: misinfo emotions <img src="figures/Misinfo.png" width="760" style="display: block; margin: auto;" /> "The Sentiment of Online Misinformation", by D. Andrianakis, A. Azizi, M. Magalhaes Ferreira, S. S. Melcher https://github.com/sabsiime/FCSS_Group8 --- # Other student project topic examples - Statistics about the influence of Elon Musk’s tweets on market prices for Tesla Inc.’ stocks and Bitcoin - Investigating gender fairness of recommendation algorithms in the book domain - Comparison of reactions to the official twitter account of Sebastian Kurz in the time period of beginning until the end of the second Kurz government - Vaccination attitudes across different countries - The impact of emotional language on engagement rates on Twitter - Integrating survey data from the world values survey and google search data on domestic violence during the covid 19 lockdowns - Investigating the relationship between attitudes towards social media algorithms and the general perception of the platform - Visibility on Twitter and in traditional newspapers of politicians in Austria --- # Apply now! <img src="figures/Admission.png" width="900" style="display: block; margin: auto;" /> **More information at: [tugraz.at/go/master-css](http://tugraz.at/go/master-css)**